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.

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.