Apple can charge whatever they want, because they've locked any possible competition out of the iPhone. Handango et al, well, they sell to fringe platforms like WinCE.
There's no reason publishers can't sell directly at a negligible cost. It certainly makes sense for them to also offer things through Amazon, but I'm not going to pay a premium for that. It can come out of their end.
Sure, explain the risks, and recommend they run the idea past their lawyers.
It's their risk to take, and look at it from their perspective; they're already trusting you with their data. Why should they trust Google, with it's nigh infinitely deep and sueable pockets, less than they trust you?
People will pirate simply to make sure there's an archival copy available, and there will always be people who's maximum price is lower than the one you set (and plenty with a maximum price of $0).
Why would you care at all about people who aren't willing to pay you? Worry about the people who would, but don't. Spend your anti-piracy efforts on reducing or eliminating the barriers to those people giving you money.
I *want* to pay for good games, but developers have to meet me part way if they want my money.
If you force me to pirate the game for functional reasons, you're eating into the goodwill that would otherwise get me to open my wallet and you're eroding my reason to buy. If I already have what I want, and you put up a roadblock to me giving you money in the first place, there's going to have to be a *lot* of goodwill for me to give you money anyway.
BTW, does Democracy work under wine yet? I *want* to buy your games...
Nintendo makes little or nothing (or negative) from the basic hardware, and nothing from the Chinese factories that make the SD cartridges. Given that they're about $5, I doubt there's much profit even to them.
I suppose Kingston made some profit on the $20 8GB microSD card.
The goalposts aren't being moved, there are simply as many goalposts as there are people and things to pirate.
For me, the general goalpost is that if the pirated version is superior, I'll pirate and more specifically to an item I have a price I'm willing to pay, and if the publisher doesn't want to take it on my terms it's not my problem.
For less than the cost of a single DS game (and they're only about $30), you can buy a cartridge and microSD card that can hold all the games you could ever want and then some *and* lets you play old school [s]nes/gameboy games. No juggling or losing cartridges, it's all just there.
Why would I want to participate in the for-pay DS economy when the pirate experience is far superior?
Sure, you *can* move your data from old storage as it's obsoleted, but that simply won't happen for most data. Especially if it's in some dusty file cabinet that only gets opened when it's needed.
Even more so when the person in charge of it is just a file clerk who barely knows what USB is and has no idea what those floppy plastic things are.
Theres the issue of encryption, and identification. Both your lax solution and browser's chicken little solution conflate the two.
If you're visiting your bank's site, you need to know that the connection is encrypted and you need to know that it is in fact encrypted for your bank and not a man in the middle.
If you're configuring your router, you don't need a certificate authority to assure you that your router is in fact your router. In fact it would be quite impossible to do anything of the sort. Even ignoring the logistics of adding $5 to the cost of every home router, it would be meaningless. An attacker would just have to extract a signed certificate from another of the same model to invalidate the entire process. (and there's no DNS record for DNSSEC).
For ubiquitous encryption, we'd still need certificate authorities to stop the Phorm asshats. ISPs could otherwise just rewrite DNS responses with their own key.
The real problem is that all browsers throw up these warnings far too often. Self signed certificates have issues, but they aren't going away. There will always be applications for which the cost of a signed certificate isn't justified.
If you want to solve the problem, work on a zero cost certificate authority. All the scary warnings are doing is training users to ignore them.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple can charge whatever they want, because they've locked any possible competition out of the iPhone. Handango et al, well, they sell to fringe platforms like WinCE.
There's no reason publishers can't sell directly at a negligible cost. It certainly makes sense for them to also offer things through Amazon, but I'm not going to pay a premium for that. It can come out of their end.
50% of the price goes to distributers/retailers. As those are unnecessary for ebooks, we can cross that right out.
That leaves 50% for the publisher, 10% of which is for printing, so 40%. Ebooks cannot be resold, so that should be halved.
So our final fair price is a maximum of 20% of paperback price, or $1-2.
But I expect not to be gouged.
You can't seriously argue that the cost of production, and transport and storage and losses from returns is not the majority of the cost of a book.
What are they smoking? Paperbacks cost less than that, and I'd expect something with zero production cost to be an order of magnitude cheaper.
This is just begging for piracy.
A site owner has every right to put whatever they want on their site. The reader has no obligation to render it in any particular way.
Sure, explain the risks, and recommend they run the idea past their lawyers.
It's their risk to take, and look at it from their perspective; they're already trusting you with their data. Why should they trust Google, with it's nigh infinitely deep and sueable pockets, less than they trust you?
People shout abuse for that, too.
The Segway is a wheelchair for people who's only disability is extreme laziness. No wonder Americans are so goddamn fat.
Do they reflect the players?
That is another person with the name Alan Cox.
There's no point even thinking in those terms.
People will pirate simply to make sure there's an archival copy available, and there will always be people who's maximum price is lower than the one you set (and plenty with a maximum price of $0).
Why would you care at all about people who aren't willing to pay you? Worry about the people who would, but don't. Spend your anti-piracy efforts on reducing or eliminating the barriers to those people giving you money.
I *want* to pay for good games, but developers have to meet me part way if they want my money.
If you force me to pirate the game for functional reasons, you're eating into the goodwill that would otherwise get me to open my wallet and you're eroding my reason to buy. If I already have what I want, and you put up a roadblock to me giving you money in the first place, there's going to have to be a *lot* of goodwill for me to give you money anyway.
BTW, does Democracy work under wine yet? I *want* to buy your games...
Nintendo makes little or nothing (or negative) from the basic hardware, and nothing from the Chinese factories that make the SD cartridges. Given that they're about $5, I doubt there's much profit even to them.
I suppose Kingston made some profit on the $20 8GB microSD card.
The more difficult you make it to pay you, the less likely people are to do so.
If I want to pay for a new DS game, I have to drive to the store, browse through whatever they happen to stock, and pony up my $30.
Then I get a cartridge that I don't want, and I have to download the pirated version.
The goalposts aren't being moved, there are simply as many goalposts as there are people and things to pirate.
For me, the general goalpost is that if the pirated version is superior, I'll pirate and more specifically to an item I have a price I'm willing to pay, and if the publisher doesn't want to take it on my terms it's not my problem.
Uploading it may be, downloading it likely isn't in most jurisdictions. Simply having a copy that you don't distribute certainly isn't.
For less than the cost of a single DS game (and they're only about $30), you can buy a cartridge and microSD card that can hold all the games you could ever want and then some *and* lets you play old school [s]nes/gameboy games. No juggling or losing cartridges, it's all just there.
Why would I want to participate in the for-pay DS economy when the pirate experience is far superior?
Sure, you *can* move your data from old storage as it's obsoleted, but that simply won't happen for most data. Especially if it's in some dusty file cabinet that only gets opened when it's needed.
Even more so when the person in charge of it is just a file clerk who barely knows what USB is and has no idea what those floppy plastic things are.
Think you'll be able to find a USB port in 70 years? SATA or PATA?
You may not be from 1860, but I wouldn't be shocked if the relevant law was.
Are you not backing up?
How do you back up dead trees?
If it's your ISP pulling Phorm style man-in-the-middle asshattery, you still need a trusted third party to sign keys.
Theres the issue of encryption, and identification. Both your lax solution and browser's chicken little solution conflate the two.
If you're visiting your bank's site, you need to know that the connection is encrypted and you need to know that it is in fact encrypted for your bank and not a man in the middle.
If you're configuring your router, you don't need a certificate authority to assure you that your router is in fact your router. In fact it would be quite impossible to do anything of the sort. Even ignoring the logistics of adding $5 to the cost of every home router, it would be meaningless. An attacker would just have to extract a signed certificate from another of the same model to invalidate the entire process. (and there's no DNS record for DNSSEC).
For ubiquitous encryption, we'd still need certificate authorities to stop the Phorm asshats. ISPs could otherwise just rewrite DNS responses with their own key.
The real problem is that all browsers throw up these warnings far too often. Self signed certificates have issues, but they aren't going away. There will always be applications for which the cost of a signed certificate isn't justified.
If you want to solve the problem, work on a zero cost certificate authority. All the scary warnings are doing is training users to ignore them.
If you want people to sign contracts, pay them.
If their advice isn't worth paying for, it's not really worth having anyway.
But a yellow car is like a left ear piercing. It's code for teh ghey.