A company that targets a niche market may have less opportunities to make lots of money than one that targets the mass market.
And there may be more opportunities to make lots of money. Corel was targetting both M$Windows (mass) and Linux (niche).
Obviously this is not always true. However, it is going to be a serious consideration for some companies when choosing a platform/market/whatever.
That's a one-sided way of looking at it. Mass, commodity markets have more and bigger competitors. Niche markets, by definition, have less. Thus making any generalisations about whether niche and/or mass markets may [not] be profitable meaningless.
Sometimes it's profitable to target a niche, sometimes it isn't. Sometimes it's profitable to get a slice of the mass market, sometimes it isn't. It all depends on the individual circumstances.
Disclaimer: I use a Mac daily and certainly appreciate niche markets. But the fact remains that a product catering to a niche may not always be as profitable.
And it may well be very profitable. All businesses start as niche businesses. A business can fail chasing a mass market or chasing a niche market.
Linksys/cisco embrace the whole "DIY" crowd and have produced a "WRT54GL" with the full amount of ram and flash so that linux hackers can do their thing. They made it difficult to flash the VXWorks one because too many idiots would try and flash a 4mb image on it and brick it, causing support headaches.
No, it would've been easy for the flash software to abort with an informative error message if somebody attempted to burn the wrong image. No need to make flashing difficult in general.
---
Scientific, evidence based IP law. Now there's a thought.
Makes sense, but I think you're under-estimating the ability of the average person to mix process and content. e.g. One person might regard an "Ayn Rand" quote as a brilliant and interesting argument point and hence mod it up. Another might regard exactly the same article as a trollish quote from a thoroughly discredited author and mod it down. Both would argue they're modding to improve the process, and not based on content. Point is, content can always be regarded as process if you look at it the right way. Meta-mod's have the same problem.
I think the best that you can do is encourage people to use the mod system fairly, appeal to their honor and evict the vandals as fast as possible.
---
Any clod can have the facts. Having opinions is an art. -- Charles McCabe.
Fortunately, I suspect this happens very infrequently.
"I suspect" is not adequate basis for law that causes as much interference in the citizen's business as patents.
Patents are badly broken, everything from completely ignoring multiple, simultaneous invention to ignoring inventions "whose time has come" to ignoring whether an invention requires significant investment (and thus worth blocking billions of people from using it for 20 years) to ignoring the fact that large classes of ideas don't have protection and work just fine (e.g. after careful research I open a business in a particular area - there is nothing to stop somebody else opening a similar business right next door) to completely arbitrary categories saying one thing is different from another (meaning some anonymous, non-inventive bureaucrat gets to decide whether somebody is really being inventive) to etc.
Patents as currently defined are basically meaningless as an indicator of inventiveness, they have very little basis in physical reality or actual thought and are just arbitrary tools for assorted lowlife to parasitise those around them.
Competition in a completely free market without IP protection means that every gizmo invented in the US will be duplicated in some other country for a tenth of the cost. Is that what you want?
Given that the US is less than 5% of the world's population and the US could copy what the other 95% of the world is inventing you're just fear mongering.
I would actually support law that promoted intellectual effort in limited ways but the system we've got currently is atrocious, with the justification for massive interference in the citizen's business being little more than hand waving.
---
Scientific, evidence based IP law. Now there's a thought.
In general, the current mod system tends to reward those who think thoughts agreeable to the majority of moderators;
It is impossible to avoid this, it's a democratic process; only by giving some people more votes than others can you avoid it.
Then it's no longer one-person, one-vote. A meritocracy in other words.
Then how do you decide who has the merit? Democracy again.
You can put in various other feedback loops that attempt to encourage more "quality" but people aren't stupid, they adapt their articles and their moderation, and then you're back to square one. In extreme cases unethical people will use sock puppets to get what they want or trickery to fool the meta-meta-mod's.
Other down-mod's I'd add:
Commercial astro-turf. Somebody pretending to be objective is pushing a commercial message.
Commercial propaganda. Somebody is pushing a commercial message.
Deceptive post. Many propagandists attempt to push their message by having a sentence of vaguely relevent material followed by several paragraphs of propaganda.
Unnecessarily insulting. Many regularly insult slashdotter's just for their own amusement or as a way of making their own propaganda seem more palatable.
The biggest problems on slashdot are not flamers and trolls but commercial interests trying to drown out other points of view with their propaganda. We get way too much repetitive commercial propaganda in the mainstream media without encouraging it here as well.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
No, he's saying M$ because it's appropriate. Helps remind people that M$ is still taxing the world $40,000,000,000+ per year for about a dozen programs mostly written more than a decade a go with the most difficult bit, the device drivers, largely written by third parties.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
Re:Total Revolution - flame on
on
Wii-mote In Action
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Keep in mind that at least some of the ravers are probably astroturfers and maybe sock puppets also.
You can buy fraudulent "stealth marketing" at places like this.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
I think all your points are arguable but I don't want to get into a point slinging match. Readers can decide.
I'd like to make a couple of other points though: one is that this is an "I don't mind and you don't matter" situation. The website administrators clearly aren't interested in creating creating the best experience they can for the reader when they do this. Fortunately others are.
Also remember that one of the reasons you don't see it much is in part because of people you regard as unreasonable (like me!) complaining about it. Count your blessings. Reminds me of this quote:
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
--- George Bernard Shaw
Maybe you should be a little less "reasonable"?
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
I agree; multiple news sources are a good idea. That's why I qualified my praise of the BBC by calling it "one of the best mainstream" news sources rather than simply "the best".
All news sources must select what stories they run. That alone creates bias. How they phrase the stories also creates bias. In addition, readers create their own bias by selecting what news sources they read and by interpreting the stories they read. Marketers pay for bias by spamming their biased messages across multiple news sources.
That $250 you're complaining about pays for multiple TV stations, multiple radio stations, a high quality website, program development and an organisational mission which includes education as well as entertainment. I like their bias; unlike most commercial news sources they also do try to adhere to something like wikipedia's "neutral point of view". The BBC is far better value for money for the people of Britain than the so-called "free market" alternatives are for the people of the USA.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
But, man, I just don't understand the panty-bunching about it on Slashdot. By the time you've spent that (minimum of) 20 seconds typing that comment, you would have been in already.
It's not 20 seconds, it's 2 minutes times however news sites you read across however many computers you read your news on times however often your cookies get cleared times the small loss in privacy times the number of spam-target email addresses it's necessary to create and remember passwords for times however many broken registration screens there are.
Stuff 'em. The BBC is one of the best mainstream news sites out there and in general the idiots who think their news is worth mandatory registration for just that; idiots. Website administrators who think mandatory registration is a good idea are likely to be the sort of people I want to avoid anyway.
You're falling into one of the standard errors of patent proponents. My correction:
... However, if someone devises something, and they wouldn't have done it without monopoly protection and profits and the overall benefit to society outweighs the cost of the monopoly., then, and only then, the patent system should protect their interest and provide a means to reward them for their work....
No invention that takes little investment, or that might reasonably have more than one person independently think of it, should be given the monopoly privilege.
One of the big problems with patents in general and software patents in particular is that the reasoning and logic used to justify this massive interference in the citizen's business is very poor, what basically amounts to hand waving. Everything from category errors, e.g. "prior art" and "combining", supposedly simple ideas, are based on the shifting sands of what it means for something to be similar, to the supposed non-existence of independent, simultaneous invention of things "whose time has come".
---
Scientific, evidence based IP law. Now there's a thought.
Does it really break the story when Bond rides around in a BMW?
Yes. In "Tomorrow Never Dies" the quantity of pointless BMW's floating around and their general obtrusiveness greatly decreases movie immersion. It wrecked it for me.
Not surprising. An unnoticed ad is an ineffective ad. You're dreaming if you think advertisers are willing to be unobtrusive.
---
Modern marketing - a great substitute for a quality product.
To those people here claiming that "unobtrusive advertising would be okay". You're either dreaming or in advertising/marketing yourself.
The whole point of an ad is to communicate a message. If you haven't noticed it then it hasn't worked. Doesn't matter if it's in context or not. Only ineffective advertising is unobtrusive i.e. pointless.
The scientific evidence for subliminal advertising is close to nil.
90% of modern mass media marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mindshare. That's why advertising increases in every possible medium until saturation. Everybody loses except the largely parasitic marketing industry.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
All else being equal an ethical business competing with an unethical business cannot win.
An unethical business always has the option of acting ethically if thats the most profitable course of action but an ethical business does not have the option of acting unethically.
Fortunately, it's rare that all else is equal. And the community comes down hard on businesses discovered to be unethical to outweigh this effect. And we try to create laws where the ethical course is also the most profitable one.
Unless you consider successfully running a business to be evil
The irony here is that a large part of the/. audience considers that to, in fact, be exactly evil.
No, it's the converse, the idea that if it's making money and it's legal then it must be ethical.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Re:Where are the bunkers to protect Citizens ?
on
Back to the Bunker
·
· Score: 1
Thanks but it was just a (bad?) joke. I have this vision of a grunt crouching in the slit trench, looking up and saying "Oh sh...".
Re:Where are the bunkers to protect Citizens ?
on
Back to the Bunker
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
A slit trench is excellent protection from the immediate effects of a nuclear blast.
Even at ground zero?
---
Keep your options open!
Re:more proof the RIAA/MPAA are insane
on
Death By DMCA
·
· Score: 1
At that point, the networks would have to charge the consumers directly.
And that would be an excellent thing, with the free market operating as it should and not distorted by the 90+% of modern advertising the sole purpose of which is to get mindshare. An arms race where everybody loses except the marketing "industry".
With advertising you pay twice. Once in time to watch the ad and second in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
*sigh*/.'s attitude of "It's okay to copy anything I want" is really, really getting tiring.
The MPAA's commercial propaganda claiming "It's not okay to copy anything at any time" is also really tiresome.
... is saying to the producers "I want your product, but don't want to pay for it".
Your assumption is playing right into the MPAA's biased view of the world. Try to think outside their box. Don't think of the elephant.
People have been sharing since the dawn of time and it's the MPAA's self serving view of the world that needs some revision.
Your suggestion won't make much difference in fixing the problem. The MPAA will continue do anything that maximises there profit, particularly on the sunk cost of the movies they already continue to repeatedly sell. Whether piracy is occurring will hardly affect that at all. And that has been true for every generation of copying technology.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Depending on your background, openness to new ideas and what you're trying to achieve Linux may be more or less work than M$windows, on the desktop or anywhere else. There's always room for improvement of course but the "dramatic" difference you're claiming is simply wrong. In most situations the difference in maintenance effort isn't much. I use both daily and haven't had much trouble with either.
It may actually have the reverse effect. I have a good income, can easily purchase whatever I want/need and have personally been pretty indifferent to piracy.
I care helluva lot about personal freedoms though and if the RIAA has any real success in curtailing personal freedoms I may just have to start giving them a hard time. Like many people worldwide already are.
You're implicitly assuming that most of the pirated copies are a forgone sale. Most of them are likely to be teenagers who never would've bought from you anyway. Most people downloading are time rich, money poor.
You're also assuming that all those copies provided you with no exposure. For all you know that piracy may've been encouraging, not depressing, your sales.
Bottom line is you have no idea. So don't get all uptight about it.
You do agree though, that DRM can be implemented in such a way that it does not break the social contract behind copyright, in which case it is the natural extension of the latter?
No, I agree with the points made by the anonymous coward sibling post.
DRM has many other problems also, ranging from breaking inter-operability, reverse-engineering and free markets to helping to hide unethical corporate behaviour. e.g. The ethernet router that redirected http requests randomly about once a day to a corporate web page, presumably for advertising purposes. This broke an automated data collection process using http I had running via it. The behaviour was disable-able by setting an obscure, apparently irrelevant configuration variable that the average user would have no hope of finding. Presumeably the configuration variable existed to get plausable legal deniability. With DRM and wide spread net connectivity you can hide much more serious misbehaviours, which regulators and consumers will have no hope of controlling.
Slashdot Mirror
A company that targets a niche market may have less opportunities to make lots of money than one that targets the mass market.
And there may be more opportunities to make lots of money. Corel was targetting both M$Windows (mass) and Linux (niche).
Obviously this is not always true. However, it is going to be a serious consideration for some companies when choosing a platform/market/whatever.
That's a one-sided way of looking at it. Mass, commodity markets have more and bigger competitors. Niche markets, by definition, have less. Thus making any generalisations about whether niche and/or mass markets may [not] be profitable meaningless.
Sometimes it's profitable to target a niche, sometimes it isn't. Sometimes it's profitable to get a slice of the mass market, sometimes it isn't. It all depends on the individual circumstances.
Disclaimer: I use a Mac daily and certainly appreciate niche markets. But the fact remains that a product catering to a niche may not always be as profitable.
And it may well be very profitable. All businesses start as niche businesses. A business can fail chasing a mass market or chasing a niche market.
---
New game: Spot the lying astroturfer on /.!
Linksys/cisco embrace the whole "DIY" crowd and have produced a "WRT54GL" with the full amount of ram and flash so that linux hackers can do their thing. They made it difficult to flash the VXWorks one because too many idiots would try and flash a 4mb image on it and brick it, causing support headaches.
No, it would've been easy for the flash software to abort with an informative error message if somebody attempted to burn the wrong image. No need to make flashing difficult in general.
---
Scientific, evidence based IP law. Now there's a thought.
Makes sense, but I think you're under-estimating the ability of the average person to mix process and content. e.g. One person might regard an "Ayn Rand" quote as a brilliant and interesting argument point and hence mod it up. Another might regard exactly the same article as a trollish quote from a thoroughly discredited author and mod it down. Both would argue they're modding to improve the process, and not based on content. Point is, content can always be regarded as process if you look at it the right way. Meta-mod's have the same problem.
I think the best that you can do is encourage people to use the mod system fairly, appeal to their honor and evict the vandals as fast as possible.
---
Any clod can have the facts. Having opinions is an art. -- Charles McCabe.
Fortunately, I suspect this happens very infrequently.
"I suspect" is not adequate basis for law that causes as much interference in the citizen's business as patents.
Patents are badly broken, everything from completely ignoring multiple, simultaneous invention to ignoring inventions "whose time has come" to ignoring whether an invention requires significant investment (and thus worth blocking billions of people from using it for 20 years) to ignoring the fact that large classes of ideas don't have protection and work just fine (e.g. after careful research I open a business in a particular area - there is nothing to stop somebody else opening a similar business right next door) to completely arbitrary categories saying one thing is different from another (meaning some anonymous, non-inventive bureaucrat gets to decide whether somebody is really being inventive) to etc.
Patents as currently defined are basically meaningless as an indicator of inventiveness, they have very little basis in physical reality or actual thought and are just arbitrary tools for assorted lowlife to parasitise those around them.
Competition in a completely free market without IP protection means that every gizmo invented in the US will be duplicated in some other country for a tenth of the cost. Is that what you want?
Given that the US is less than 5% of the world's population and the US could copy what the other 95% of the world is inventing you're just fear mongering.
I would actually support law that promoted intellectual effort in limited ways but the system we've got currently is atrocious, with the justification for massive interference in the citizen's business being little more than hand waving.
---
Scientific, evidence based IP law. Now there's a thought.
I agree with your points however:
In general, the current mod system tends to reward those who think thoughts agreeable to the majority of moderators;
It is impossible to avoid this, it's a democratic process; only by giving some people more votes than others can you avoid it.
Then it's no longer one-person, one-vote. A meritocracy in other words.
Then how do you decide who has the merit? Democracy again.
You can put in various other feedback loops that attempt to encourage more "quality" but people aren't stupid, they adapt their articles and their moderation, and then you're back to square one. In extreme cases unethical people will use sock puppets to get what they want or trickery to fool the meta-meta-mod's.
Other down-mod's I'd add:
The biggest problems on slashdot are not flamers and trolls but commercial interests trying to drown out other points of view with their propaganda. We get way too much repetitive commercial propaganda in the mainstream media without encouraging it here as well.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
No, he's saying M$ because it's appropriate. Helps remind people that M$ is still taxing the world $40,000,000,000+ per year for about a dozen programs mostly written more than a decade a go with the most difficult bit, the device drivers, largely written by third parties.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
Keep in mind that at least some of the ravers are probably astroturfers and maybe sock puppets also.
You can buy fraudulent "stealth marketing" at places like this.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
I think all your points are arguable but I don't want to get into a point slinging match. Readers can decide.
I'd like to make a couple of other points though: one is that this is an "I don't mind and you don't matter" situation. The website administrators clearly aren't interested in creating creating the best experience they can for the reader when they do this. Fortunately others are.
Also remember that one of the reasons you don't see it much is in part because of people you regard as unreasonable (like me!) complaining about it. Count your blessings. Reminds me of this quote:
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
--- George Bernard Shaw
Maybe you should be a little less "reasonable"?
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
I agree; multiple news sources are a good idea. That's why I qualified my praise of the BBC by calling it "one of the best mainstream" news sources rather than simply "the best".
All news sources must select what stories they run. That alone creates bias. How they phrase the stories also creates bias. In addition, readers create their own bias by selecting what news sources they read and by interpreting the stories they read. Marketers pay for bias by spamming their biased messages across multiple news sources.
That $250 you're complaining about pays for multiple TV stations, multiple radio stations, a high quality website, program development and an organisational mission which includes education as well as entertainment. I like their bias; unlike most commercial news sources they also do try to adhere to something like wikipedia's "neutral point of view". The BBC is far better value for money for the people of Britain than the so-called "free market" alternatives are for the people of the USA.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
But, man, I just don't understand the panty-bunching about it on Slashdot. By the time you've spent that (minimum of) 20 seconds typing that comment, you would have been in already.
It's not 20 seconds, it's 2 minutes times however news sites you read across however many computers you read your news on times however often your cookies get cleared times the small loss in privacy times the number of spam-target email addresses it's necessary to create and remember passwords for times however many broken registration screens there are.
Stuff 'em. The BBC is one of the best mainstream news sites out there and in general the idiots who think their news is worth mandatory registration for just that; idiots. Website administrators who think mandatory registration is a good idea are likely to be the sort of people I want to avoid anyway.
---
Keep your options open!
You're falling into one of the standard errors of patent proponents. My correction:
No invention that takes little investment, or that might reasonably have more than one person independently think of it, should be given the monopoly privilege.
One of the big problems with patents in general and software patents in particular is that the reasoning and logic used to justify this massive interference in the citizen's business is very poor, what basically amounts to hand waving. Everything from category errors, e.g. "prior art" and "combining", supposedly simple ideas, are based on the shifting sands of what it means for something to be similar, to the supposed non-existence of independent, simultaneous invention of things "whose time has come".
---
Scientific, evidence based IP law. Now there's a thought.
Does it really break the story when Bond rides around in a BMW?
Yes. In "Tomorrow Never Dies" the quantity of pointless BMW's floating around and their general obtrusiveness greatly decreases movie immersion. It wrecked it for me.
Not surprising. An unnoticed ad is an ineffective ad. You're dreaming if you think advertisers are willing to be unobtrusive.
---
Modern marketing - a great substitute for a quality product.
To those people here claiming that "unobtrusive advertising would be okay". You're either dreaming or in advertising/marketing yourself.
The whole point of an ad is to communicate a message. If you haven't noticed it then it hasn't worked. Doesn't matter if it's in context or not. Only ineffective advertising is unobtrusive i.e. pointless.
The scientific evidence for subliminal advertising is close to nil.
90% of modern mass media marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mindshare. That's why advertising increases in every possible medium until saturation. Everybody loses except the largely parasitic marketing industry.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
All else being equal an ethical business competing with an unethical business cannot win.
An unethical business always has the option of acting ethically if thats the most profitable course of action but an ethical business does not have the option of acting unethically.
Fortunately, it's rare that all else is equal. And the community comes down hard on businesses discovered to be unethical to outweigh this effect. And we try to create laws where the ethical course is also the most profitable one.
---
Paid marketers are the worst zealots.
He's a jerk. But he hasn't cost you a thing. And many people have benefited. Sounds like sour grapes on your part.
If you care about it just start redistributing your version so people know he's a jerk. If he's breaking your license publicise that fact or sue.
And like the sibling post says whether your code was open source or closed source is irrelevant.
---
It's not piracy, it's sharing. Didn't your parents teach you to share?
Unless you consider successfully running a business to be evil
The irony here is that a large part of the /. audience considers that to, in fact, be exactly evil.
No, it's the converse, the idea that if it's making money and it's legal then it must be ethical.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Thanks but it was just a (bad?) joke. I have this vision of a grunt crouching in the slit trench, looking up and saying "Oh sh...".
---
New game: Spot the lying astroturfer on /.!
Yep, cherry picking examples and exaggerating.
---
New game: Spot the lying astroturfer on /.!
A slit trench is excellent protection from the immediate effects of a nuclear blast.
Even at ground zero?
---
Keep your options open!
At that point, the networks would have to charge the consumers directly.
And that would be an excellent thing, with the free market operating as it should and not distorted by the 90+% of modern advertising the sole purpose of which is to get mindshare. An arms race where everybody loses except the marketing "industry".
With advertising you pay twice. Once in time to watch the ad and second in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
*sigh* /.'s attitude of "It's okay to copy anything I want" is really, really getting tiring.
The MPAA's commercial propaganda claiming "It's not okay to copy anything at any time" is also really tiresome.
Your assumption is playing right into the MPAA's biased view of the world. Try to think outside their box. Don't think of the elephant.
People have been sharing since the dawn of time and it's the MPAA's self serving view of the world that needs some revision.
Your suggestion won't make much difference in fixing the problem. The MPAA will continue do anything that maximises there profit, particularly on the sunk cost of the movies they already continue to repeatedly sell. Whether piracy is occurring will hardly affect that at all. And that has been true for every generation of copying technology.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Your position is so exaggerated it's silly.
Depending on your background, openness to new ideas and what you're trying to achieve Linux may be more or less work than M$windows, on the desktop or anywhere else. There's always room for improvement of course but the "dramatic" difference you're claiming is simply wrong. In most situations the difference in maintenance effort isn't much. I use both daily and haven't had much trouble with either.
---
New game: Spot the lying astroturfer on /.!
maybe some will give up in the process.
It may actually have the reverse effect. I have a good income, can easily purchase whatever I want/need and have personally been pretty indifferent to piracy.
I care helluva lot about personal freedoms though and if the RIAA has any real success in curtailing personal freedoms I may just have to start giving them a hard time. Like many people worldwide already are.
The RIAA does not have the numbers on their side.
---
New game: Spot the lying astroturfer on /.!
You're implicitly assuming that most of the pirated copies are a forgone sale. Most of them are likely to be teenagers who never would've bought from you anyway. Most people downloading are time rich, money poor.
You're also assuming that all those copies provided you with no exposure. For all you know that piracy may've been encouraging, not depressing, your sales.
Bottom line is you have no idea. So don't get all uptight about it.
---
New game: Spot the lying astroturfer on /.!
You do agree though, that DRM can be implemented in such a way that it does not break the social contract behind copyright, in which case it is the natural extension of the latter?
No, I agree with the points made by the anonymous coward sibling post.
DRM has many other problems also, ranging from breaking inter-operability, reverse-engineering and free markets to helping to hide unethical corporate behaviour. e.g. The ethernet router that redirected http requests randomly about once a day to a corporate web page, presumably for advertising purposes. This broke an automated data collection process using http I had running via it. The behaviour was disable-able by setting an obscure, apparently irrelevant configuration variable that the average user would have no hope of finding. Presumeably the configuration variable existed to get plausable legal deniability. With DRM and wide spread net connectivity you can hide much more serious misbehaviours, which regulators and consumers will have no hope of controlling.
---
Keep your options open!