The states are trying to maximize their tax revenue.
By taxing online purchases, they're raising the final cost to the consumer of the product. There will be a certain number of consumers (the marginal consumers, if you will) who will determine the total price to them too high, and thus will not make the purchase.
Granted, one cannot calculate out the total numbers, but it's likely that the revenues these states expect to gain from this additional taxation may not be at the levels they estimated, and we may be better off as a nation in a time of economic recovery to be stimulating the economy through these additional purchases.
CNN has always done this. I work in Atlanta, and my company was given a tour of CNN/Turner's online operations. Their home-grown content management system allows for them to change the template for the front page and republish, so whenever they see major traffic spikes, they pull out images, ads, and dynamic content and revert to a very streamlined front page.
SunONE Identity Server 6.0 is the Netscape/iPlanet/SunONE Directory Server (LDAP directory) renamed. It's becoming more than just a directory server, since it becomes an identity and policy management server.
"How can you justify piracy when so few titles break even on their development costs?"
Economically speaking, if they weren't breaking even, they wouldn't be doing it. If companies consistantly lose money through an activity, they will stop performing that activity.
There *is* a difference, though. When you steal a physical good, that good is relatively scarce (in the overall system). If you steal a car, that's one less car that can exist (given a finite amount of steel, plastic, etc.).
An infinite number of people could pirate software, and you wouldn't "run out" of it.
I'm not making any judgements about the relative rightness or wrongness of these two types of crimes, but trying to stay they're not different is just not correct.
Slashdot Mirror
One could also look at this another way:
The states are trying to maximize their tax revenue.
By taxing online purchases, they're raising the final cost to the consumer of the product. There will be a certain number of consumers (the marginal consumers, if you will) who will determine the total price to them too high, and thus will not make the purchase.
Granted, one cannot calculate out the total numbers, but it's likely that the revenues these states expect to gain from this additional taxation may not be at the levels they estimated, and we may be better off as a nation in a time of economic recovery to be stimulating the economy through these additional purchases.
Just a thought.
CNN has always done this. I work in Atlanta, and my company was given a tour of CNN/Turner's online operations. Their home-grown content management system allows for them to change the template for the front page and republish, so whenever they see major traffic spikes, they pull out images, ads, and dynamic content and revert to a very streamlined front page.
Chris
SunONE Identity Server 6.0 is the Netscape/iPlanet/SunONE Directory Server (LDAP directory) renamed. It's becoming more than just a directory server, since it becomes an identity and policy management server.
Chris
"How can you justify piracy when so few titles break even on their development costs?"
Economically speaking, if they weren't breaking even, they wouldn't be doing it. If companies consistantly lose money through an activity, they will stop performing that activity.
There *is* a difference, though. When you steal a physical good, that good is relatively scarce (in the overall system). If you steal a car, that's one less car that can exist (given a finite amount of steel, plastic, etc.).
An infinite number of people could pirate software, and you wouldn't "run out" of it.
I'm not making any judgements about the relative rightness or wrongness of these two types of crimes, but trying to stay they're not different is just not correct.