Ask Slashdot: Should Commercial Software Prices Be Pegged To a Country's GDP?

Here's a bright idea from dryriver Why don't software makers look at the average income level in a given country -- per capita GDP for example -- and adjust their software prices in these countries accordingly? Most software makers in the U.S. and EU currently insist on charging the full U.S. or EU price in much poorer countries. "Rampant piracy" and "low sales" is often the result in these countries. Why not change this by charging lower software prices in less wealthy countries?
This presupposes the continuing existence of closed-source software businesses -- but is there a way to make that pricing more fair? Leave your best suggestions in the comments. should commercial software prices be pegged to a country's GDP?

Comments

Subject

[Anonymous Coward]

Because of the simple fact that doing this will move the problem. Instead of having piracy in those "poor" countries, you will now have resellers taking advantage of the low price and making a profit in the "rich" country.

Re:Subject

[arth1]

You touch upon the problem why it won't work. It requires rigid regional DRM. And that's not a good long term solution.
There's no doubt in my mind that piracy has increased due to regional DRM, both for DVDs and entertainment software. If you can't get what you want legally while others can, that leads to uprising and war. Even if the war is just one person downloading pirated stuff.

Re:Subject

[Austerity Empowers]

Even beyond rigid DRM, there are two other reasons:

1) you create a situation where high GDP countries have much higher costs to operate (piracy in these places is harder and more likely to result in arrest), and as a result businesses sometimes become impossible to start due to investment factor. It makes us less able to adapt and try new things. This further sets the stage to enable us to continue to exploit labor price differences and exploit workers on both sides of the political border.

2) The vendor needs to recoup his costs (even if we ignore profit, which their investors never do), and we assume the price given to you is at least somewhat based upon development costs, then the low GDP countries aren't paying their way. They're relying on high GDP countries to fund this software so that low GDP countries can leech. I'm not sure anyone wants that particular kind of charity, we prefer it to be out in the open (and tax deductible)

DRM is just the mechanism hollywood came up to enable them to do exactly this.

Re:Subject

[ShanghaiBill]

It is a dumb idea. Just because someone lives in a poor country doesn't mean they are poor. Just because someone lives in a rich country doesn't mean they are rich. It would be more reasonable to consider the income of each person individually, and instead of doing it for a superfluous item like software, it is much more important to do it for critical items like food. I hereby propose that everyone should be required to bring a notarized copy of their tax returns to the grocery store, so Safeway knows how much to charge for the milk.

Already like that

[rmdingler]

The reason folks from the US shop in Mexico for prescription drugs and animal vaccines is because this phenomenon already exists.

Because people can travel?

[CastrTroy]

What's to stop people from going to Venezuela and buying 10 copies of Final Cut Pro and bringing it back to the US? Unless you are suggesting that they start region locking software, controlling which country you can use software in depending on where you bought it.

Pricing of goods

[Anonymous Coward]

What is wrong with you? Those who produce can ask what they like for what they produce. If it isn't worth it people won't buy. Whether it is worth it or not, there will always be those that will steal what is produced. 'Fair' is where you go to sell your pig, not the means by which you set the price.

Ummm, No

[JWW]

They should always use Open Source and just follow the GPL.... ;-)

A problem without a good solution.

[Zitchas]

There isn't really a good solution to this.

If everyone has the same price, then people in poor countries are likely to pirate.

If prices are adjusted so that it is expensive in rich countries and cheap in poor countries, then everyone is going to buy copies in the poor country, one way or another (either via resellers, establishing subsidiaries there, etc)

And if one region locks the software, then that makes people unhappy because they bought the product and want to be able to use it world wide. And it is hard to geolock computers, anyway.

I think just one price and have it constant everywhere is the best option. At least then you don't end up with situations like having everything super expensive in Australia just because.

If they dropped the prices in one poor country, everyone else will complain about "if you can afford to sell if for X in country Y, you must be ripping us off selling it for Z here."

Probably the best strategy is just to have one constant price, let the people in the poor countries pirate, and establish some kind of "pirate redemption" system targeting those areas to get people to spend some small amount to "upgrade" to a legit version. Then set that amount to the reduced amount one would have charged in the poor country in the first place.

Re:Gouge the middle class to make them poor

[Ungrounded Lightning]

It sounds more fair when you say charge less in poorer countries. However when you turn it around, it is gouge the people in less poor countries.

Especially given that GDP is not evenly distributed among the population. The bulk of the added revenue from technology driven productivity improvements (at least in the US) has gone to the denizens of the C suites and the government, not to the workers. GDP has soared while real-inflation adjusted after-tax income has stagnated or dropped for decades.

That's much of why a nuclear family in the '50s got along fine on a single income and a two-parent family now involves both parents working and the kids in child care, and the bulk of kids are in "non-traditional" family arrangements and/or on some form of public assistance.

So "gouge the developed world's middle class" is indeed what such a GDP-based scheme would accomplish.