As far as I can figure, Laser Disc failed due to the unwieldiness of the media. Sure, there was an increase in video and audio quality, but the amount of the increase compared to the size increase in the physical media itself (LD versus VHS) probably turned a lot of people off.
Do not forget the price. While a VHS deck had uses beyond playing commercially purchased media, LD players did not. Because of "rental pricing" VHS was often priced at ridiculous levels, at least for the first half year or so of release. LD titles were even more obscenely priced and that pricing never came down until the format was obsolete. So a purchase of an LD player necessitated a huge outlay of cash to get even just a couple of movies, a purchase of a VHS deck was immediately useful with the purchase of $2 blank tape and later on a person might buy one or two commercial VHS releases when they had more disposable income available. Meanwhile DVD's were often cheaper than VHS editions from day 1 and have had serious declines in average selling prices with things like the $5 bin at Wal-mart.
The Fifth Element is classic in my book for the ample bussoms of Milla Jovovich being seen on the big screen.
With that criteria, Resident Evil should be a classic in your book for the ample display of another part of Milla. She even comments on it, enthusiastically I might add, in the commentrary track of the DVD.
It is like those DVD-R stuff that I never get into yet (I'm archaic now...) -- there was 2 format, now 2 format war again.
Yes, you are archaic. DVD+/-R was resolved years ago when sony released the first dual-format burner. Nowadays every new model of burner is dual-format. The playability of burnt discs depends more on the quality of the media (more $$$ means better playability) than it does on whether the discs is a +R or a -R.
How the hell do companies manage to print public domain works and make any money if your little theory was even remotely true?
They make it up in volume. Been to Target recently? They have a ton of public-domain movies and shows on DVD selling for a quarter each. Yes, that is 25 cents. Used to be $1 but now it is 25 cents. You can't get much stronger proof than that for the OP's original claim about monopoly pricing.
3G was switched on about a month ago. Stupidly expensive for data.
No surprise, looks like Manila DSL and wifi access at 256-384kbps is priced at the same level as US 3-4Mbps service, and that's dollars for dollars (~2000p/month ~= $35/month). Considering how much more of other kinds of services the US dollar will buy there, that's effectively like a 10x pricing premium over the cost in the US which is already pretty sucky compared to the developed asian countries.
Then also consider those of us who don't want to pay upwards of $100/mo for cable TV. Soon (hopefully) we can just pay $2-3 per show and get our fill of just the shows we want for maybe $10 or $20/mo.
At $2/ep, watching just a single show per night will take you to $60/month. Those bucks add up real fast when you start to get anywhere near the average amount of american television that joe-sixpack and his family watches.
If this business model is going to be successful it has to appeal to joe-sixpack at least as much as it does joe gadget-freak. The $2/ep level of pricing is unsustainable for the joe-sixpack crowd. Nor will an open market support it, competitors who will price their offerings at a decent, but not obscene, margin above their production costs should bring prices back out of the stratosphere.
Most tv shows have a budget under a couple of million per episode. Most tv shows do not make a profit until they hit syndication, which usually requires around 100 episodes in the can.
TV show downloads have the potential to make first run TV shows profitable up front, no need for syndication. But pricing levels of $1 or $2 per show for non-niche shows are beyond reasonable.
Take a look at "Lost," one of the most expensive shows on TV today, they've been doing around 20M viewers per episode in the USA alone. If only 10% of those viewers go to pay-for-download that's $4M per episiode, which is already turning a profit never mind the commercial fees for the remaining 18M viewers still watching it over the air with commercials. At 20% of the audience or just 4M viewers, the revenue becomes $8M which is probably significantly more profitable than any show ever in the history of US broadcasting.
Thus these big-name, big-budget shows should tend to be priced closer to 20cents per episode if there was real competition. Similarly, the shows with smaller audiences often have much smaller budgets (for example an episode of anime usually costs $200K-$300K to produce) and should still be inline with pricing in the 15-30 cents/episode range.
Don't even get me started on video quality - itunes video is far too low resolution, I believe a pseudo-HD resolution of around 960x540 ought to be an absolute minimum considering that MPEG4/AVC1/H264 can do that reasonably well in about 500MB.
Are you saying things are only worth what it costs to copy them?
When given the choice between paying A to make the copy or getting the copy free from B what do you think the average consumer will choose? If you think mere laws will prevent the consumer from choosing "free" you (a) do not understand human nature and (b) haven't been paying attention to the internet for the last 10 years.
People have been finding value in giving things away as "loss leaders" for millenia.
If you think that the sum total of dada's experience has been the loss-leader model you were not reading carefully. Even if it were, that still doesn't mean it is the only business model that does not require copyright to be profitable.
Obliterating copyright is not the answer, if you want people to continue to create new works at the same rate as they've been in the past.
You are partially correct - new incentive models provide for the possibility of increased rate of creation. One huge problem with the current system is that it requires a lot of capital, that is one reason we have "publishers" as middle-men. They front the production costs, assuming the capital risk in the hope that they will be able to recoup it by charging for distribution.
A system that significantly reduces the risk associated with production would remove the bottleneck that current "publishers" impose on the actual production of new creative works. If everyone with talent could profitably self-publish the rate of output should increase. In such a model, copyright is no longer necessary when incentive no longer depends on charging for copies.
if you don't recognize that copyright provides a huge incentive for people to create things, then I feel you're being naive....
If you eliminate incentives to create original works, you will absolutely limit original works.
You make a huge, and clearly erroneous, leap in logic there.
While copyright has provided a huge incentive, the world is in the process of moving on to new incentives and dada's own experience is one such example.
When making a copy becomes a zero-marginal cost action, charging for making copies becomes inherently untenable - customers will not see any value in paying for something that costs nothing. Thus old business models based on copyright must be and are being replaced by new ones that provide incentive to create too.
Could it be that Sony planned this whole thing just to stop people from making backups of their favorite CDs by scaring them out of even putting CDs in their PCs?
You are forgetting Hanlon's Razor:
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
To extend that idea a bit further: If we lose liberties present in The Constitution, The Amendments and The Bill of Rights, have the terrorists won?
That would appear to be their goal --
"I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people in -- and the West in general -- into an unbearable hell and a choking life." --Osama bin Laden, October 21st, 2001
Jimmy Carter has always been a bit soft in the head, and it hasn't gotten better with age. There will not be 9-10% of the population who will vote for Bush in 2008, and yet it will likely be another Republican sweep.
Yeah, not even 9% of the population will vote for republicans in 2008 but because of all those diebold voting machines in the field it will likely be another republican sweep.
Oh, that's not what you meant? Hey look, I can deliberately misunderstand a quote to make a dubious point too!
s opposed to academic work that has been retroactively claimed under the open-source umbrella,
What makes "academic" work special enough to be singled out? People getting paid, either via salary or via education to create software that "scratches an itch."
I don't think that anyone is claiming that a proprietary license is a necessary ingredient for innovation.
In my experience, that is exactly what the original question usually means when it gets asked.
Just as you currently pay a subscription fee for things like cable tv access and magazines - you could also "subscribe" to the production of a specific show. As long as the pre-paid subscription fees are enough to support the production costs plus whatever level of profit the producers think they can squeeze from their customers, each episode gets created. If the fees aren't enough to support production, that is a sign that either the asking price is too high and/or nobody cares enough about the show anyway - a purely free market approach.
The beauty of this solution is that the show is paid for up-front, that means the production company can lock in guaranteed profit before shooting even starts. Today, television and film production is very high risk - as a SWAG I'd say less than 10% of shows ever turn a profit. Of those that due turn a profit, probably only 10% are able to be profitable during first run, around 90% do not turn a profit until syndication. Being able to guarantee a profit up front would radically change the way hollywood works.
There is another benefit too, to the subscribers. Besides being able to directly "vote with their dollar" for the shows they want to see created, there is no reason to forbid redistribution. In other words - the producers already got paid, they don't need copyright law to force people to pay for copies of the show. Instead, they can just give it away to anyone who wants a copy or wants to give a copy to his 10 million closest friends.
Allowing completely free redistribution will create a feed-back mechanism too - the free copies of shows will serve as advertising for new, unproduced shows. Like crack cocaine, the first one is free - except as long as enough people are willing to put their money where their mouth is to continue funding production, then the entire show will also be free.
Of the responses so far, dwheeler's is the only one that even comes close to answering the question asked.
I'll elaborate a bit to add other "internet technologies"
The first web browser - Tim Berners-Lee's GUI-based WorldWideWeb was open source. The first "famous" web browser was NCSA Mosaic that was also open source (at least in that it was distributed as source and user-contributed patches were accepted back into the NCSA-controlled mainline).
Sendmail, the program that, even today, handles the majority of the internet's email is open source.
ffmpeg and derivatives like ffdshow are high-quality open source implementations of both proprietary standards (like mpeg2, etc) but are also high-quality open source implementations of brand new video and audio manipulation algorithms. Then there is all of Ogg, where Vorbis, by definition is not a reimplementation of a prorprietary standard since it does not infringe on any software patents.
Why do people assume taking ethics courses makes people more ethical. I'm sure Jeffrey Skilling and Ken Lay too ethics courses when they got their MBAs.
There is real ethics and then there is corporate ethics. Anyone who has had to go to "corporate ethics training" as part of their job knows that corporate ethics is just a euphemism for "how to protect the company from being sued." Any ethics courses taught as part of an MBA program will probably be along those same lines.
IOW, ATIs offering is "free", but tied directly to their hardware. nVidia's offering isn't tied to any particular hardware and is paid for directly instead.
Nvidia's video post processor, which is part of their pure video package, only works with the hardware of nvidia cards. Sure, it also has a software mode that sucks, but to get any real use out of it you need nvidia hardware to back it up. The mpeg decoder part of pure video does make use of standard interfaces to mpeg acceleration hardware and thus is useful with non-nvidia cards.
And if you don't know your numbers you aren't qualified to have an opinion. Apple does not have 90%+ control. No figures that I have seen, even Apple's own give them that much of the market. Furthermore, you keep bandying that number about without specifying which market. MP3 players? AAC players? Music distribution? Which market?
Just because you are ignorant of the facts does not make them any less true. To get even more technical, Apple clearly has monopoly control of the market because they are able to maintain pricing at levels significantly higher than all of their competitors without significant technical differentiation. That is de facto proof of a monopoly regardless of the specific market percentages - the demand curve for ipods slopes downward, not upward as it would if there was legitimate competition.
The RIAA's monopoly appearance is merely due to the fact that they own so many copyrights. Would you call a tiny startup record company a monopoly in the same way you refer to the RIAA?
Yes. You really seem to be hung up on your misunderstanding of the RIAA members' monopoly as it applies to the market of music sales. RIAA members have a legally sanctioned monopoly on the most popular music. If their copyright was not legal sanctioned, they would have long ago been forced to allow secondary sources of the music they own the copyright for.
But apple doesn't have monopoly control.
No matter how many times you say this, it is still false.
1) Apple is not a monopoly. They are the majority player in the market but hardly a monopoly.
As I stated before - 90%+ control of a market is the definition of monopoly. If you don't know your terms, you clearly aren't qualified to have an opinion.
The RIAA is a monopoly in the same way that Apple is a monopoly, they are the market leader and market dominator.
No they are not anything of the kind. The RIAA's monopoly is in their copyright of the music - they have a monopoly on copies of the music. Apple sells hardware and services, there are no copies. Again it sounds like you are unfamiliar with the terms of the debate - copyright is a government granted monopoly, a fact that the supreme court has explicitly acknowledged many times.
3) It is not understood that monopolies caused by having market dominence is bad. What is understood is that having a monopoly grants a company extreme power over the market and there is great potential to abuse that power, but having a monopoly is not inherrently bad.
You have taken the first two steps, but ignored the third. It is inherent in any unregulated monopoly, and even most regulated ones, that the "extreme power over the market" will be abused to maintain artifically high pricing.
Um, you do realize you just described how a monopoly loses it's monopoly status.
Doh! I had no clue. Of course it was my point -- the guy asked if Apple would ever make a change that would reduce their monopoly control, and I said no they would not make such a change unless they had already lost monopoly control.
Distribute RIAA files copy protected and distribute non RIAA files unprotected. Then, use the fact that the sales numbers vary and demonstrate that this varience is due to the unprotected nature of the files, and then demonstrate that by distributing through real in such a way the industry can reach 100% of the MP3 player market.
For a guy so adamant in defending Apple's monopoly control of the FairPlay DRM you sure have a lot of faith that DRM is holding back sales. Either you are a hypocrite, or you understand how your proposed scenario is completely unreasonable given the RIAA's unwavering stance on copy-restrictions and are just waving your hands some more.
For the record, I don't believe that selling copies of songs is a viable business model unless there is some form of copy-restriction (creating artifical scarcity). I do believe that other business models that pay for the creation of songs rather than for copies of songs can be viable without copy-restriction.
Apple doesn't have monopoly control. They have majority.
Economists use the term monopoly to refer to a company with approximately 90% or greater control of the market. By your definition, AT&T was not a monopoly, just a majority at the time of their break-up because there were a number of gnat-sized alternatives.
they need to try a different tact.
You are now arguing in circles.
If you can propose one, even semi-reasonable plan for Real to "fight the industry" you would have a point.
Anyhow, the market for downloadable music is much wider than just iPods and iTMS. All the non-iPod (read WMA) vendors have decided they want to exploit a different part of the market.
And are failing miserably at it precisely because Apple controls 90+% of the player market.
The only party that has a lock on RIAA music is... say it with me... the RIAA. (As a cartel it's in their best interest to keep that way.)
The difference is that the RIAA copyright cartel is legally mandated by the constitution and congress. Apple's monopoly is the result of market domination. It is generally understood that monopolies that arise from market domination are not beneficial for anyone but the monopoly holder. Whether the copyright monopoly is good or bad is irrelevant, it is unfortunately 100% legal.
I always wonder... if iPod users were clamoring for WMA would Apple add it?
Of course not, that's because Apple has a monopoly, they would not need to no matter how the ipod users "clamored." If they actually lost sales because of it, then that would mean they no longer hold an effective monopoly.
If Real and Napster wanted a piece of the iPod they would have ponied up. That was Real's decision. I'm sure you know that Real refused to license FairPlay (but they spin it as "Apple wouldn't let us have it" but leave out the words "cheaply enough that we would agree")
That is 100% demonstrably false - Apple refuses to license FairPlay. No matter how much pony they've got, it is not enough for Apple because they have a monopoly on the market and intend to keep it that way.
And do we condider Real to be larger than a gnat compared to iTunes? I certainly don't.
Bingo. You clearly understand the problem. Real is NOT larger than a gnat compared to iTunes, nor is anyone else and they never will be as long as Apple has monopoly control over copy-restricted music sales.
Slashdot Mirror
As far as I can figure, Laser Disc failed due to the unwieldiness of the media. Sure, there was an increase in video and audio quality, but the amount of the increase compared to the size increase in the physical media itself (LD versus VHS) probably turned a lot of people off.
Do not forget the price. While a VHS deck had uses beyond playing commercially purchased media, LD players did not. Because of "rental pricing" VHS was often priced at ridiculous levels, at least for the first half year or so of release. LD titles were even more obscenely priced and that pricing never came down until the format was obsolete. So a purchase of an LD player necessitated a huge outlay of cash to get even just a couple of movies, a purchase of a VHS deck was immediately useful with the purchase of $2 blank tape and later on a person might buy one or two commercial VHS releases when they had more disposable income available. Meanwhile DVD's were often cheaper than VHS editions from day 1 and have had serious declines in average selling prices with things like the $5 bin at Wal-mart.
The Fifth Element is classic in my book for the ample bussoms of Milla Jovovich being seen on the big screen.
With that criteria, Resident Evil should be a classic in your book for the ample display of another part of Milla. She even comments on it, enthusiastically I might add, in the commentrary track of the DVD.
It is like those DVD-R stuff that I never get into yet (I'm archaic now...) -- there was 2 format, now 2 format war again.
Yes, you are archaic. DVD+/-R was resolved years ago when sony released the first dual-format burner. Nowadays every new model of burner is dual-format. The playability of burnt discs depends more on the quality of the media (more $$$ means better playability) than it does on whether the discs is a +R or a -R.
How the hell do companies manage to print public domain
works and make any money if your little theory was even
remotely true?
They make it up in volume. Been to Target recently? They have a ton of public-domain movies and shows on DVD selling for a quarter each. Yes, that is 25 cents. Used to be $1 but now it is 25 cents. You can't get much stronger proof than that for the OP's original claim about monopoly pricing.
3G was switched on about a month ago. Stupidly expensive for data.
No surprise, looks like Manila DSL and wifi access at 256-384kbps is priced at the same level as US 3-4Mbps service, and that's dollars for dollars (~2000p/month ~= $35/month). Considering how much more of other kinds of services the US dollar will buy there, that's effectively like a 10x pricing premium over the cost in the US which is already pretty sucky compared to the developed asian countries.
Here:
ATI X1300 and X1600
Nvidia 6800
Just wait a few more weeks and they will be on the market.
Sorry, wrong - we use exactly the same system in the UK as the US does: £1,000,000.50\
Unfortunately you've got your own idea of billion/trillion so that just makes it worse.
Then also consider those of us who don't want to pay upwards of $100/mo for cable TV. Soon (hopefully) we can just pay $2-3 per show and get our fill of just the shows we want for maybe $10 or $20/mo.
At $2/ep, watching just a single show per night will take you to $60/month. Those bucks add up real fast when you start to get anywhere near the average amount of american television that joe-sixpack and his family watches.
If this business model is going to be successful it has to appeal to joe-sixpack at least as much as it does joe gadget-freak. The $2/ep level of pricing is unsustainable for the joe-sixpack crowd. Nor will an open market support it, competitors who will price their offerings at a decent, but not obscene, margin above their production costs should bring prices back out of the stratosphere.
Most tv shows have a budget under a couple of million per episode. Most tv shows do not make a profit until they hit syndication, which usually requires around 100 episodes in the can.
TV show downloads have the potential to make first run TV shows profitable up front, no need for syndication. But pricing levels of $1 or $2 per show for non-niche shows are beyond reasonable.
Take a look at "Lost," one of the most expensive shows on TV today, they've been doing around 20M viewers per episode in the USA alone. If only 10% of those viewers go to pay-for-download that's $4M per episiode, which is already turning a profit never mind the commercial fees for the remaining 18M viewers still watching it over the air with commercials. At 20% of the audience or just 4M viewers, the revenue becomes $8M which is probably significantly more profitable than any show ever in the history of US broadcasting.
Thus these big-name, big-budget shows should tend to be priced closer to 20cents per episode if there was real competition. Similarly, the shows with smaller audiences often have much smaller budgets (for example an episode of anime usually costs $200K-$300K to produce) and should still be inline with pricing in the 15-30 cents/episode range.
Don't even get me started on video quality - itunes video is far too low resolution, I believe a pseudo-HD resolution of around 960x540 ought to be an absolute minimum considering that MPEG4/AVC1/H264 can do that reasonably well in about 500MB.
Are you saying things are only worth what it costs to copy them?
When given the choice between paying A to make the copy or getting the copy free from B what do you think the average consumer will choose? If you think mere laws will prevent the consumer from choosing "free" you (a) do not understand human nature and (b) haven't been paying attention to the internet for the last 10 years.
People have been finding value in giving things away as "loss leaders" for millenia.
If you think that the sum total of dada's experience has been the loss-leader model you were not reading carefully. Even if it were, that still doesn't mean it is the only business model that does not require copyright to be profitable.
Obliterating copyright is not the answer, if you want people to continue to create new works at the same rate as they've been in the past.
You are partially correct - new incentive models provide for the possibility of increased rate of creation. One huge problem with the current system is that it requires a lot of capital, that is one reason we have "publishers" as middle-men. They front the production costs, assuming the capital risk in the hope that they will be able to recoup it by charging for distribution.
A system that significantly reduces the risk associated with production would remove the bottleneck that current "publishers" impose on the actual production of new creative works. If everyone with talent could profitably self-publish the rate of output should increase. In such a model, copyright is no longer necessary when incentive no longer depends on charging for copies.
if you don't recognize that copyright provides a huge incentive for people to create things, then I feel you're being naive. ...
If you eliminate incentives to create original works, you will absolutely limit original works.
You make a huge, and clearly erroneous, leap in logic there.
While copyright has provided a huge incentive, the world is in the process of moving on to new incentives and dada's own experience is one such example.
When making a copy becomes a zero-marginal cost action, charging for making copies becomes inherently untenable - customers will not see any value in paying for something that costs nothing. Thus old business models based on copyright must be and are being replaced by new ones that provide incentive to create too.
Could it be that Sony planned this whole thing just to stop people from making backups of their favorite CDs by scaring them out of even putting CDs in their PCs?
You are forgetting Hanlon's Razor:
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
The Amendments and The Bill of Rights, have the terrorists won?
That would appear to be their goal --
Jimmy Carter has always been a bit soft in the head, and it hasn't gotten better with age. There will not be 9-10% of the population who will vote for Bush in 2008, and yet it will likely be another Republican sweep.
Yeah, not even 9% of the population will vote for republicans in 2008 but because of all those diebold voting machines in the field it will likely be another republican sweep.
Oh, that's not what you meant? Hey look, I can deliberately misunderstand a quote to make a dubious point too!
s opposed to academic work that has been retroactively claimed under the open-source umbrella,
What makes "academic" work special enough to be singled out? People getting paid, either via salary or via education to create software that "scratches an itch."
I don't think that anyone is claiming that a proprietary license is a necessary ingredient for innovation.
In my experience, that is exactly what the original question usually means when it gets asked.
Some alternatives to this are:
Add this one to your list - work for hire.
Just as you currently pay a subscription fee for things like cable tv access and magazines - you could also "subscribe" to the production of a specific show. As long as the pre-paid subscription fees are enough to support the production costs plus whatever level of profit the producers think they can squeeze from their customers, each episode gets created. If the fees aren't enough to support production, that is a sign that either the asking price is too high and/or nobody cares enough about the show anyway - a purely free market approach.
The beauty of this solution is that the show is paid for up-front, that means the production company can lock in guaranteed profit before shooting even starts. Today, television and film production is very high risk - as a SWAG I'd say less than 10% of shows ever turn a profit. Of those that due turn a profit, probably only 10% are able to be profitable during first run, around 90% do not turn a profit until syndication. Being able to guarantee a profit up front would radically change the way hollywood works.
There is another benefit too, to the subscribers. Besides being able to directly "vote with their dollar" for the shows they want to see created, there is no reason to forbid redistribution. In other words - the producers already got paid, they don't need copyright law to force people to pay for copies of the show. Instead, they can just give it away to anyone who wants a copy or wants to give a copy to his 10 million closest friends.
Allowing completely free redistribution will create a feed-back mechanism too - the free copies of shows will serve as advertising for new, unproduced shows. Like crack cocaine, the first one is free - except as long as enough people are willing to put their money where their mouth is to continue funding production, then the entire show will also be free.
Bingo.
Of the responses so far, dwheeler's is the only one that even comes close to answering the question asked.
I'll elaborate a bit to add other "internet technologies"
The first web browser - Tim Berners-Lee's GUI-based WorldWideWeb was open source.
The first "famous" web browser was NCSA Mosaic that was also open source (at least in that it was distributed as source and user-contributed patches were accepted back into the NCSA-controlled mainline).
Sendmail, the program that, even today, handles the majority of the internet's email is open source.
ffmpeg and derivatives like ffdshow are high-quality open source implementations of both proprietary standards (like mpeg2, etc) but are also high-quality open source implementations of brand new video and audio manipulation algorithms. Then there is all of Ogg, where Vorbis, by definition is not a reimplementation of a prorprietary standard since it does not infringe on any software patents.
Why do people assume taking ethics courses makes people more ethical. I'm sure Jeffrey Skilling and Ken Lay too ethics courses when they got their MBAs.
There is real ethics and then there is corporate ethics. Anyone who has had to go to "corporate ethics training" as part of their job knows that corporate ethics is just a euphemism for "how to protect the company from being sued." Any ethics courses taught as part of an MBA program will probably be along those same lines.
IOW, ATIs offering is "free", but tied directly to their hardware. nVidia's offering isn't tied to any particular hardware and is paid for directly instead.
Nvidia's video post processor, which is part of their pure video package, only works with the hardware of nvidia cards. Sure, it also has a software mode that sucks, but to get any real use out of it you need nvidia hardware to back it up. The mpeg decoder part of pure video does make use of standard interfaces to mpeg acceleration hardware and thus is useful with non-nvidia cards.
And if you don't know your numbers you aren't qualified to have an opinion. Apple does not have 90%+ control. No figures that I have seen, even Apple's own give them that much of the market. Furthermore, you keep bandying that number about without specifying which market. MP3 players? AAC players? Music distribution? Which market?
t share.at.92/
Just because you are ignorant of the facts does not make them any less true. To get even more technical, Apple clearly has monopoly control of the market because they are able to maintain pricing at levels significantly higher than all of their competitors without significant technical differentiation. That is de facto proof of a monopoly regardless of the specific market percentages - the demand curve for ipods slopes downward, not upward as it would if there was legitimate competition.
http://www.macnn.com/articles/04/10/12/ipod.marke
The RIAA's monopoly appearance is merely due to the fact that they own so many copyrights. Would you call a tiny startup record company a monopoly in the same way you refer to the RIAA?
Yes. You really seem to be hung up on your misunderstanding of the RIAA members' monopoly as it applies to the market of music sales. RIAA members have a legally sanctioned monopoly on the most popular music. If their copyright was not legal sanctioned, they would have long ago been forced to allow secondary sources of the music they own the copyright for.
But apple doesn't have monopoly control.
No matter how many times you say this, it is still false.
1) Apple is not a monopoly. They are the majority player in the market but hardly a monopoly.
As I stated before - 90%+ control of a market is the definition of monopoly. If you don't know your terms, you clearly aren't qualified to have an opinion.
The RIAA is a monopoly in the same way that Apple is a monopoly, they are the market leader and market dominator.
No they are not anything of the kind. The RIAA's monopoly is in their copyright of the music - they have a monopoly on copies of the music. Apple sells hardware and services, there are no copies. Again it sounds like you are unfamiliar with the terms of the debate - copyright is a government granted monopoly, a fact that the supreme court has explicitly acknowledged many times.
3) It is not understood that monopolies caused by having market dominence is bad. What is understood is that having a monopoly grants a company extreme power over the market and there is great potential to abuse that power, but having a monopoly is not inherrently bad.
You have taken the first two steps, but ignored the third. It is inherent in any unregulated monopoly, and even most regulated ones, that the "extreme power over the market" will be abused to maintain artifically high pricing.
Um, you do realize you just described how a monopoly loses it's monopoly status.
Doh! I had no clue. Of course it was my point -- the guy asked if Apple would ever make a change that would reduce their monopoly control, and I said no they would not make such a change unless they had already lost monopoly control.
Distribute RIAA files copy protected and distribute non RIAA files unprotected. Then, use the fact that the sales numbers vary and demonstrate that this varience is due to the unprotected nature of the files, and then demonstrate that by distributing through real in such a way the industry can reach 100% of the MP3 player market.
For a guy so adamant in defending Apple's monopoly control of the FairPlay DRM you sure have a lot of faith that DRM is holding back sales. Either you are a hypocrite, or you understand how your proposed scenario is completely unreasonable given the RIAA's unwavering stance on copy-restrictions and are just waving your hands some more.
For the record, I don't believe that selling copies of songs is a viable business model unless there is some form of copy-restriction (creating artifical scarcity). I do believe that other business models that pay for the creation of songs rather than for copies of songs can be viable without copy-restriction.
Apple doesn't have monopoly control. They have majority.
Economists use the term monopoly to refer to a company with approximately 90% or greater control of the market. By your definition, AT&T was not a monopoly, just a majority at the time of their break-up because there were a number of gnat-sized alternatives.
they need to try a different tact.
You are now arguing in circles.
If you can propose one, even semi-reasonable plan for Real to "fight the industry" you would have a point.
Ring a bell?
Anyhow, the market for downloadable music is much wider than just iPods and iTMS. All the non-iPod (read WMA) vendors have decided they want to exploit a different part of the market.
... say it with me ... the RIAA. (As a cartel it's in their best interest to keep that way.)
And are failing miserably at it precisely because Apple controls 90+% of the player market.
The only party that has a lock on RIAA music is
The difference is that the RIAA copyright cartel is legally mandated by the constitution and congress. Apple's monopoly is the result of market domination. It is generally understood that monopolies that arise from market domination are not beneficial for anyone but the monopoly holder. Whether the copyright monopoly is good or bad is irrelevant, it is unfortunately 100% legal.
I always wonder... if iPod users were clamoring for WMA would Apple add it?
Of course not, that's because Apple has a monopoly, they would not need to no matter how the ipod users "clamored." If they actually lost sales because of it, then that would mean they no longer hold an effective monopoly.
If Real and Napster wanted a piece of the iPod they would have ponied up. That was Real's decision. I'm sure you know that Real refused to license FairPlay (but they spin it as "Apple wouldn't let us have it" but leave out the words "cheaply enough that we would agree")
That is 100% demonstrably false - Apple refuses to license FairPlay. No matter how much pony they've got, it is not enough for Apple because they have a monopoly on the market and intend to keep it that way.
And do we condider Real to be larger than a gnat compared to iTunes? I certainly don't.
Bingo. You clearly understand the problem. Real is NOT larger than a gnat compared to iTunes, nor is anyone else and they never will be as long as Apple has monopoly control over copy-restricted music sales.