you believe that all they should be able to charge for the game is the cost to press the disks.
No, disks are not economically abundant goods. They cost >$0 to press because physical resources are expended making the disks. An internet download, on the other hand, expends no physical resources and costs almost nothing to transmit.
And do tell where you can higher people to mow lawns for $5 an hour, the companies here cost much closer to $25
Thanks for the correction. You do realize this only helps my argument, right? In this case, the standard wage for one hour of work multiplied by the 500x markup Trism is using is $12,500 instead of my original apparently gross underestimate of $2,500.
I did not say $0 x 1 = $0.01, I said 1 cent is the lowest you can set a price before making it free. Thus, 1 cent is the basis for my markup calculation.
You can't use zero, because $0 x anything is $0, so if you're contending that there's zero markup on a $5 app, I'd call that a pretty ridiculous statement. But I don't want to put words in your mouth, so I'll simply ask how would you calculate the markup?
The market may not care about my ethics right now, but inevitably some day it will. Obviously most people aren't going to be thinking in terms of whether or not artificial scarcity is ethical. What's going to happen is people are going to prefer the free download over p2p venues rather than the not free download from things like the App Store as is the case right now with Bit Torrent vs. the iTunes Music store. It's just simple competition. You can't compete with free, and less and less people are finding p2p unethical. Because it isn't.
As for convenience, piracy is pretty convenient and getting more convenient all the time. Really what prevents the critical mass necessary to abolish artificial scarcity is a highly sophisticated anti piracy marketing campaign put out by big content shaming us all into thinking p2p is somehow unethical. Remember: it isn't. It's not our responsibility to subsidize obsolete business models.
You are in deep denial about where this is all headed. Your argument assumes that the percentage of users of your iPhone applications who are pirates will not rise and that the percentage of people will not find piracy unethical will also not rise. Both are rising right now and will continue to do so until artificial scarcity is unsustainable.
I was wondering how you arrived at your odd conclusion that there was a 500% markup on what you maintain is a cost of zero. In that case of course, the markup was infinite. So then I figured you were just an idiot.
No, 500% markup would be 5 cents.
Let's walk through it. 100% of 1 cent is 1 cent. 200% of 1 cent is 2 cents. 500% of 1 cent is 5 cents. 1,000% of 1 cent is 10 cents. 10,000% of 1 cent is 100 cents, or $1. 50,000% of 1 cent is 500 cents, or $5.
Actually, I like your percent approach better. 50,000% markup sounds a hell of a lot more heinous than "marked up 500 times." Thanks.:)
I don't appreciate the ad hominem though.:(
The minimum price you can set (without making it free) is $.99.
I wasn't talking about the App Store's arbitrary limitations, I was talking about the minimum price anyone can set for anything before making it free. I suppose you could get into fractions of a cent, but I wanted to keep it simple.
Your argument is a red herring. Development costs should play no part in how a price is set. I might require only $20 an hour and 40 hours to develop something that would require you $40 an hour and 80 hours to develop the same thing. Thus development costs are arbitrary. Prices should only be set based on cost of reproduction plus a reasonable markup for profit. Nothing marked up hundreds of times is reasonable. It would be like me charging $2500 to mow your lawn. That's the standard $5 an hour wage normally paid for an hour of lawn mowing work times 500. So, it follows that any consumer cost is not an option for an economically abundant good, because a reasonable markup would only multiply out to a few cents. Thus, digital information should be monetized using a business model that doesn't depend on artificial scarcity. See this post for more substantiation and details.
How do you suggest he be compensated? He wrote the software with the expectation of at least some financial reward, and he hit the jackpot. What's fair, in your opinion?
A business model which doesn't depend on artificial scarcity. Many iPhone applications are free and use advertising as a business model. Another option is subscription services (this works well for games) in which you pay a recurring fee for the service of receiving a steady stream of new content (think MMORPGs). Merchandising is another option, though less relevant here.
The inevitable reply to this post is somebody whining "none of those are as profitable!" Okay, sure. But you must remember that artificial scarcity isn't a sustainable business model in the long term. If I want Trism, I can get it without paying for it with relative ease. Anything can be pirated, even iPhone apps.
There are only two things which stop people from pirating his game: 1. Ignorance of how to do this, something that will surely fade with time as piracy gets easier and easier, and 2. Guilt over piracy not compensating the author. The second one is a tougher nut to crack, but it's cracking.
The bottom line is artificial scarcity cannot be technologically enforced. Only legally enforced. So, unless Trism's author is willing to sue pirates like the RIAA, he's not going to be able to enforce his business model. Even the RIAA cannot enforce their business model to anywhere near 100% coverage, even with all their legal shenanigans.
And at the end of the day, it's not the consumer's responsibility to subsidize an obsolete business model. If this business model cannot be enforced without suing any customer who chooses to ignore it, it's obsolete. And as more and more people are beginning to realize this, reason #2, guilt, will go away too.
Once you have a culture that embraces p2p and rejects artificial scarcity, making any kind of money by charging a consumer for a digital download won't happen anymore. Monetization will have to be accomplished via one of the alternative business models I suggested, or one I've not thought up yet.
Stop being bitter and pulling numbers out of your ass.
I'll show you where the numbers come from.
The price of anything is determined by the cost of reproduction plus any additional markup. Software is digital information, and digital information has a marginal cost of reproduction of zero because copying digital information with a computer costs nothing.
So at $5, the price is entirely markup. None of that price is accounting for the cost of reproduction, because there is no such cost. So if the full price is pure markup, then it is valid to say that it is marked up 500 times, because $5 is 500 times one cent, the minimum price he could have set without making it free. (Incidentally, one cent would still be marked up one time higher than the cost to redistribute.)
No, actually. I know your comment is in jest, but Apple charges $100 for that "first hit" (the SDK). You have to pay them money for the privilege of developing an application they reserve the right to deny you the ability to distribute.
That CNN article is strongly biased. Consider this quote: "The overhead and barriers to entry [for iPhone development] are so low that virtually anyone can afford to take a crack."
Yeah, sure, compared to the ludicrousness of consoles. But how about PCs? Or even Mac OS X on anything other than an iPhone? The barrier to entry on any of those platforms is zero.
Also quoth the article: "The iPhone and the App Store have helped democratize game development by opening the field to any software coder."
Sure, yeah, a platform where you have to pay a fee to even be allowed to develop for it, then have all applications you make subject to Apple's approval for distribution is so democratic!
Also quoth the article: "It's also become a potential gold mine for entrepreneurs who create games for the device. Just ask Steve Demeter, developer of the popular puzzle game "Trism."... Priced at $5, "Trism" earned Demeter $250,000 in profits the first two months."
I continue to be astonished by how people consider getting rich off of digital downloads to be at all a good thing. I respectfully submit that anyone who makes hundreds of thousands of dollars for a few months of work "in their spare time" is being grossly overpaid. And when you really think about it, paying any price for a digital download is simply price gouging anyway, since the cost of reproduction is zero. That means at $5, Trism is marked up 500 times. No wonder he got so rich, huh?
people like Stallman stop begrudging others the right to make their own products and sell them.
Stallman doesn't do that, but I do.
Seriously, let's think about it a minute. I can make infinite copies of your software at zero cost and distribute them anywhere I want in perfect, digital quality for free. How can your $5 distribution cost possibly compete with my $0 distribution cost?
Sure, it's not fair to you, doing the work and all, but life isn't fair. If you want to make money, you're going to have find a business model that's actually enforceable. Because the digital information industry is fast realizing that p2p cannot be stopped and is becoming more and more prevalent every day.
> There will be people who want to keep credit for their work, people who want to make money off of their work, and they do not want to make money supporting their software.
Each and everyone of the above is possible with Free software too.
Really? Then why don't you tell Google to open source their Search software then, since it's clearly obvious that if they did that they'd continue to have a profitable business. Oh wait, they wouldn't. Google Search is free as in beer software for users paid for by advertising, which would not be possible if it were open source. They make their money by offering an unique service for advertisers which would cease to be unique the moment the source for their search engine gets deployed by another company.
You're right though, some open source projects have perfectly viable business models. But many other perfectly legitimate business models depend on an application being closed source. Sure, charging a price for software is ridiculous and unenforceable thanks to p2p, but keeping the source closed is perfectly enforceable and is a fine compromise between Stallman's impossible utopian technocracy and Microsoft's draconian gouge consumers fascism. The moderate compromise between these two philosophies is to develop primarily closed source, but free as in beer software for consumers in cases where open source won't work, like in the case of Google Search.
It's also possible space aliens have infiltrated MTV studios and are doing this to encourage us to fight amongst ourselves prior to a planned invasion. So what?
Maybe just a hunch, but I think the scenario I proposed is just a bit more likely.
Maybe, but it's also possible that MTV due to its close ties to the RIAA is strongly against the proliferation of p2p by any means. Assuming that this isn't in fact all one grand inside joke from Weird Al, it would be pretty consistent. Remember, this is the organization which spends millions of dollars on propaganda campaigns trying to stigmatize p2p, labeling it as piracy and such, trying to get it subconsciously associated pillaging cargo.
However, this moral campaign only gets as much traction as it does because people are ignorant and assume that artificial scarcity is the only business model capable of monetizing music. Seems to me, keeping people ignorant about competition (what programs do file sharing) is a lot like keeping people ignorant of alternative business models in general.
So in that sense, I think conservatives would support taxpayer funding for a "right to live" limited to food, clothing, very basic medical care, and shelter; provided that the person is doing their best to improve their own situation. In no way should we be taxing someone to pay someone else's cable TV bills though. A right to live does not equate to a right to live well on the public dole.
So you're saying that conservatives are for social programs in general, but disagree with the current implementation because they can be exploited. Can you tell me what sort of changes or replacement programs you, as a conservative, would favor?
So, you have to figure out how to advance in the game on your own and then do so in one continuous game. Make sure you don't turn off your iPhone, recharge it or receive an incoming call, otherwise you'll have to start from the beginning again... This has got to be a joke.
You can run apps while your phone is charging. And you can disable incoming calls by turning on airplane mode.
by using someone else's hardware and software to do your computing and store your data, you risk losing access to and control over said hardware and software resources, as well as your data.
Then run for the hills! Abandon your Slashdot account immediately because it's an evil web service that you can't control! Go run your own web server for your own IMAP email, or abandon IMAP entirely and use POP! Look, contrary to your condescending attitude, I understand Stallman's argument perfectly. And like plenty of other people, I happen to find Stallman's intentions good, but his conclusions so far from practical that he comes off sounding vaguely kooky.
The bottom line is it isn't in any web service operator's best interest from a business or a reputation standpoint to suddenly deny their customers access to the service and/or their data. Otherwise you get Slashdot stories like this one. On top of that, there are plenty of folks out there whose data is better in the hands of, say, GMail than their ISP provided POP email account because there are plenty of folks out there who don't know the first thing about keeping regular backups. GMail does this for them.
I, like most people, just don't buy Stallman's argument. For him to be correct, something apocalyptic would have to happen. And even if being that paranoid was legitimate, Stallman's solution of confining your computing to computers you own is so inconvenient that most people would sooner prefer to just lose some data. Even the folks unable to comprehend regular backups tend to store the really important data in multiple places anyway, such as in the cloud, in a text file somewhere, and on some good old fashioned paper too.
So while you're sticking your nose in the air waiting for that apocalyptic scenario to happen so you can join Stallman and the < 1% who agree with him in saying "I told you so!" so you can feel smarter than everyone, the rest of the world is going to carry on using web services. Because whatever negligible risks of data loss and even privacy invasion that exist are well worth the convenience.
The whole mentality here is that anybody can change the source of a project, submit it, and you never know what kind of compiled binary you're going to get.
If someone important in the IT department at my company said something as grossly fucking stupid as that, then one of two things would happen. I'd either get him fired, or I'd quit and go work for a company that hires qualified people.
Isn't this just the type of thing that Stallman was referring to not long ago?... it certainly goes to show . ..
Goes to show what? That using web services is "just as bad as using a proprietary program" as Stallman put it? Did you bother to think through Stallman's position? If he had his way, there'd be no GMail, no Flickr, hell, probably not even any Slashdot. Because you know, Slashdot's a web service. And by having personal information on a Slashdot account, well then you're just "putty in the hands of whoever developed that software."
Forget web services. Who needs them? "Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program." Sure, you won't have pesky things like modern, convenient services that the vast majority of the rest of the world seems to think are great, but at least you'll have the "freedom" (one could also say paranoia) to laugh at all those idiots for having the slightest faith and trust that their fellow men and women behind those services aren't working as agents of evil.
All the p2p venues I frequent do have ads, and I don't block them. Nor do most people. The simple fact of the matter is the benefit of not seeing ads isn't enough to justify the effort of blocking them in the first place.
Moreover, conventional adblocking techniques (such as the adblock firefox extension) are easily circumvented by web developers. So if ad blocking ever does become anywhere near as popular as p2p is today, you'll just see a sharp rise in ads being served with methods indistinguishable from content. Meaning, you would have to surf the web without images to black banner ads, without flash to block flash ads, and without javascript to block JS ads. On top of that, there'd be absolutely no means of blocking text-only ads. Even if Lynx was your only browser.
In short, ads will continue to be a sustainable business model. Consumer cost downloads will not. The bottom line is there is no mass consumer revolt against ads. There is one against paying for digital information. So your comparison is baseless.
As others have pointed out to you, my argument never contended that the demand for the content itself was diminishing. It contended that the demand for physical CDs, physical DVDs, and pay-downloads is diminished by p2p. Why pay for something when you don't have to?
In that sense, you're right, how the content is delivered is secondary. If my goal is to consume content, I'll pick the cheapest delivery mechanism possible. In this case, it's p2p. At least until the content owners decide to compete against it themselves by offering a free digital download.
But I'm not the one screwing over content creators. They do it to themselves by not seeing which way the wind is blowing. Do you think people are just going to magically stop being cheap some day? There are ways to work people like us into their business models. Legislating against p2p won't cut it. Only by competing against p2p on the free market by distributing their content just as free paid for by means of a non-consumer cost business model (ads, etc) will they ever monetize my large, growing constituency of cheap asses.
I am not ethically obligated to patronize an absurd, obsolete business model, and that's all there is too it.
Not me. My objection is to charging for something which can be reproduced ad infinitum at negligible cost in the first place. I refuse to pay for any kind of digital download, period. And until the laws get even more draconian or the content creators learn how to compete against the problem rather than legislate against it, I'm going to continue to circumvent their obsolete business model. Tough.
The industry has already offered music for free on the radio for decades, and they offer free singles to download all the time. If distributors attached ads to content to offset expenses, pirates would use that as another justification to pirate. People will invent any number of reasons to protect a free ride.
I've got news for you. Torrent sites have ads too.
Slashdot Mirror
No, disks are not economically abundant goods. They cost >$0 to press because physical resources are expended making the disks. An internet download, on the other hand, expends no physical resources and costs almost nothing to transmit.
Thanks for the correction. You do realize this only helps my argument, right? In this case, the standard wage for one hour of work multiplied by the 500x markup Trism is using is $12,500 instead of my original apparently gross underestimate of $2,500.
I did not say $0 x 1 = $0.01, I said 1 cent is the lowest you can set a price before making it free. Thus, 1 cent is the basis for my markup calculation.
You can't use zero, because $0 x anything is $0, so if you're contending that there's zero markup on a $5 app, I'd call that a pretty ridiculous statement. But I don't want to put words in your mouth, so I'll simply ask how would you calculate the markup?
The market may not care about my ethics right now, but inevitably some day it will. Obviously most people aren't going to be thinking in terms of whether or not artificial scarcity is ethical. What's going to happen is people are going to prefer the free download over p2p venues rather than the not free download from things like the App Store as is the case right now with Bit Torrent vs. the iTunes Music store. It's just simple competition. You can't compete with free, and less and less people are finding p2p unethical. Because it isn't.
As for convenience, piracy is pretty convenient and getting more convenient all the time. Really what prevents the critical mass necessary to abolish artificial scarcity is a highly sophisticated anti piracy marketing campaign put out by big content shaming us all into thinking p2p is somehow unethical. Remember: it isn't. It's not our responsibility to subsidize obsolete business models.
You are in deep denial about where this is all headed. Your argument assumes that the percentage of users of your iPhone applications who are pirates will not rise and that the percentage of people will not find piracy unethical will also not rise. Both are rising right now and will continue to do so until artificial scarcity is unsustainable.
No, 500% markup would be 5 cents.
Let's walk through it. 100% of 1 cent is 1 cent. 200% of 1 cent is 2 cents. 500% of 1 cent is 5 cents. 1,000% of 1 cent is 10 cents. 10,000% of 1 cent is 100 cents, or $1. 50,000% of 1 cent is 500 cents, or $5.
Actually, I like your percent approach better. 50,000% markup sounds a hell of a lot more heinous than "marked up 500 times." Thanks. :)
I don't appreciate the ad hominem though. :(
I wasn't talking about the App Store's arbitrary limitations, I was talking about the minimum price anyone can set for anything before making it free. I suppose you could get into fractions of a cent, but I wanted to keep it simple.
I've addressed that argument here. And ad hominems are immature.
Your argument is a red herring. Development costs should play no part in how a price is set. I might require only $20 an hour and 40 hours to develop something that would require you $40 an hour and 80 hours to develop the same thing. Thus development costs are arbitrary. Prices should only be set based on cost of reproduction plus a reasonable markup for profit. Nothing marked up hundreds of times is reasonable. It would be like me charging $2500 to mow your lawn. That's the standard $5 an hour wage normally paid for an hour of lawn mowing work times 500. So, it follows that any consumer cost is not an option for an economically abundant good, because a reasonable markup would only multiply out to a few cents. Thus, digital information should be monetized using a business model that doesn't depend on artificial scarcity. See this post for more substantiation and details.
A business model which doesn't depend on artificial scarcity. Many iPhone applications are free and use advertising as a business model. Another option is subscription services (this works well for games) in which you pay a recurring fee for the service of receiving a steady stream of new content (think MMORPGs). Merchandising is another option, though less relevant here.
The inevitable reply to this post is somebody whining "none of those are as profitable!" Okay, sure. But you must remember that artificial scarcity isn't a sustainable business model in the long term. If I want Trism, I can get it without paying for it with relative ease. Anything can be pirated, even iPhone apps.
There are only two things which stop people from pirating his game: 1. Ignorance of how to do this, something that will surely fade with time as piracy gets easier and easier, and 2. Guilt over piracy not compensating the author. The second one is a tougher nut to crack, but it's cracking.
The bottom line is artificial scarcity cannot be technologically enforced. Only legally enforced. So, unless Trism's author is willing to sue pirates like the RIAA, he's not going to be able to enforce his business model. Even the RIAA cannot enforce their business model to anywhere near 100% coverage, even with all their legal shenanigans.
And at the end of the day, it's not the consumer's responsibility to subsidize an obsolete business model. If this business model cannot be enforced without suing any customer who chooses to ignore it, it's obsolete. And as more and more people are beginning to realize this, reason #2, guilt, will go away too.
Once you have a culture that embraces p2p and rejects artificial scarcity, making any kind of money by charging a consumer for a digital download won't happen anymore. Monetization will have to be accomplished via one of the alternative business models I suggested, or one I've not thought up yet.
I'll show you where the numbers come from.
The price of anything is determined by the cost of reproduction plus any additional markup. Software is digital information, and digital information has a marginal cost of reproduction of zero because copying digital information with a computer costs nothing.
So at $5, the price is entirely markup. None of that price is accounting for the cost of reproduction, because there is no such cost. So if the full price is pure markup, then it is valid to say that it is marked up 500 times, because $5 is 500 times one cent, the minimum price he could have set without making it free. (Incidentally, one cent would still be marked up one time higher than the cost to redistribute.)
No, actually. I know your comment is in jest, but Apple charges $100 for that "first hit" (the SDK). You have to pay them money for the privilege of developing an application they reserve the right to deny you the ability to distribute.
That CNN article is strongly biased. Consider this quote: "The overhead and barriers to entry [for iPhone development] are so low that virtually anyone can afford to take a crack."
Yeah, sure, compared to the ludicrousness of consoles. But how about PCs? Or even Mac OS X on anything other than an iPhone? The barrier to entry on any of those platforms is zero.
Also quoth the article: "The iPhone and the App Store have helped democratize game development by opening the field to any software coder."
Sure, yeah, a platform where you have to pay a fee to even be allowed to develop for it, then have all applications you make subject to Apple's approval for distribution is so democratic!
Also quoth the article: "It's also become a potential gold mine for entrepreneurs who create games for the device. Just ask Steve Demeter, developer of the popular puzzle game "Trism." ... Priced at $5, "Trism" earned Demeter $250,000 in profits the first two months."
I continue to be astonished by how people consider getting rich off of digital downloads to be at all a good thing. I respectfully submit that anyone who makes hundreds of thousands of dollars for a few months of work "in their spare time" is being grossly overpaid. And when you really think about it, paying any price for a digital download is simply price gouging anyway, since the cost of reproduction is zero. That means at $5, Trism is marked up 500 times. No wonder he got so rich, huh?
Stallman doesn't do that, but I do.
Seriously, let's think about it a minute. I can make infinite copies of your software at zero cost and distribute them anywhere I want in perfect, digital quality for free. How can your $5 distribution cost possibly compete with my $0 distribution cost?
Sure, it's not fair to you, doing the work and all, but life isn't fair. If you want to make money, you're going to have find a business model that's actually enforceable. Because the digital information industry is fast realizing that p2p cannot be stopped and is becoming more and more prevalent every day.
Really? Then why don't you tell Google to open source their Search software then, since it's clearly obvious that if they did that they'd continue to have a profitable business. Oh wait, they wouldn't. Google Search is free as in beer software for users paid for by advertising, which would not be possible if it were open source. They make their money by offering an unique service for advertisers which would cease to be unique the moment the source for their search engine gets deployed by another company.
You're right though, some open source projects have perfectly viable business models. But many other perfectly legitimate business models depend on an application being closed source. Sure, charging a price for software is ridiculous and unenforceable thanks to p2p, but keeping the source closed is perfectly enforceable and is a fine compromise between Stallman's impossible utopian technocracy and Microsoft's draconian gouge consumers fascism. The moderate compromise between these two philosophies is to develop primarily closed source, but free as in beer software for consumers in cases where open source won't work, like in the case of Google Search.
Maybe just a hunch, but I think the scenario I proposed is just a bit more likely.
Maybe, but it's also possible that MTV due to its close ties to the RIAA is strongly against the proliferation of p2p by any means. Assuming that this isn't in fact all one grand inside joke from Weird Al, it would be pretty consistent. Remember, this is the organization which spends millions of dollars on propaganda campaigns trying to stigmatize p2p, labeling it as piracy and such, trying to get it subconsciously associated pillaging cargo.
However, this moral campaign only gets as much traction as it does because people are ignorant and assume that artificial scarcity is the only business model capable of monetizing music. Seems to me, keeping people ignorant about competition (what programs do file sharing) is a lot like keeping people ignorant of alternative business models in general.
So you're saying that conservatives are for social programs in general, but disagree with the current implementation because they can be exploited. Can you tell me what sort of changes or replacement programs you, as a conservative, would favor?
You can run apps while your phone is charging. And you can disable incoming calls by turning on airplane mode.
Then run for the hills! Abandon your Slashdot account immediately because it's an evil web service that you can't control! Go run your own web server for your own IMAP email, or abandon IMAP entirely and use POP! Look, contrary to your condescending attitude, I understand Stallman's argument perfectly. And like plenty of other people, I happen to find Stallman's intentions good, but his conclusions so far from practical that he comes off sounding vaguely kooky.
The bottom line is it isn't in any web service operator's best interest from a business or a reputation standpoint to suddenly deny their customers access to the service and/or their data. Otherwise you get Slashdot stories like this one. On top of that, there are plenty of folks out there whose data is better in the hands of, say, GMail than their ISP provided POP email account because there are plenty of folks out there who don't know the first thing about keeping regular backups. GMail does this for them.
I, like most people, just don't buy Stallman's argument. For him to be correct, something apocalyptic would have to happen. And even if being that paranoid was legitimate, Stallman's solution of confining your computing to computers you own is so inconvenient that most people would sooner prefer to just lose some data. Even the folks unable to comprehend regular backups tend to store the really important data in multiple places anyway, such as in the cloud, in a text file somewhere, and on some good old fashioned paper too.
So while you're sticking your nose in the air waiting for that apocalyptic scenario to happen so you can join Stallman and the < 1% who agree with him in saying "I told you so!" so you can feel smarter than everyone, the rest of the world is going to carry on using web services. Because whatever negligible risks of data loss and even privacy invasion that exist are well worth the convenience.
I'm inclined to agree.
If someone important in the IT department at my company said something as grossly fucking stupid as that, then one of two things would happen. I'd either get him fired, or I'd quit and go work for a company that hires qualified people.
Goes to show what? That using web services is "just as bad as using a proprietary program" as Stallman put it? Did you bother to think through Stallman's position? If he had his way, there'd be no GMail, no Flickr, hell, probably not even any Slashdot. Because you know, Slashdot's a web service. And by having personal information on a Slashdot account, well then you're just "putty in the hands of whoever developed that software."
Forget web services. Who needs them? "Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program." Sure, you won't have pesky things like modern, convenient services that the vast majority of the rest of the world seems to think are great, but at least you'll have the "freedom" (one could also say paranoia) to laugh at all those idiots for having the slightest faith and trust that their fellow men and women behind those services aren't working as agents of evil.
Ad blocking and p2p are apples and oranges.
All the p2p venues I frequent do have ads, and I don't block them. Nor do most people. The simple fact of the matter is the benefit of not seeing ads isn't enough to justify the effort of blocking them in the first place.
Moreover, conventional adblocking techniques (such as the adblock firefox extension) are easily circumvented by web developers. So if ad blocking ever does become anywhere near as popular as p2p is today, you'll just see a sharp rise in ads being served with methods indistinguishable from content. Meaning, you would have to surf the web without images to black banner ads, without flash to block flash ads, and without javascript to block JS ads. On top of that, there'd be absolutely no means of blocking text-only ads. Even if Lynx was your only browser.
In short, ads will continue to be a sustainable business model. Consumer cost downloads will not. The bottom line is there is no mass consumer revolt against ads. There is one against paying for digital information. So your comparison is baseless.
As others have pointed out to you, my argument never contended that the demand for the content itself was diminishing. It contended that the demand for physical CDs, physical DVDs, and pay-downloads is diminished by p2p. Why pay for something when you don't have to?
In that sense, you're right, how the content is delivered is secondary. If my goal is to consume content, I'll pick the cheapest delivery mechanism possible. In this case, it's p2p. At least until the content owners decide to compete against it themselves by offering a free digital download.
Yep, I'm cheap.
But I'm not the one screwing over content creators. They do it to themselves by not seeing which way the wind is blowing. Do you think people are just going to magically stop being cheap some day? There are ways to work people like us into their business models. Legislating against p2p won't cut it. Only by competing against p2p on the free market by distributing their content just as free paid for by means of a non-consumer cost business model (ads, etc) will they ever monetize my large, growing constituency of cheap asses.
I am not ethically obligated to patronize an absurd, obsolete business model, and that's all there is too it.
Not me. My objection is to charging for something which can be reproduced ad infinitum at negligible cost in the first place. I refuse to pay for any kind of digital download, period. And until the laws get even more draconian or the content creators learn how to compete against the problem rather than legislate against it, I'm going to continue to circumvent their obsolete business model. Tough.
I've got news for you. Torrent sites have ads too.