Excuse me? Are you seriously claiming that there are no drawbacks whatsoever associated illegal content distribution? I'm sure I'm completely misunderstanding what you're trying to say, or you've totally misunderstood me.
Totally misunderstood you? You went from a bizzarrely incorrect argument that it's more expensive to deliver something via pirate means than through legitimate means and now have backpeddled this via not-so-clever verbal gymnastics into a much weaker contention that i somehow claimed that there are no drawbacks associated with content distribution. For that assinine comment alone, you get a hearty *PLONK*.
Nice try as well for attmepting to claim somehow that software protection is not DRM. Way to go, champ.
blah blah blah...h the DRM program to see where it gets the keys from, and then to replicate the process. And once the DRM is cracked, then there is no longer any limit to the amount of times that file can be copied.
Returning to the real world: does the use of a lock on the front door of your house "prevent" thieves from coming in and stealing things? no... it simply reduces the likelihood of them doing so. Should you go on holiday, and one thief breaks the lock, all subsequent theives can steal whatever stuff the previous theif left, right?
Ah - but what if you don't go on holiday? What if you come home every night and change the lock, regardless of whether or not it was broken or not? Yes, a thief might break it one day and get some stuff, but he won't be able to come back the next day unless he goes through the same laborious process.
Your "real world" point misses a very real reality: that "stopping" piracy is about reducing the rate of infringement. To give you some idea: the existence of spyware and trojans reduces the rate of software piracy. Why? because people who have been burned who aren't technically savvy begin to associate, say, eMule with "the place where I got spyware from last time because I downloaded keygen.exe" A business guy who 4 years ago could just do a google search for "newprogram serialz" for an algorithmically passing serial number now has to contend with either a more complicated crack or some other mechanism - including ones that cleverly claim to be a successful unlock and then report back to the company the IP address, etc of the infringer for the basic purpose of making a civil claim against his company. All these things CAN and DO help. Your philosophical result is true in only some ideal sense.
The "war" against copyright infringement is like a war of your hands vs bacteria. neither side ever wins unless one side just gives up, but it *is* possible to be cleaner or dirtier than another, depending on how often you clean and where you stick your hands in the first place.
Secondly, content holders will still have the advantage over copyright infringers, because legal content distribution is always cheaper than illegal content distribution. There is a not insignificant cost to distributing content illegally; in the form of lawsuits (multiply probability of being caught by the average amount of money they'll fine you), in the form of decentralisation inefficiencies, in the form of anonymising algorithms that put security over speed, in the form of usability. A content holder can provide a better service than illegal competitors; people will pay for this.
This is comedy gold. Do you even believe or read what you are writing? While your last sentence above is true, the rest is not worthy of a response.
Courtney Love offers some options on the matter. She appears to be of the opinion that most artists make little enough money off the music that they might as well be giving it away for free, DRM or no.
Sigh. Oft debunked nonsense (well, she overexaggerated greatly). But even if it were 100% true, it misses the point - if you dont like the deal, DONT SIGN ON THE DOTTED LINE. The internet offers myriads of ways for self publishing - why not use them?
Let's pretend for a moment that your basic thinking is true: one, that your baseless empirical statement is true that DRM doesn't prevent copyright infringement and two, that the ONLY effect of DRM is to prevent legal owners from doing legal things.
I think that you are completely wrong on #1 and probably only very marginally correct on #2, but #1 negates this (I am in the software business and know as a 100%, indisputable fact that the DRM that we put on our products increases sales and decreases piracy.)
Anyway, let's ignore this for a moment. Now I ask you this: hopefully as I write to you you are an intelligent person who recognizes the social good of a limited copyright and general intellectual property protection for creators and rightsholders as a Good Thing and NOT some "abolish all copyright now" idiot.
Now, putting aside all your marginal thoughts and objections to issues relating to, for example length of copyright duration, let me ask you this simple question: what should rightsholders currently do to protect their legal rights and economic well-being, given an ever-more pervasive culture on the internet that basically condones piracy.
Please answer the question from their standpoint, taking into consideration both a large and small rightsholding entity (individual, company, whatever).
I dare you (and any other reader) to come up with a plausible, workable solution that involves neither of economic suicide, economic fantasy ("give away the music but sell T-shirts / concert tickets"), legal action against infringers, or DRM.
Infringement no more obsoletes a business model than guns obsolete banks.
Since you got marked up as "+5 insightful" and yet the person you replied to, who made an equally valid and interesting point, did not get marked up at all, we see slashdot's moderation bias in flagrante delicto.
What's good about DRM? Well, that's like saying "what's good about seat belts? they keep you from moving about as you might otherwise like." The point is that NOBODY likes DRM. I'm sure the labels wish they didnt have to play the stupid, expensive, headache-filled games of reducing the RATE (not absolute, but the *** RATE *** of copyright infringement by playing technological cat and mouse), but the fact is that the reason that it has that way is NOT because of the labels, but rather because the technical and social geniuses of the internet, who keep reminding us of how they are far more honest, englightened, visionary, and fair than the lawyers, politicians, businesspeople, windows users, and everybody else of the world have basically devleoped a complete culture (complete with phony gods, pseudo-intellectuals, questionable economics, self-serving philosophies, blatantly enabling tools, etc) basically centered around justifying their own copy infringement.
case in point: mention something like "wouldn't it be nice if the same intellectual creativity that goes into finding ways to circumvent rightful copyright holders' attempting to clamp down on illegal infringement of their works actually went into protecting it, instead" and you'll just get an earful about the evil RIAA this, bullshiat "abolish all copyright" idiot philosophy that, the mickey-mouse-copyrigt-extension-justifies-my-downl oading-this-video-that, and so forth.
The fact of the matter is that the problem is AT LEAST 50% caused by the attitude that has come about here. So.. what is good about DRM? Not a hell of a lot. But don't blame the labels entirely - blame it on the millions of willfully infringing users who have nececcitated it.
This is all because of the high quality and free open source alternative known as the gimp eating their market share.
That was supposed to be ironic / funny. Alas, the fact is that gimp sucks compared to commercial offerings and is a major black eye for proponents of F/OSS.
Yet again we see a slashdot article that mentions something neat that people did with a PC with a general purpose operating system. Does the operating system matter or is the choice of OS even interesting? Probably not more than and possibly much less than the programming language that the thing was written in.. but does that get mentioned?
Face it, folks. Linux is a general purpose operating system on which you can do all of the expected things that one can do with such. We are WELL past the time where you can do basic things, like program and use webcams, on Linux, and nobody reading slashdot really needs to be fluffed further in this respect.
As far as this story goes, unless the inventors did something that could more or less only have been done on linux, then the linux aspect of this story is irrelevant.
Wow, that post was about the best example on Slashdot that I have ever seen of "post some speculative paranoid crap, but slant it against microsoft, and get it modded up to +5 insightful."
Repeat After Me: Fighting Piracy is a war of attrition, NOT a war of absolutes.
The goal of anti piracy measures is not (realistically) to eliminate all piracy. Rather, it's to make piracy a relative hassle so that more people will stay clear of it.
For EVERY anti-piracy mechanism there will be some workaround - be it a rename, a magic marker, a shift key, a crack, a patch, or whatever. That's not the point. The point is that the more of a pain or the more specific knowledge it takes to do such a workaround, statistically fewer people will do it. Every fake file, threat of lawsuit, etc is an attempt to curb the RATE of piracy, not some idyllic attempt to eliminate it altogether.
Actually, I know your comment was tongue in cheek, but recall nevertheless that prior to the introduction of all those $1 / song services, these messageboards were teeming with messages that said, flat out, "charge a fair fee, say, $1 per song, and then we will have an alternative and not need to pirate."
The lesson from that adventure was basically that there are a lot of people here with convenient ethics.
Oh come on. Given all the ingenuity that is put into circumventing controls, a bit can be put into enforcing community support against piracy. Just as a 10-second idea, how about something akin to a reputation system, where certain users are given weight for correctly identifying copyrighted works and gain, for example, download credit for doing so? Yes, this is not a complete or well thought out idea, but my point is that certainly something can be thought up. There would even be a system of punishing those who introduce offending files into the system and so forth.
The DMCA certainly does have its problems, both in initial design and in abuse of it 'in the field.'
However, let's put things in perspective. What is *really* the bigger problem right now - a few (even a few thousand), bad yes, abuses of the DMCA or the completely out of control wanton disregard for copyright law that exists in many internet corners? The defenders of P2P for LEGITIMATE use lose their credibility if they are not equally realistic and aggressive in condemning and thinking of ways to stop illegitimate use.
Your own argument works against you. Personal attacks and Amazon hijinks against Jack Thompson deserve just as much respect as any speech made by Jack Thompson, or anyone else for that matter.
Yelling "lalalalalalalala" at the top of your voice in order to prevent others from being heard is not free speech.
The article states that was basically what people were doing - NOT simply writing negative reviews, but basically using amazon tricks to ensure that any 'real' reviews would be lost in the noise. RTFA.
from what i understood, people were doing things like causing the book to be effectively linked to gay erotica on amazon. that's not "filing a review". RTFA.
That message board where the link points to is absolutely scary. The way I saw the piece:
1. Jerk writes book.
2. People who hate the jerk play underhanded amazon tricks to sabotage book on Amazon.com
3. Jerk complains to amazon that such tricks are clearly against amazon's rules and asks amazon to remove the offending material, which amazon does poorly or incompletently.
I expected the mesasgeboards there to be filled with "I disagree with what Jerk says, but I respect his right to say it in a fair way", instead it is full of Vigilante Logic such as pointing to Jerk's supposed jerk activities in a vein of "two wrongs make a right" logic criticizing the guy for asking for amazon to play by its own rules.
However, coders and technologists will generally (definately not in all cases) try to grasp the basics of the implications of intellectual property laws. As coders, we are interested in understanding systems and finding out how they work.
wow. I don't know whether to call you cynical or simply naive.
Instead of defending lawyers and politicians, let me beat you with the other end of the stick: if what you say is true, why do so many people on slashdot exhibit such a complete basic grasp of the most fundamental economic concepts? It is not because (mostly, anyway) that the slashdotters are stupid. Rather, it is because they try to basically invent things on an ad-hoc basis and end up reasoning out of their ass with poorly thought out and quite often self-serving arguments.
In other words, if you are accusing that easy boogieman of 'lawyers of politicians' of being intellectualy lazy or dishonest, pot, meet kettle.
But are the (possibly bad) decisions on Slashdot taken up by governments?
Perhaps not, but every day we see effectively an important analog: technologists creating products that have the effect of executing policy despite a lack of respect for or training in underlying law, policy, or economics.
In slashdot, many people have bizarre notion that the guy who wired the atom bomb therefore becomes an expert on its use. While in practice we give a sort of respect and listen to the voices to those who invented it (the einsteins and bohrs of the world), but in practice we elect presidents and legislatures to decide when to use them.
Oh wait - did I say atom bomb? I meant p2p services / cryptography / intellectual property / etc. In that case, the attitude seems to be "f*** that, it's mine - i can do what I want, and if they try to stop me i'll ( build unstoppable v2 / ignore them / claim that they are all corrupt overpaid idiots / etc. }" Of course, p2p is not an atom bomb, but it does have many policy and law implications.
After all, what about loss leaders? You know, products intentionally priced under cost (much lass profit maximizing) in order to sell ANOTHER product at higher volume and better margin?
Because as anybody with a brain will tell you, the music industry doesn't work that way. There are no loss leaders in music for reasons that are so obvious I feel silly even mentioning them inlcuding that artists are not subsitutes for each other, there is no such thing as an 'entry level' album akin to an A-class mercedes (since you cant know in advance whether an artists first or 5th album will be his best), there is no such thing for all practical purposes as 'label loyalty' akin to brand loyalty, and that music is a perceived value good - why should i pay $20 for x's 2nd album when I paid $5 for the first?
You should be embarassed that you even brought up 'loss leaders' in this context.
As far as the other responders to my post go: I wish I had the time to respond to all the bullshit that has been flung my way. People claiming that basic economics dont apply, for example, because the RIAA companies are an evil monopoly (neither half of that argument - that the economics dont apply and that they can act efficiently as an oligopoly are true) are so full of shiat it is unbelievable. Alas, I will have to simply ignore them for now, since I do not have the time to reply properly.
By that standard, "coders and technologists know about as much about the economics and public policy implications of intellectual property laws as cows know algebra."
It doesn't seem to stop every self proclaimed expert here from spouting off their particular pet theory that coiincidentally justifies their eMule use, nevertheless.
it's about allowing the labels to manipulate public perception of value through pricing.
Oh stop it already. We're used to Economics-101 ignorant, occasionally semi-tongue-in-cheek-I-hope paranoioa from slashdot, but this is really too much.
Economics 101:
Any time you as a seller of a good price an item at other than a profit-maximizing value, your profit decreases. This is true regardless of whether the item is a luxury good or a commodity. Or, in other words: while the labels might be able to use the mechanism as the headline naively suggests they might, this would be generally just as against the label's own interest as taking the latest blockbuster movie and shoving it straight into the 99c VHS bin would be.
The real fact of the matter, from anybody who has taken economics, is to recognize that truly fluid, market-driven pricing is a great thing for buyers (taken as a whole) as well as sellers. I applaud any news of this being the case as should any and all readers here.
By the way, I likewise finally doing away with the idiotic ways agencies sell tickets to sporting events. The prices of those too, or at least sure-to-be-sold-out-at-current-prices events, should be sold in some kind of auction system to ensure a) maximal profits for the sellers and b) fair availability for those willing to pay. In other words, in market terms, a win-win.
Anybody who thinks of replying to my post and ranting about how tickets are a finite resource whieras digital music is not is ignorant and should save their breath. This is irrelevant to the basic economic argument I am making here.
This has (or at least should have) nothing to do with any naive or good hearted attempt to give the artists a 'fair deal.' Rather, this is (should be) an economic gamble by the publisher, pure and simple. The publisher wants to attract the best talent to his small company, so he offers the talent a better agreement than the talent could get elsewhere.
This is basic market economics at work here - supply and demand. Likewise, in the music industry, there is an overabundance of acts willing to sign on the dotted line with record companies to contracts which many underinformed idiots on slashdot somehow believe to be "unfair to the artist." What's especially funny-in-a-sad-way is how many idiots whine about the RIAA "monopoly" and how the RIAA are just "do-nothing middlemen" while using the internet, the greatest enabler of self publishing and theoretical alternative to middlemen the world has ever seen.
In terms of pure market principles, legality and morality aside, choosing to pirate a song rather than buy one (especially one that is less functional, being DRMed) is a perfectly normal and sound market decision
This is why, like it or not, it is the role of the government (or at least the legal system) to come down and come down HARD on those who choose to pirate. You're right - in the absence of any realistic chance of punishment, we can expect rational homo economus to make the rational decision to pirate. So, the answer, much to the dismay of many (most?) slashdotters, is simply that the cost of piracy must be made more expensive than the cost of coming to a true market-driven solution.
by that same standard, you can find plenty of equally skilled foreign college students willing to work for $2 an hour. I am on a business trip now in eastern europe. lord knows there are plenty of responsible college students here who would do the scanning work for 1/5th the price or less. the savings would eaisly pay for adequate supervision and shipment as necessary.
No, i'm operatnig under the assumption that it's far less expensive to to the transfer and pay for the necessary oversight, given the number of books invoved. those hourly costs very quickly get very expensive.
I am not saying send them to a random person with a scanner. However, this can be done competently.
Send the scans to india or eastern europe to be scanned for a fraction of the price. I mean really. This seems to be a serious operation - why not maximize the use of available resources? Spending $10/hr on scanning is just dumb.
Slashdot Mirror
Totally misunderstood you? You went from a bizzarrely incorrect argument that it's more expensive to deliver something via pirate means than through legitimate means and now have backpeddled this via not-so-clever verbal gymnastics into a much weaker contention that i somehow claimed that there are no drawbacks associated with content distribution. For that assinine comment alone, you get a hearty *PLONK*.
Nice try as well for attmepting to claim somehow that software protection is not DRM. Way to go, champ.
Returning to the real world: does the use of a lock on the front door of your house "prevent" thieves from coming in and stealing things? no... it simply reduces the likelihood of them doing so. Should you go on holiday, and one thief breaks the lock, all subsequent theives can steal whatever stuff the previous theif left, right?
Ah - but what if you don't go on holiday? What if you come home every night and change the lock, regardless of whether or not it was broken or not? Yes, a thief might break it one day and get some stuff, but he won't be able to come back the next day unless he goes through the same laborious process.
Your "real world" point misses a very real reality: that "stopping" piracy is about reducing the rate of infringement. To give you some idea: the existence of spyware and trojans reduces the rate of software piracy. Why? because people who have been burned who aren't technically savvy begin to associate, say, eMule with "the place where I got spyware from last time because I downloaded keygen.exe" A business guy who 4 years ago could just do a google search for "newprogram serialz" for an algorithmically passing serial number now has to contend with either a more complicated crack or some other mechanism - including ones that cleverly claim to be a successful unlock and then report back to the company the IP address, etc of the infringer for the basic purpose of making a civil claim against his company. All these things CAN and DO help. Your philosophical result is true in only some ideal sense.
The "war" against copyright infringement is like a war of your hands vs bacteria. neither side ever wins unless one side just gives up, but it *is* possible to be cleaner or dirtier than another, depending on how often you clean and where you stick your hands in the first place.
Secondly, content holders will still have the advantage over copyright infringers, because legal content distribution is always cheaper than illegal content distribution. There is a not insignificant cost to distributing content illegally; in the form of lawsuits (multiply probability of being caught by the average amount of money they'll fine you), in the form of decentralisation inefficiencies, in the form of anonymising algorithms that put security over speed, in the form of usability. A content holder can provide a better service than illegal competitors; people will pay for this.
This is comedy gold. Do you even believe or read what you are writing? While your last sentence above is true, the rest is not worthy of a response.
Courtney Love offers some options on the matter. She appears to be of the opinion that most artists make little enough money off the music that they might as well be giving it away for free, DRM or no.
Sigh. Oft debunked nonsense (well, she overexaggerated greatly). But even if it were 100% true, it misses the point - if you dont like the deal, DONT SIGN ON THE DOTTED LINE. The internet offers myriads of ways for self publishing - why not use them?
I think that you are completely wrong on #1 and probably only very marginally correct on #2, but #1 negates this (I am in the software business and know as a 100%, indisputable fact that the DRM that we put on our products increases sales and decreases piracy.)
Anyway, let's ignore this for a moment. Now I ask you this: hopefully as I write to you you are an intelligent person who recognizes the social good of a limited copyright and general intellectual property protection for creators and rightsholders as a Good Thing and NOT some "abolish all copyright now" idiot.
Now, putting aside all your marginal thoughts and objections to issues relating to, for example length of copyright duration, let me ask you this simple question: what should rightsholders currently do to protect their legal rights and economic well-being, given an ever-more pervasive culture on the internet that basically condones piracy.
Please answer the question from their standpoint, taking into consideration both a large and small rightsholding entity (individual, company, whatever).
I dare you (and any other reader) to come up with a plausible, workable solution that involves neither of economic suicide, economic fantasy ("give away the music but sell T-shirts / concert tickets"), legal action against infringers, or DRM.
Infringement no more obsoletes a business model than guns obsolete banks.
What's good about DRM? Well, that's like saying "what's good about seat belts? they keep you from moving about as you might otherwise like." The point is that NOBODY likes DRM. I'm sure the labels wish they didnt have to play the stupid, expensive, headache-filled games of reducing the RATE (not absolute, but the *** RATE *** of copyright infringement by playing technological cat and mouse), but the fact is that the reason that it has that way is NOT because of the labels, but rather because the technical and social geniuses of the internet, who keep reminding us of how they are far more honest, englightened, visionary, and fair than the lawyers, politicians, businesspeople, windows users, and everybody else of the world have basically devleoped a complete culture (complete with phony gods, pseudo-intellectuals, questionable economics, self-serving philosophies, blatantly enabling tools, etc) basically centered around justifying their own copy infringement.
case in point: mention something like "wouldn't it be nice if the same intellectual creativity that goes into finding ways to circumvent rightful copyright holders' attempting to clamp down on illegal infringement of their works actually went into protecting it, instead" and you'll just get an earful about the evil RIAA this, bullshiat "abolish all copyright" idiot philosophy that, the mickey-mouse-copyrigt-extension-justifies-my-downl oading-this-video-that, and so forth.
The fact of the matter is that the problem is AT LEAST 50% caused by the attitude that has come about here. So.. what is good about DRM? Not a hell of a lot. But don't blame the labels entirely - blame it on the millions of willfully infringing users who have nececcitated it.
Only on slashdot will you find posts so naive and ignorant, and yet so brazen about it.
That was supposed to be ironic / funny. Alas, the fact is that gimp sucks compared to commercial offerings and is a major black eye for proponents of F/OSS.
Face it, folks. Linux is a general purpose operating system on which you can do all of the expected things that one can do with such. We are WELL past the time where you can do basic things, like program and use webcams, on Linux, and nobody reading slashdot really needs to be fluffed further in this respect.
As far as this story goes, unless the inventors did something that could more or less only have been done on linux, then the linux aspect of this story is irrelevant.
Moderators: be very ashamed.
The goal of anti piracy measures is not (realistically) to eliminate all piracy. Rather, it's to make piracy a relative hassle so that more people will stay clear of it.
For EVERY anti-piracy mechanism there will be some workaround - be it a rename, a magic marker, a shift key, a crack, a patch, or whatever. That's not the point. The point is that the more of a pain or the more specific knowledge it takes to do such a workaround, statistically fewer people will do it. Every fake file, threat of lawsuit, etc is an attempt to curb the RATE of piracy, not some idyllic attempt to eliminate it altogether.
The lesson from that adventure was basically that there are a lot of people here with convenient ethics.
Oh come on. Given all the ingenuity that is put into circumventing controls, a bit can be put into enforcing community support against piracy. Just as a 10-second idea, how about something akin to a reputation system, where certain users are given weight for correctly identifying copyrighted works and gain, for example, download credit for doing so? Yes, this is not a complete or well thought out idea, but my point is that certainly something can be thought up. There would even be a system of punishing those who introduce offending files into the system and so forth.
However, let's put things in perspective. What is *really* the bigger problem right now - a few (even a few thousand), bad yes, abuses of the DMCA or the completely out of control wanton disregard for copyright law that exists in many internet corners? The defenders of P2P for LEGITIMATE use lose their credibility if they are not equally realistic and aggressive in condemning and thinking of ways to stop illegitimate use.
Yelling "lalalalalalalala" at the top of your voice in order to prevent others from being heard is not free speech.
The article states that was basically what people were doing - NOT simply writing negative reviews, but basically using amazon tricks to ensure that any 'real' reviews would be lost in the noise. RTFA.
from what i understood, people were doing things like causing the book to be effectively linked to gay erotica on amazon. that's not "filing a review". RTFA.
1. Jerk writes book.
2. People who hate the jerk play underhanded amazon tricks to sabotage book on Amazon.com
3. Jerk complains to amazon that such tricks are clearly against amazon's rules and asks amazon to remove the offending material, which amazon does poorly or incompletently.
I expected the mesasgeboards there to be filled with "I disagree with what Jerk says, but I respect his right to say it in a fair way", instead it is full of Vigilante Logic such as pointing to Jerk's supposed jerk activities in a vein of "two wrongs make a right" logic criticizing the guy for asking for amazon to play by its own rules.
Sad.
wow. I don't know whether to call you cynical or simply naive.
Instead of defending lawyers and politicians, let me beat you with the other end of the stick: if what you say is true, why do so many people on slashdot exhibit such a complete basic grasp of the most fundamental economic concepts? It is not because (mostly, anyway) that the slashdotters are stupid. Rather, it is because they try to basically invent things on an ad-hoc basis and end up reasoning out of their ass with poorly thought out and quite often self-serving arguments.
In other words, if you are accusing that easy boogieman of 'lawyers of politicians' of being intellectualy lazy or dishonest, pot, meet kettle.
Perhaps not, but every day we see effectively an important analog: technologists creating products that have the effect of executing policy despite a lack of respect for or training in underlying law, policy, or economics.
In slashdot, many people have bizarre notion that the guy who wired the atom bomb therefore becomes an expert on its use. While in practice we give a sort of respect and listen to the voices to those who invented it (the einsteins and bohrs of the world), but in practice we elect presidents and legislatures to decide when to use them.
Oh wait - did I say atom bomb? I meant p2p services / cryptography / intellectual property / etc. In that case, the attitude seems to be "f*** that, it's mine - i can do what I want, and if they try to stop me i'll ( build unstoppable v2 / ignore them / claim that they are all corrupt overpaid idiots / etc. }" Of course, p2p is not an atom bomb, but it does have many policy and law implications.
Because as anybody with a brain will tell you, the music industry doesn't work that way. There are no loss leaders in music for reasons that are so obvious I feel silly even mentioning them inlcuding that artists are not subsitutes for each other, there is no such thing as an 'entry level' album akin to an A-class mercedes (since you cant know in advance whether an artists first or 5th album will be his best), there is no such thing for all practical purposes as 'label loyalty' akin to brand loyalty, and that music is a perceived value good - why should i pay $20 for x's 2nd album when I paid $5 for the first?
You should be embarassed that you even brought up 'loss leaders' in this context.
As far as the other responders to my post go: I wish I had the time to respond to all the bullshit that has been flung my way. People claiming that basic economics dont apply, for example, because the RIAA companies are an evil monopoly (neither half of that argument - that the economics dont apply and that they can act efficiently as an oligopoly are true) are so full of shiat it is unbelievable. Alas, I will have to simply ignore them for now, since I do not have the time to reply properly.
It doesn't seem to stop every self proclaimed expert here from spouting off their particular pet theory that coiincidentally justifies their eMule use, nevertheless.
Oh stop it already. We're used to Economics-101 ignorant, occasionally semi-tongue-in-cheek-I-hope paranoioa from slashdot, but this is really too much.
Economics 101:
Any time you as a seller of a good price an item at other than a profit-maximizing value, your profit decreases. This is true regardless of whether the item is a luxury good or a commodity. Or, in other words: while the labels might be able to use the mechanism as the headline naively suggests they might, this would be generally just as against the label's own interest as taking the latest blockbuster movie and shoving it straight into the 99c VHS bin would be.
The real fact of the matter, from anybody who has taken economics, is to recognize that truly fluid, market-driven pricing is a great thing for buyers (taken as a whole) as well as sellers. I applaud any news of this being the case as should any and all readers here.
By the way, I likewise finally doing away with the idiotic ways agencies sell tickets to sporting events. The prices of those too, or at least sure-to-be-sold-out-at-current-prices events, should be sold in some kind of auction system to ensure a) maximal profits for the sellers and b) fair availability for those willing to pay. In other words, in market terms, a win-win.
Anybody who thinks of replying to my post and ranting about how tickets are a finite resource whieras digital music is not is ignorant and should save their breath. This is irrelevant to the basic economic argument I am making here.
This is basic market economics at work here - supply and demand. Likewise, in the music industry, there is an overabundance of acts willing to sign on the dotted line with record companies to contracts which many underinformed idiots on slashdot somehow believe to be "unfair to the artist." What's especially funny-in-a-sad-way is how many idiots whine about the RIAA "monopoly" and how the RIAA are just "do-nothing middlemen" while using the internet, the greatest enabler of self publishing and theoretical alternative to middlemen the world has ever seen.
This is why, like it or not, it is the role of the government (or at least the legal system) to come down and come down HARD on those who choose to pirate. You're right - in the absence of any realistic chance of punishment, we can expect rational homo economus to make the rational decision to pirate. So, the answer, much to the dismay of many (most?) slashdotters, is simply that the cost of piracy must be made more expensive than the cost of coming to a true market-driven solution.
by that same standard, you can find plenty of equally skilled foreign college students willing to work for $2 an hour. I am on a business trip now in eastern europe. lord knows there are plenty of responsible college students here who would do the scanning work for 1/5th the price or less. the savings would eaisly pay for adequate supervision and shipment as necessary.
I am not saying send them to a random person with a scanner. However, this can be done competently.
Send the scans to india or eastern europe to be scanned for a fraction of the price. I mean really. This seems to be a serious operation - why not maximize the use of available resources? Spending $10/hr on scanning is just dumb.