If they really cared so much about their copyright, they could just have all their pages check the Referer URL of incoming requests. This is easy to spoof, but it at least forces somebody to go through some effort to use the site in a manner they deem incorrect.
If you look at the DeCSS case, similar arguments can be made but yet it went to court and so far the defendant is losing the case. Until we get some clear rulings by the court I would go betting on the assumption that if you bought it, you can do whatever you want.
Some stores keep track of your record for a particular purchase. So if you try to do that they will see in the record of your purchases that you got a replacement for an opened but defective copy.
Now, on the other hand, if you just keep harassing them and asking for your money back they'll probably give it to you just to shut you up.
The DMCA forbids the creation and distribution of access control circumvention devices. The EULA agreement, during installation, could be interpreted to be a form of access control. The software will not, ordinarily, install on your system unless you click the "I Accept" button. Therefore it is controlling your access to the software and anybody who bypasses the EULA may not be authorized to use the software.
Welcome to the wonders of poorly written legal language...
There's nothing "wrong" with belief. But if you seek to have that experience which lies at the root of all religion, a mystical experience if you will, then belief will only get in the way.
Or so you believe...:)
I think there are many different paths one can take and that really only the individual can judge the value of the path they take and the destinations they reach.
Belief is not a disease. In the world, the person who quests a lifetime is as likely to figure it all out as the person who sits and accepts everything he was ever taught from birth. If accepting a certain view of the world as truth helps you get through the day and be a happy person then what is wrong with that?
A disease deblitates and damages. A religion or belief can do this (the history books are filled with this), but some of the happiest people I've ever met were "comfortable" with their beliefs. They were comfortable and thus didn't feel they had to convince me they were right. They didn't feel a need to judge others for their different beliefs. They are not anymore right than anybody else is but they are happy and what is wrong with thaat?
A certain amount of questioning is healthy, but too much questioning can be just as destructive as too much belief. What should I do with my life? Why should I do it? All these questions become very difficult to answer when you strip away all your beliefs.
I have, fortunately, never had to deal with the procedure, but I believe your ISP is under no obligation to take down your site once you certify. If you go into court, the judge may choose to injoin the distribution of the content but that can be executed through you and enforced by any number of legal sanctions. There's no reason for the ISP to get involved really.
Basically this sets it up so that the ISP shouldn't have to shut anything down (except during that time between certification letters). Whether they do or not is really a matter of ISP policy, and I guarantee that any ISP is going to protect their right to do that in your hosting agreement.
Yeah, but that's the presumption in all of law. I mean keep in mind, the reponse letter to the DMCA isn't going to cost you a substantial amount. It's only if you have to fight something out in court that it'll cost you and that's an entirely separta step.
Although I do tend to favor the system where the loser pays the legal fees. Eliminates a lot of these issues in law.
No, the DMCA doesn't presume guilt. While the accusing party may be presuming guilt, the courts make no similar assumption. All that the procedures set out by the DMCA do is provide a way for copyright owners to bring anonymous posters of pirated materials out into the open. Basically, if you post something and it was legitimate, you simply assert that it is legitimate to your accuser and then it's up to the accuser to take you to court.
The only presumption really made here is that if the materials are legitimate, you'll make the effort to certify to that they are in response to the accuser.
This part of the DMCA is about the only part that's intelligently written (IMHO). It says that somebody who thinks you violated a copyright must send a letter to your service provider certifiying that they believe you have violated a copyright.
The provider, to avoid taking on the liability for contributory copyright infringement, must remove your site unless you certify that you have not violated their copyright. Now that's the thing though, you have to be willing to take the chance in a court of law that you did not violate their copyright. If you aren't, then an ISP will, wisely, remove your offending content.
Now, I say not ENTIRELY true, because I'm sure that a number of providers will be more than happy to shut down your site completely regardless of what you say because it's not worth the hassle to them. That is a risk you take when you walk near the legal grey areas (and boy haven't those grey areas increased in size lately). I mean running any site today that allows for some sort of public user posting runs the risk of them violating copyright on your site. Then you get to have the choice of eliminating their posts or taking a moral stand. Moral stands are expensive...
See the thing is, the lawsuits aren't actually groundless or frivolous (though I agree that such a system helps in other ways). These companies and universities do have at least some illegal software and in a court of law, even the one or two copies that might be illegal are enough justification to rule the case as not being frivolous.
If it were completely groundless, then yes it would be illegal. The problem here is that in these situations, there's no way for the university to 100% license everything they use. Even if they make a concerted best try effort to license everything a few licenses will slip through the cracks. The university knows this, the BSA knows this, and that is why the BSA, to the best of my knowledge, has never been challenged when these audits come up.
Let's say on your entire campus, one license is not valid. If the BSA comes knocking at your door, you face a relatively minor penalty for that license, but then you have to pay for your legal counsel, their legal counsel, damages, the auditors, etc. The BSA knows this, and they use it to their advantage.
Now, keep in mind here that they are suggesting a product is not legally licensed if you don't have the paperwork to proove it. Therefor, if you aren't totally pristine in keeping track of the licenses for all your software that is, in fact, 100% legitimate, you can still get screwed by the BSA. Although I do wonder how well that would stand up in court, that is, unless the BSA can proove those copies are pirated, is simply not being able to proove them legitimate enough to get you into hotwater. I'm sure their license provisions make certain statements about this, but I don't know if they would stand up in court.
What it boils down to is that the BSA takes advatange of our legal system to extort businesses and it's about time that something was done to put an end to this. For example, I would propose that any organization that licenses software for more than say 50 computers, they should have certain protections from this sort of action. I would suggest the following protections:
1) Provide protection for good faith effort. If your company makes a good faith effort to license your software (at least say 80% of the value of the software is legitimately licensed), then all you can be held accountable for is the cost of licenses at retail price. No damages, no attorneys fees, no auditing fees. It would still cost you the attorneys fees to fend it off, but at least the expense would be clear and reasonable. If you have more than 90% compliance, then your legal fees would be covered by the suing party (though you'd still have to pay for the licenses). Thus, there's a strong disincentive to go after an organization that's not blatantly violating the law.
2) Receipts or other proof of software purchase should be considered valid proof of legal license. If you buy a thousand copies of a piece of software, you shouldn't have to keep track of a thousand pieces of paper. It would be impossible to proove that a piece of software is pirated, so it makes sense for the purchaser to be required to demonstrate ownership in court, but the burden of what needs to be proven should be much more reasonable.
Okay, so then the Japanese complain about us dumping. Then what? Let's say they win in WTO hearings. How nice for them. Then the US just ignores it. Why? Because we can. What real punishment can the WTO provide?
The WTO is totally powerless, especially against the US. The only thing it provides is a common forum for working these issues out and for establishing a sort of trade best practices. But when you get right down to it, trade disputes are settled as they always have been, either through discussion, or through various embargoes, tariffs, etc. The WTO may add some legitimacy to a particular countries use of some tariffs, etc, but overall it doesn't provide any significant sanctioning ability.
That's the funny thing with all of the world governmental bodies. They have no real power, they mostly just serve as negotiating platforms. The real power continues to be held by individual nations and there's no evidence that they'll be giving up that power anytime soon.
I run a website that uses slashchode. Now, this asks for certain bits of information. I don't have any intention of doing anything with this information and I'm not any sort of commercial entity. Am I to be held to the same standards about opt-in and opt-out agreements?
Given that you are only going to have two days for this crash course, the amount you'll be able to accomplish is probably minimal. I taught a Linux class a little over a year ago that was a week long so I had the benefit of a bit more time. But I do have a couple suggestions.
The biggest one is, teach them how to find out more. These are people who may be used to getting their tech support from paid vendors, and when working with Linux you can get frequently superior support from on-line resources. Teach them how to effectively use google and google groups to get "tech support". One of the most valuable tricks I learned early on with linux was simply looking for an error message in quotes. 90% of the time, somebody already asked the same question and somebody else has already answered it.
Another thing I would suggest is get them familiar with the basics of getting around on the command prompt. Give them a reference sheet with the most useful commands and the most useful switches for those commands. Then if you don't have time to cover them in detail, at least a cursory explanation and that reference sheet should give them the foundation they need.
Next, I would show them how easy it is to download and compile tools. Find some small piece of software that you use routinely, and then show them how to build it. Knowing that most packages can be constructed using the standard./configure, make, make install, can take that edge of fear off that might be associated with having to compile their own tools. Just be sure you know it works on the machines you have to work with.
Overall thought I think the focus, given your short time, should be making them feel comfortable with working on Linux. If you get them comfortable, then they can figure it out from there:).
Actually, if they distribute it, they have to. Doesn't matter whether they are selling it. Section 3a of the GPL states that binary distributions must be accompanied by source code. They say you CAN charge for it, but that is not a factor here.
Now, having said that, I tend to think that Lindows probably has their heart in the right place. Yes, technically they are violating the GPL but give them a break. Let's see what happens when they actually release the software. If they don't have source code available then to purchasers of the software, then it's time to raise hell. I think sending them a warning mesage is productive, but we shouldn't be writing them off as an agent of the devil in the meantime.
Here's why that may not be true. If it costs the manufacturer say $15/card, and they sell it to a retailer at say $30/card (50% markup), then they are making $15/card. Now, let's see what happens if they are able to reduce costs per card by an additional $5/card.
The first manufacturer to do this would have a temporary advantage. They could sell those cards to retailers at $30 still, but now they are making $20/card, a substantial increase in their profits at the volumes we are talking about. That advantage maybe lasts them a month or two until the next manufacturer does the same thing.
Now, the other manufacturer has the same margin, but in an effort to grab market share undercuts the first manufacturer. Eventually this price competition will push down the price that they can sell to retailers to whatever maintains their razor thin profits (which is probably identical to what they were before if not lower). Since the price point the cards are at now is so low already, they are unlikely to sell more cards by further dropping the prices. So now what happens is that they've modified their product lines, changed how they support and develop these cards and they aren't making anymore money than they would have in the first place.
Now, if the wireless card manufacturers could actually sell more cards if they dropped the price then their would be an advantage to them to look at software drivers. In the modem market, the price differences between winmodems and regular modems was substantial so this made more sense. At $50/card, are you really going to choose not to buy it because it's too expensive? Is it going to make a real difference to you at $30? If not then there's no incentive to invest the money in changing the technology.
The logic behind winmodems was to reduce the hardware costs and drive down the prices. My question is how much cheaper can they really drive these prices down. Right now you can pick up a wireless ethernet card for $50. Modems are runing as low as $30 for comparison.
So as demand increases, quantities of scale continue to increase, we can expect the cost for those same cards to come down. It's unlikely that WiFi cards will be able to press much further down in price even with using software drivers.
Another thing to keep in mind is that most of the wireless manufacturers tend to save costs by reducing redundancy in their wireless products. If you use a Lucent AP-1000 access point, it runs on the same cards that you'd put in your laptop. I have yet to see a wireless adapater for a desktop that wasn't, in reality, a PCMCIA slot with a wireless card. It's a big cost savings to them to only have to manufacture one set of devices to fill their needs in laptops, PC's, and access points. Trying to do software drivers would totally screw up these possibilities.
If it is true that C# is very similar to Java and it is true that C# can be used on non-windows platforms, then why should we be concerned about C# coming to dominate? I mean, all the java developers go learn C# and life goes on.
I also recommend metalsmiths.com. They do some great work and they do have titanium rings. We got an engagement ring and two wedding bands from them and they were very well done and reasonably priced. My wedding band was titanium with a stripe of gold and my wife's was platinum (and the engagement ring was platinum with an emerald).
The one caveat I would say is that they do sometimes take a while since it is a small operation, so if you are planning to meet a specific timeline order well in advance.
Actually, the price is set to the optimum profit point, not the lowest price. I could conceivably lower the price by $5 bucks but I wouldn't sell substantially more shoes. They increase this optimum point by using marketing to push the demand for the shoes up enough that they can raise the prices and still sell the same number of shoes.
Actually one of the concepts that a lot of entrepeneurs have been into is the notion of avoiding competition. Basically, you try to start businesses that are in new technologies, or provide services nobody else is providing. This way you don't have to compete in any real sense.
Also, competition doesn't necessarily force prices to the lowest that they can be. Many times companies compete using marketing and branding which allow them to operate at prices well beyond what are the bare minimum for survival. I mean, are Nike shoe really worth that much money?
Let's say they were charging $50/copy and they sold 5000 copies (which seemed to be a reasonable expectation given what the report said). At that price and volume, that's $250,000 per title.
Now, figure that each title is going to take 3 or 4 developers. Let's say that each is paid $96K/year (for math simplicity) in salary and benefits, that would come down to approximately $8000/month per employee or roughly $32,000/month for each team. My numbers are totally coming out of thin air, but not unreasonable. At that burn rate you can afford to spend 7 months in development of each game with some room for some sort of profit.
Of course that base price isn't accounting for a lot of the company infrastructure. You have to afford a place to work, computers, a network connection, marketing, packaging, etc. You'll need an office manager, somebody to run the website, and a couple other odds and ends. So probably, in the grand scheme of things, you're talking at least $50K/month burn rate. As you develop more games, the overhead is probably reduced somewhat but this is a reasonable baseline.
So now, suddenly you are down to 5 months of development time. Ohhhh wait, you forgot to license that game, didn't you? Well that's going to shave a few bucks off each copy of the game, and now suddenly you are in the red assuming that you can get the game ported from start to finish in 5 months.
My numbers aren't necessarily realistic, but I think they are close enough to reality to illustrate that this is, at best, a razor thin business to be in.
Slashdot Mirror
If they really cared so much about their copyright, they could just have all their pages check the Referer URL of incoming requests. This is easy to spoof, but it at least forces somebody to go through some effort to use the site in a manner they deem incorrect.
Other than that they should just get over it.
If you look at the DeCSS case, similar arguments can be made but yet it went to court and so far the defendant is losing the case. Until we get some clear rulings by the court I would go betting on the assumption that if you bought it, you can do whatever you want.
Some stores keep track of your record for a particular purchase. So if you try to do that they will see in the record of your purchases that you got a replacement for an opened but defective copy.
Now, on the other hand, if you just keep harassing them and asking for your money back they'll probably give it to you just to shut you up.
The DMCA forbids the creation and distribution of access control circumvention devices. The EULA agreement, during installation, could be interpreted to be a form of access control. The software will not, ordinarily, install on your system unless you click the "I Accept" button. Therefore it is controlling your access to the software and anybody who bypasses the EULA may not be authorized to use the software.
Welcome to the wonders of poorly written legal language...
There's nothing "wrong" with belief. But if you seek to have that experience which lies at the root of all religion, a mystical experience if you will, then belief will only get in the way.
:)
Or so you believe...
I think there are many different paths one can take and that really only the individual can judge the value of the path they take and the destinations they reach.
Belief is not a disease. In the world, the person who quests a lifetime is as likely to figure it all out as the person who sits and accepts everything he was ever taught from birth. If accepting a certain view of the world as truth helps you get through the day and be a happy person then what is wrong with that?
A disease deblitates and damages. A religion or belief can do this (the history books are filled with this), but some of the happiest people I've ever met were "comfortable" with their beliefs. They were comfortable and thus didn't feel they had to convince me they were right. They didn't feel a need to judge others for their different beliefs. They are not anymore right than anybody else is but they are happy and what is wrong with thaat?
A certain amount of questioning is healthy, but too much questioning can be just as destructive as too much belief. What should I do with my life? Why should I do it? All these questions become very difficult to answer when you strip away all your beliefs.
I have, fortunately, never had to deal with the procedure, but I believe your ISP is under no obligation to take down your site once you certify. If you go into court, the judge may choose to injoin the distribution of the content but that can be executed through you and enforced by any number of legal sanctions. There's no reason for the ISP to get involved really.
Basically this sets it up so that the ISP shouldn't have to shut anything down (except during that time between certification letters). Whether they do or not is really a matter of ISP policy, and I guarantee that any ISP is going to protect their right to do that in your hosting agreement.
Yeah, but that's the presumption in all of law. I mean keep in mind, the reponse letter to the DMCA isn't going to cost you a substantial amount. It's only if you have to fight something out in court that it'll cost you and that's an entirely separta step.
Although I do tend to favor the system where the loser pays the legal fees. Eliminates a lot of these issues in law.
No, the DMCA doesn't presume guilt. While the accusing party may be presuming guilt, the courts make no similar assumption. All that the procedures set out by the DMCA do is provide a way for copyright owners to bring anonymous posters of pirated materials out into the open. Basically, if you post something and it was legitimate, you simply assert that it is legitimate to your accuser and then it's up to the accuser to take you to court.
The only presumption really made here is that if the materials are legitimate, you'll make the effort to certify to that they are in response to the accuser.
This part of the DMCA is about the only part that's intelligently written (IMHO). It says that somebody who thinks you violated a copyright must send a letter to your service provider certifiying that they believe you have violated a copyright.
The provider, to avoid taking on the liability for contributory copyright infringement, must remove your site unless you certify that you have not violated their copyright. Now that's the thing though, you have to be willing to take the chance in a court of law that you did not violate their copyright. If you aren't, then an ISP will, wisely, remove your offending content.
Now, I say not ENTIRELY true, because I'm sure that a number of providers will be more than happy to shut down your site completely regardless of what you say because it's not worth the hassle to them. That is a risk you take when you walk near the legal grey areas (and boy haven't those grey areas increased in size lately). I mean running any site today that allows for some sort of public user posting runs the risk of them violating copyright on your site. Then you get to have the choice of eliminating their posts or taking a moral stand. Moral stands are expensive...
See the thing is, the lawsuits aren't actually groundless or frivolous (though I agree that such a system helps in other ways). These companies and universities do have at least some illegal software and in a court of law, even the one or two copies that might be illegal are enough justification to rule the case as not being frivolous.
If it were completely groundless, then yes it would be illegal. The problem here is that in these situations, there's no way for the university to 100% license everything they use. Even if they make a concerted best try effort to license everything a few licenses will slip through the cracks. The university knows this, the BSA knows this, and that is why the BSA, to the best of my knowledge, has never been challenged when these audits come up.
Let's say on your entire campus, one license is not valid. If the BSA comes knocking at your door, you face a relatively minor penalty for that license, but then you have to pay for your legal counsel, their legal counsel, damages, the auditors, etc. The BSA knows this, and they use it to their advantage.
Now, keep in mind here that they are suggesting a product is not legally licensed if you don't have the paperwork to proove it. Therefor, if you aren't totally pristine in keeping track of the licenses for all your software that is, in fact, 100% legitimate, you can still get screwed by the BSA. Although I do wonder how well that would stand up in court, that is, unless the BSA can proove those copies are pirated, is simply not being able to proove them legitimate enough to get you into hotwater. I'm sure their license provisions make certain statements about this, but I don't know if they would stand up in court.
What it boils down to is that the BSA takes advatange of our legal system to extort businesses and it's about time that something was done to put an end to this. For example, I would propose that any organization that licenses software for more than say 50 computers, they should have certain protections from this sort of action. I would suggest the following protections:
1) Provide protection for good faith effort. If your company makes a good faith effort to license your software (at least say 80% of the value of the software is legitimately licensed), then all you can be held accountable for is the cost of licenses at retail price. No damages, no attorneys fees, no auditing fees. It would still cost you the attorneys fees to fend it off, but at least the expense would be clear and reasonable. If you have more than 90% compliance, then your legal fees would be covered by the suing party (though you'd still have to pay for the licenses). Thus, there's a strong disincentive to go after an organization that's not blatantly violating the law.
2) Receipts or other proof of software purchase should be considered valid proof of legal license. If you buy a thousand copies of a piece of software, you shouldn't have to keep track of a thousand pieces of paper. It would be impossible to proove that a piece of software is pirated, so it makes sense for the purchaser to be required to demonstrate ownership in court, but the burden of what needs to be proven should be much more reasonable.
Take that first sentance, rephrase as follows:
Okay, so the japanase complain about us being protectionist and blocking them.
Okay, so then the Japanese complain about us dumping. Then what? Let's say they win in WTO hearings. How nice for them. Then the US just ignores it. Why? Because we can. What real punishment can the WTO provide?
The WTO is totally powerless, especially against the US. The only thing it provides is a common forum for working these issues out and for establishing a sort of trade best practices. But when you get right down to it, trade disputes are settled as they always have been, either through discussion, or through various embargoes, tariffs, etc. The WTO may add some legitimacy to a particular countries use of some tariffs, etc, but overall it doesn't provide any significant sanctioning ability.
That's the funny thing with all of the world governmental bodies. They have no real power, they mostly just serve as negotiating platforms. The real power continues to be held by individual nations and there's no evidence that they'll be giving up that power anytime soon.
I run a website that uses slashchode. Now, this asks for certain bits of information. I don't have any intention of doing anything with this information and I'm not any sort of commercial entity. Am I to be held to the same standards about opt-in and opt-out agreements?
Given that you are only going to have two days for this crash course, the amount you'll be able to accomplish is probably minimal. I taught a Linux class a little over a year ago that was a week long so I had the benefit of a bit more time. But I do have a couple suggestions.
./configure, make, make install, can take that edge of fear off that might be associated with having to compile their own tools. Just be sure you know it works on the machines you have to work with.
:).
The biggest one is, teach them how to find out more. These are people who may be used to getting their tech support from paid vendors, and when working with Linux you can get frequently superior support from on-line resources. Teach them how to effectively use google and google groups to get "tech support". One of the most valuable tricks I learned early on with linux was simply looking for an error message in quotes. 90% of the time, somebody already asked the same question and somebody else has already answered it.
Another thing I would suggest is get them familiar with the basics of getting around on the command prompt. Give them a reference sheet with the most useful commands and the most useful switches for those commands. Then if you don't have time to cover them in detail, at least a cursory explanation and that reference sheet should give them the foundation they need.
Next, I would show them how easy it is to download and compile tools. Find some small piece of software that you use routinely, and then show them how to build it. Knowing that most packages can be constructed using the standard
Overall thought I think the focus, given your short time, should be making them feel comfortable with working on Linux. If you get them comfortable, then they can figure it out from there
Actually, if they distribute it, they have to. Doesn't matter whether they are selling it. Section 3a of the GPL states that binary distributions must be accompanied by source code. They say you CAN charge for it, but that is not a factor here.
Now, having said that, I tend to think that Lindows probably has their heart in the right place. Yes, technically they are violating the GPL but give them a break. Let's see what happens when they actually release the software. If they don't have source code available then to purchasers of the software, then it's time to raise hell. I think sending them a warning mesage is productive, but we shouldn't be writing them off as an agent of the devil in the meantime.
Here's why that may not be true. If it costs the manufacturer say $15/card, and they sell it to a retailer at say $30/card (50% markup), then they are making $15/card. Now, let's see what happens if they are able to reduce costs per card by an additional $5/card.
The first manufacturer to do this would have a temporary advantage. They could sell those cards to retailers at $30 still, but now they are making $20/card, a substantial increase in their profits at the volumes we are talking about. That advantage maybe lasts them a month or two until the next manufacturer does the same thing.
Now, the other manufacturer has the same margin, but in an effort to grab market share undercuts the first manufacturer. Eventually this price competition will push down the price that they can sell to retailers to whatever maintains their razor thin profits (which is probably identical to what they were before if not lower). Since the price point the cards are at now is so low already, they are unlikely to sell more cards by further dropping the prices. So now what happens is that they've modified their product lines, changed how they support and develop these cards and they aren't making anymore money than they would have in the first place.
Now, if the wireless card manufacturers could actually sell more cards if they dropped the price then their would be an advantage to them to look at software drivers. In the modem market, the price differences between winmodems and regular modems was substantial so this made more sense. At $50/card, are you really going to choose not to buy it because it's too expensive? Is it going to make a real difference to you at $30? If not then there's no incentive to invest the money in changing the technology.
The logic behind winmodems was to reduce the hardware costs and drive down the prices. My question is how much cheaper can they really drive these prices down. Right now you can pick up a wireless ethernet card for $50. Modems are runing as low as $30 for comparison.
So as demand increases, quantities of scale continue to increase, we can expect the cost for those same cards to come down. It's unlikely that WiFi cards will be able to press much further down in price even with using software drivers.
Another thing to keep in mind is that most of the wireless manufacturers tend to save costs by reducing redundancy in their wireless products. If you use a Lucent AP-1000 access point, it runs on the same cards that you'd put in your laptop. I have yet to see a wireless adapater for a desktop that wasn't, in reality, a PCMCIA slot with a wireless card. It's a big cost savings to them to only have to manufacture one set of devices to fill their needs in laptops, PC's, and access points. Trying to do software drivers would totally screw up these possibilities.
If it is true that C# is very similar to Java and it is true that C# can be used on non-windows platforms, then why should we be concerned about C# coming to dominate? I mean, all the java developers go learn C# and life goes on.
What's the problem?
not necessarily on topic, but a good point
I also recommend metalsmiths.com. They do some great work and they do have titanium rings. We got an engagement ring and two wedding bands from them and they were very well done and reasonably priced. My wedding band was titanium with a stripe of gold and my wife's was platinum (and the engagement ring was platinum with an emerald).
The one caveat I would say is that they do sometimes take a while since it is a small operation, so if you are planning to meet a specific timeline order well in advance.
Actually, the price is set to the optimum profit point, not the lowest price. I could conceivably lower the price by $5 bucks but I wouldn't sell substantially more shoes. They increase this optimum point by using marketing to push the demand for the shoes up enough that they can raise the prices and still sell the same number of shoes.
Actually one of the concepts that a lot of entrepeneurs have been into is the notion of avoiding competition. Basically, you try to start businesses that are in new technologies, or provide services nobody else is providing. This way you don't have to compete in any real sense.
Also, competition doesn't necessarily force prices to the lowest that they can be. Many times companies compete using marketing and branding which allow them to operate at prices well beyond what are the bare minimum for survival. I mean, are Nike shoe really worth that much money?
Let's say they were charging $50/copy and they sold 5000 copies (which seemed to be a reasonable expectation given what the report said). At that price and volume, that's $250,000 per title.
Now, figure that each title is going to take 3 or 4 developers. Let's say that each is paid $96K/year (for math simplicity) in salary and benefits, that would come down to approximately $8000/month per employee or roughly $32,000/month for each team. My numbers are totally coming out of thin air, but not unreasonable. At that burn rate you can afford to spend 7 months in development of each game with some room for some sort of profit.
Of course that base price isn't accounting for a lot of the company infrastructure. You have to afford a place to work, computers, a network connection, marketing, packaging, etc. You'll need an office manager, somebody to run the website, and a couple other odds and ends. So probably, in the grand scheme of things, you're talking at least $50K/month burn rate. As you develop more games, the overhead is probably reduced somewhat but this is a reasonable baseline.
So now, suddenly you are down to 5 months of development time. Ohhhh wait, you forgot to license that game, didn't you? Well that's going to shave a few bucks off each copy of the game, and now suddenly you are in the red assuming that you can get the game ported from start to finish in 5 months.
My numbers aren't necessarily realistic, but I think they are close enough to reality to illustrate that this is, at best, a razor thin business to be in.