The real problem is way more obvious. If you ever studied microeconomics, you probably know that the price equals to the marginal cost (at least on a "perfect" market). You learned something about Public Goods. The pure public goods are non-rival (meaning that the fact that I use it doesnt get in the way of you using it) and non-excludable (meaning you cannot exclude someone from using it).
So if you look at the marginal cost of downloading a software on the internet has almost zero marginal cost. So its price should be zero. And if you look at it in therms of type of product, youll realise that its also a pure public good.
If you take the market failures that those points bring, youll see why we are having so many problems on economic and legal aspects of software (and digitalized information in general). Turning a public good in a private one can be very difficult on the internet age.
Slashdot Mirror
The real problem is way more obvious. If you ever studied microeconomics, you probably know that the price equals to the marginal cost (at least on a "perfect" market). You learned something about Public Goods. The pure public goods are non-rival (meaning that the fact that I use it doesnt get in the way of you using it) and non-excludable (meaning you cannot exclude someone from using it). So if you look at the marginal cost of downloading a software on the internet has almost zero marginal cost. So its price should be zero. And if you look at it in therms of type of product, youll realise that its also a pure public good. If you take the market failures that those points bring, youll see why we are having so many problems on economic and legal aspects of software (and digitalized information in general). Turning a public good in a private one can be very difficult on the internet age.