If halving your price will let you sell more than twice as many copies, then it is the right thing to do. If 100 people are willing to pay $5, but 10,000 are willing to pay $0.50, then, ignoring credit card processing and hosting costs, you have a choice between making $500 and making $5,000. Which makes more sense? It doesn't matter whether the 9,900 who would buy it for $0.50 but not for $5 would have pirated it, it only matters whether they will buy it at a given price.
This seems to be something that the software (and music) industry forgets.
I think you're wrong in claiming that this is something that the software and music industries forget. I think the software and music industries are more aware of this fact than you are giving them credit for. I also think that consumers almost always pick the side that "it should be cheaper". Whether consumers are right or not, I'm not sure. Maybe they are, maybe they're not. But, I do think consumers are also biased towards lower prices (because that's what's best for them). This bias then plays into the perception that the software and music industries price their product too high, and are somehow ignorant of the "profit per unit" x "units sold" equation.
* I'm not actually agreeing or disagreeing with you that the price should be lower, just questioning how you arrived at that conclusion.
Suppose we want that information: Can you think of a test which would detect displaced sales?
You'd have to be able to read people's minds and know what they would've done in the case where piracy was not available.
I did hear of one developer who posted fake registration codes on the internet, though. He then tracked the IP addresses of people who tried to use the fake codes, and then watched how many of them came back to actually pay for a copy when the registration code didn't work. His numbers were that about 1/3rd of those people bought a copy. I've heard widely varying estimates, though.
In any case, the only thing you can do is try to shut-down piracy because most everyone believes "lost sales" is above 0%. Even worse, the percentage of people who would've bought could vary significantly depending on other external factors. For example, if no one combats piracy, then maybe it will pervade society and then you really are losing sales because piracy has changed from "something poor teenagers do" (where the piracy to lost-sales ratio is, say, 2%) to "something everybody, even the working public does" (where the piracy to lost-sales ratio is, say, 50%). I still remember one girl I know complaining to a friend of mine that she should pirate her music instead of buying off iTunes. This friend of mine and her husband both have very good jobs -- and by "good jobs", I mean that they earn around $150,000 per year together. Yet, here was this girl telling her that she should pirate her music because she couldn't understand why someone would pay instead of not-pay.
Surely the real question is: How many of the people who are using pirated copies would pay for a copy if the pirated copies were not available?
Okay, a reasonable question.
This is the RIAA fallacy, presuming that all pirated copies represent lost revenue.
Wait, what? You suddenly presume that everyone's answer to your first question is "100% of pirates would've bought" and then shoot-down that argument? What if it's less than 100% but more than 0%, which is what nearly everyone (outside lobbyists and laywers) would say? If it's more than 0%, then people can start talking about lost revenue, and I don't think any reasonable person can argue that it's 0%.
Selling games is strictly self-serving also. Apparently, you think its fantastic for companies to be driven by greed, but the customers should be selfless?
Er - what? First, where did he say that it was "fantastic for companies to be driven by greed"?
Second, there is a difference between working and wanting to get paid (as much as possible*) for your work. (*This is what we're talking about when we talk about "typical" corporate greed. Nobody likes the "sucker poor people / ambulence chaser / sell cigarettes even though they kill people" type of corporate greed. Nobody thinks it "fantastic" when companies don't pay the people they're supposed to pay - e.g. their workers, their suppliers, etc.) The type of customer greed you're talking about is "take stuff for free, don't pay people for their work" type of greed. There is a difference - and that difference is how you act and how you compromise your morality in pursuit of that greed.
Okay, if you want a slightly closer comparison, how about this: you can decide, after the meal, whether you want to pay the wholesale cost of the meal (which doesn't include paying or tipping the waiter, or paying the cook, or paying to help the restaurant keep the lights on or their rent). The cost of your meal suddenly gets reduced to the wholesale cost of the ingredients.
Anyway, I think the analogy is flawed for another reason: most people will pay in that kind of a restaurant because of social pressure. People feel guilty, and they don't want dirty looks from the staff, and they don't want people talking behind their backs about being a cheapskate. (In fact, if you look at who tips the most in restaurants, it's people on dates - because they don't want to look cheap, they social approval.)
None of that is true with piracy because it can be done so anonymously. Even worse, because people know that they've cost the restaurant money by consuming the food, they feel bad about paying nothing. Pirates, on the other hand, can sate their unwillingness to pay with excuses that "I'm not taking anything from you" which can drive up the number of people who aren't paying. In other words, if it was legal to screw over a restaurant by not paying, 90% of people would still pay because of the desire for social approval and guilt over costing the restaurant money. But, if it's legal to screw over developers by not paying, 90% or more would feel fine doing it because they are anonymous and they don't *feel* like they are screwing over the developer because they aren't lowering his inventory.
I'd like to take a minute to point out the obvious: despite the fact that many slashdotters complain that software development is a racket because software can be sold over and over for "doing the work one time", the reality is far more complicated. This story is a vindication of the copyright system. It shows that business that depends on copyright are not, in fact, getting rich. The reality is that when we, as software developers spend X years writing a piece of software, we HAVE to sell it multiple times to break-even. The result of us selling a product multiple times allows us to spread-out our costs over many consumers. This lowers the cost for all consumers. For example, if I spend one year writing a product and I want to earn $40,000 per year, I can either sell it once for $40,000. Or, if I'm writing software for the general consumer, I can hope to sell it for $10 to 4,000 people. This means each of those 4,000 people get the benefits of one year's worth of software development. Where else can you get a years-worth of work for $10? The fact that we can sell a product multiple times does NOT mean that we are rich. The fact that we can sell it multiple times means that you (the consumer) get a lot for your money, and it means that we (as software developers) can earn a living. The alternative - abolishing copyright, as was suggested by commenters in the recent Slashdot story "100 Years of Copyright Hysteria" - means we will all lose.
Funny how Slashdot recently added the story: "Road To Riches Doesn't Run Through the App Store", showing how your '$100,000 per year ad-infinitum for one year of work' doesn't reflect the reality of software development.
Actually, they might have done that, but their main...
Well, I wasn't really planning on discussing Standard Oil. It was a peripheral point meant to show that sometimes companies can benefit when you steal their product if it means not paying a competitor. (Also, Lessig's writing also provides another example: alcohol and drugs. I'm sure my local drug dealer would be okay with me stealing a little of his meth, heroin, crack, etc if it meant that I'd come back for more. That's why they give away samples.)
Bruce's work is exclusively available from one "label" so I can't go to Warners or MCA (etc) to see if they can deliver the "same" product at a lower cost.... There's no tiered pricing mechanism in the so-called "legitimate" marketplace, so, for all intents and purposes the price of the item is "posted" (in the same way that Standard "posted" their arbitrarily-set pricing of oil back in the pre-anti trust days).
That may be, but you have alternative artists and alternative media (TV, movies, games, etc). Anyway, you can make the exact same argument about concert tickets -- tickets are only available at the price that Bruce Springsteen sets. Should we allow people to print-up their own tickets, which are entirely valid? Should we allow companies to print-up and sell tickets to Bruce Springsteen's shows even though they have no affiliation whatsoever with Bruce Springsteen? Essentially, that's what piracy is.
horribly skewed by the labels's insistence on enforcing the myth of "scarcity" despite the de facto existence of truly unlimited copies of the same item, etc.
The problem with the "you can make unlimited copies" argument is this: the consumer cost of a product can NEVER reach the marginal cost of a product. I've heard arguments that costs should always fall to the marginal cost. The problem is this: there's development costs. If you have a digital product that only 10,000 people in the world want, you'd better figure out how to pack your development costs into 10,000 sales. If it costs you 50 cents to print a CD, and $50,000 to record an album, then you HAVE to charge $5.50 per copy in order to break-even on 10,000 sales. One problem is that piracy ignores the whole "development cost" part of the equation and pirates think they should only have to pay the marginal cost (50 cents). Now, I'm not claiming that top-selling musicians aren't meeting their production costs, but there's a severe flaw in the pirate's calculation about how much they should pay. If everyone acted like them, then musicians would not be able to pay their production costs, and you'd find that more and more musicians are just recording music live (because that has the lowest production costs). Even worse, I think many of us in the software industry are operating much closer to the red-line of "paying our production costs" than musicians are.
When the band, Radiohead, made a new work available on an honor system they were incredibly successful.
I'm not so sure they were. Further, I can think of plenty of reasons that system doesn't work long term. For one thing, their system of "pay what you want" was no novel that it garnered lots of free press. If bands routinely gave away their music on a "pay what you want" basis, then none of them (not even Radiohead) would get the kind of press that you saw the first time around. So, maybe the free-press drew in 10x as many listeners, and only 10% of them actually paid. In the end, that evens out, but if "pay what you want" becomes routine, then instead of 10x listeners, you'll see smaller and smaller numbers of people hearing about it. Eventually, it could become so commonplace, that bands get zero additional press and no additional listeners from a Radiohead-like stunt. Additionally, it's possible that people were so grateful to Radiohead that they wanted to pay them for their generosity. If "pay what you want" becomes routine, the charity of the public could fade with time. I've heard art
First of all, I don't believe your story. $20? 5,000 copies per year? $100,000? One year of work? Those all sound like nice round, made-up numbers. You say that he "just wrote a program", but then you already have yearly numbers? The fact of the matter is that that scenario is most definitely the exception, not the rule. When I look around at some small software companies, I've seen companies go out of business, cut-back on staff, ask programmers to go without pay for months at a time. They aren't raking it in, driving gold-plated cars like you'd make them out to be.
A far more common situation would be one year of work, $20 a copy, 1,000 copies the first year, 500 copies the second, 200 copies the third year, 100 copies the fourth year. At those numbers, he'd be getting 1800 x $20 = $36,000 for a year of work, and it's spread-out over four years -- which isn't very good pay for a software developer. Jeff Vogel (of the Bottom Feeder blog) laid out how much he got paid for a typical game he created a while back. His numbers were pretty similar to the number I've laid out here.
Further, even if I really did believe that "your friend" made $100,000 per year *AND* he was consistently making $100,000 per year on an ongoing basis (which you don't actually know since he "just wrote a program" -- instead of "he wrote a program five years ago"). Then what? Apparently, he created a lot of value for a lot of people. And, if you abolish copyright, because your jealous, then what? He'd get $5,000 for a year of work, would decide not to write software anymore, and all those people who were happy to pay him $100,000 / year for his work no longer have the value of that software? Is that the ideal situation you want to see?
computer programmers should only get paid for their time actually programming.
And how, exactly would that work? In your world, you've abolished copyright. Do you think that money will just float through the air and land on programmers desks each time they write a few lines of code? You mention "performance", but you haven't laid out what that means for software developers, since there is no such thing as performing a piece of software.
Copyrights and patents are unfair, and cater to a small portion of society. Copyrights and patents treat certain industries as if their time is somehow more valuable than the average person.
Nonsense. Copyrights give creators a basis on which to negotiate with the consumer. If the consumer wants to pay the price, if they think the software is worth the money, they can buy it. Without copyrights, creators have zero power in negotiations - it turns software developers into beggars. Even though people want their stuff badly enough to pay for it, they'll pay nothing, essentially getting all the value of the programmers work for free, and paying him nothing in return. Abolishing copyrights treats creators as if their time is worthless, as if their time is somehow less valuable than the average person.
In general, competition drives down prices and revenue in the software industry. You used to pay $40 for a crappy game for the Atari 2600 created by one person. Now, you can get a copy of Killzone 2 for $50. It cost $70 million dollars and was built by hundreds of people. The fact that creators can sell their work multiple times means that they can spread-out the costs on more people -- instead of charging $70 million to one person. All of this means that copyright enables companies and software developers to spend huge amounts of time and effort on a product. They raise the bar for everyone, and then the company next door has to try harder. If you eliminate copyright, then expect the amount of time and effort companies put into products to dramatically decline because it simply doesn't make sense to create valuable stuff for society if it won't repay you. Get used to cheaply-made products.
The doctor and plumber's time is limited, number of copies of digital media isn't, so it's a bad analogy.
It takes time to create digitial media, and the people who make it have limited time. Copyright enables a group of people to collectively pay for the work of the creator. It's not such a bad analogy.
Consider the situation with MS Windows. While they would prefer that people buy it instead of copy it, they prefer people to pirate windows [itwire.com] than use a competing product.
Two problems with that argument.
First: Operating Systems serve as foundations for software developers. People buy operating systems based on the amount of software available for the OS, and software developers write software for platforms where the users are. This creates a self-reinforcing cycle. So operating systems naturally tend towards monopolistic patterns. Microsoft doesn't want people to break out of that cycle because they're on top. Most digital media is not in that situation.
Second: people claim that companies benefit from piracy, but there's something very bizarre in the whole calculation when piracy goes to 100%. If piracy of MS Windows went to 100%, then Microsoft wouldn't be much of a beneficiary. At best, they could charge for consulting and could maybe steer users towards certain products, but most digital media creators aren't in that situation, either.
Even Lawrence Lessig (a piracy advocate, and who I disagree with on a lot of things) says the Microsoft Windows case is a bad example to use when thinking about piracy and whether it has benefits. Here's what Lessig - a piracy advocate - says in his book:
"Finally, we could try to excuse this piracy with the argument that the piracy actually helps the copyright owner. When the Chinese “steal” Windows, that makes the Chinese dependent on Microsoft. Microsoft loses the value of the software that was taken. But it gains users who are used to life in the Microsoft world. Over time, as the nation grows more wealthy, more and more people will buy software rather than steal it. And hence over time, because that buying will benefit Microsoft, Microsoft benefits from the piracy. If instead of pirating Microsoft Windows, the Chinese used the free GNU/Linux operating system, then these Chinese users would not eventually be buying Microsoft. Without piracy, then, Microsoft would lose.
This argument, too, is somewhat true. The addiction strategy is a good one... Still, the argument is not terribly persuasive. We don’t give the alcoholic a defense when he steals his first beer, merely because that will make it more likely that he will buy the next three. Instead, we ordinarily allow businesses to decide for themselves when it is best to give their product away.
Thus, while I understand the pull of these justifications for piracy, and I certainly see the motivation, in my view, in the end, these efforts at justifying commercial piracy simply don’t cut it. This kind of piracy is rampant and just plain wrong. It doesn’t transform the content it steals; it doesn’t transform the market it competes in. It merely gives someone access to something that the law says he should not have. Nothing has changed to draw that law into doubt. This form of piracy is flat out wrong."
Can you think of any seller of a tangible product that would prefer you to steal their product than use a competitor's product?
Didn't Standard Oil lower their prices below wholesale cost (i.e. selling their product at a loss) so that they could drive other oil companies out of business? Not exactly the same thing, but if you were a gas-station, you could reason from that case that it's okay to pay oil companies $90 for $100 worth of gas. You'd be underpaying them - maybe they'd even describe it as stealing $10 - but it might harm their competition, and therefore be "a benefit" to them. I can imagine other scenarios where a company is in bitter compet
"Piracy" is a clever term coined by the music and file industry to associate file copying directly with stealing.
You may be interested to know that "piracy" is also a term used by the cable and satellite-TV companies to refer to using their signal without paying them. Do you really think companies are going to spend $50 million or $100 million dollars putting satellites up into the sky if the whole world says, "I don't have to pay you; but I get all the channels for free"?
Existing information is replicated or copied nothing more and nothing less.
And if everyone treats cable piracy (or music piracy, or software piracy) as a non-crime, then why shouldn't everyone do it? The ultimate end-point of "companies provide a service + you won't pay them for it" is "you don't get the service anymore".
That may not be legal by current law, and there might be an "opportunity loss" for the content owner, but that is not "piracy" nor is it "stealing".
It's as much stealing as not paying your doctor or your plumber for work performed. Sure, you can claim "I didn't take anything physical from you, therefore, you aren't actually losing anything when I don't pay you", but work needs to be done, you want the benefits of that work, but you balk at paying for it. Piracy creates an unsustainable situation which results in people not getting paid for their work, even though you want the benefits of that work. How long do you think people are going to "volunteer" their time and effort just so you can benefit without giving anything back?
Personally, I don't really care if copyright lengths are reduced - even down to 10, 20, or 30 years. I think that's fine. I just think abandoning copyright is a little bit like trying to solve Health Care by not paying doctors. In the end, you'll drive people out of the career and we'll all be a lot worse off.
Pretty much every bookstore I've been to has a literature and philosophy section filled with books by dead people. Many books for various university curricula were written by dead people.
In the current context, we're talking about people who are dead and who's works are still under copyright. Quite a few philosophers' works are out of copyright.
No, it means people don't want to read your book on their screens. They probably read a chapter or two then "upgraded" to a print version. Just wait until electronic readers are cheap and good-quality. Right now, printed versions are still the best versions available.
Welcome to Slashdot. The first thing you have to realize is that a lot of readers are pirates. This means they demand your work for free. Being unwilling to work for free makes you evil. An evil, evil man because you want to pay the bills using your time, hard work, and talent. Logic and debate about it's negative effects on authors, the production of new works, and the long-term effects on society won't get much play here because the question revolves around their own short-term interests.
If their attitudes become widespread, I'd recommend a career in mowing lawns. Sure, it will be less beneficial for society than production of new books, but if society selfishly discards copyright so that they get all the benefit of your works and repay you nothing, then it's hardly worth your time and effort if you're homeless because you can't pay the bills. In the end, their attitude will screw everybody.
"let's hope that copyright doesn't stand in the way."
I think you meant to write: "to hell with authors getting paid for their work, we need free stuff, even if it means we undercut the ability of authors to earn a living - they are our slaves, we are the masters. Welcome to the reverse civil rights movement, bitch!". I find it bizarre how the pirate crowd demands free stuff, but would raise hell if anyone else wanted them to work full-time for free.
Besides, your point about dead authors is moot. Walk into any bookstore. What percentage of books there are older than 10 years? Next to none. Most of the books people read are current.
Exactly. It's one of the myths of the anti-copyright movement that copyrighted works only help society when they fall into the public domain. As if copyrighted software hasn't helped make society wealthier, more productive, and more efficient. If you were to apply to same logic (it only helps society if it's done as charity; i.e. the consumer doesn't have to pay for it) to the rest of the economy, they'd have to conclude that automobiles, airplanes, medicine, and computers haven't helped society at all because they aren't free.
Doctorow is an advocate of piracy. Companies need to earn money for their work. One possible impetus for cloud computing is to act as a defense against piracy - since you need an account, just like World Of Warcraft. What I'd really like to see is Doctorow admit that his pro-piracy stance is fueling the impetus for cloud computing. He simply cannot expect other people to work hard creating the software he uses if he demands getting it all for free. Companies aren't going to sit around and get the rug pulled out from under them.
You tried to claim that lack of copyright would kill production dead,
No, he didn't. You wish he did because that would give you something easier to argue against. The fact of the matter is that copyright-defenders argue that eliminating copyright would have a big effect on significantly reducing digital creation. Pointing out the existence of music before copyright or Linux doesn't get you anywhere under that argument.
Here's one of your strawman arguments:
"Also, music came into existence with copyright. Prior to the 18th century music was a concept unknown to the human race. The 10,000 year old wind instrument recently dug up was clearly as fraudulent as all the dinosaur skulls that ruin nice peoples bedtime stories."
So, if eliminating copyright eliminates 95% (instead of 100%) of all digital content creation, apparently, you think you've won the argument - that copyright should be eliminated. Right. How about this: let's stop paying doctors. SOME doctors would continue to keep working as volunteers and 95% of them would quit. Imagine how much money all of us could save by not paying doctors. Ah ha! I've just proven that "not paying doctors" is a better healthcare system than paying them because I showed that less than 100% of doctors would quit - healthcare would still exist, and we wouldn't have to pay for it!
Just because people in the past struggled-along with a particular system doesn't mean we should go back to it; it doesn't mean it was a good system. Pre-modern people struggled along without modern medicine, relying on sham treatments for "healthcare". They were largely illiterate, denied rights to women, and held slaves. The fact that people in history lived under those bad conditions doesn't prove anything about how we should live today, or what systems best serve society.
To use you're quote: it must be nice to live in a complete fantasy world where you can throw around non-sequiturs to justify your bad economic system where you get everything for free.
Let's see -- TheVelvetFlamebait said, "there is a very good chance that it would never have been created without copyright."
Which you twist into "You assert that without copyright there is no content." and then accuse him of "the old 'Big Lie' method of propaganda". Geez. The fact that you can't argue against him without twisting his words around into a strawman shows just how hollow and dishonest pirates' arguments are.
Don't use the word "reformed" when you talk about the Pirate Party's intentions with copyright. "Reformed" is way too mild, and it definitely smacks of spin. It reminds me of the phrase "collateral damage": a euphemism used to cover-up and soften what's really going on. I remember talking to someone on slashdot a while ago who was advocating complete abolishment of copyright. So, I asked him: should Walmart be allowed to print their own copies of books, music, and software and sell them without paying the original creator anything at all? He replied, "good luck selling them when torrents are available for all of them". Which seems like a pretty good point against the people who argue for "non-commercial" use of copyrighted material. If you allow for non-commercial usage, then "good luck selling them when torrents are available for all of them" also applies to the original creator trying to sell his work. So, people who think they're being moderate by allowing for non-commercial use (e.g. Pirate Party) really aren't that different in the end than people advocating for the complete abolishment of copyright. Calling the Pirate Party's ideas "copyright reform" is hiding the ugly truth. They want to gut copyright, leaving nothing but token scraps.
Red Hat makes money through support, training and consulting services. Sure, they write code, too, but their business isn't really based on writing software - except to the extent that it supports their other activities. The only reason their model works is because they're providing support for a complex software. What percentage of all software is complex enough that you can charge for support for it? Less than one percent?
Why do they _have_ to live from their art? Just because someone says so?
Why do filesharers have to screw over our "common culture" just so that they can get all their entertainment for free?
"Do we as a society at large really want to support criminalizing our fellow filesharers just in order to enable a certain activity (art) to be performed at a professional, for-profit level?"
If you ever want the Godfather, Apocalypse Now, or Star Wars, then YES! If you want to spend the rest of your life getting your entertainment from amateur YouTube clips, then fine - I guess you've got a point.
I know the industry wants that, but do _we_, the democratic majority, really want this?
Yes, it is. I even know filesharers who are aghast at the idea of eliminating copyright. Why? Because the elimination of copyright means that they'll have nothing but amateur junk to pirate.
"Every Windows user should consider making these utilities part of their standard applications"... the very first application they list is "Filezilla". Um, what? Why should every Windows user make Filezilla part of their standard applications?
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If halving your price will let you sell more than twice as many copies, then it is the right thing to do. If 100 people are willing to pay $5, but 10,000 are willing to pay $0.50, then, ignoring credit card processing and hosting costs, you have a choice between making $500 and making $5,000. Which makes more sense? It doesn't matter whether the 9,900 who would buy it for $0.50 but not for $5 would have pirated it, it only matters whether they will buy it at a given price.
This seems to be something that the software (and music) industry forgets.
I think you're wrong in claiming that this is something that the software and music industries forget. I think the software and music industries are more aware of this fact than you are giving them credit for. I also think that consumers almost always pick the side that "it should be cheaper". Whether consumers are right or not, I'm not sure. Maybe they are, maybe they're not. But, I do think consumers are also biased towards lower prices (because that's what's best for them). This bias then plays into the perception that the software and music industries price their product too high, and are somehow ignorant of the "profit per unit" x "units sold" equation.
* I'm not actually agreeing or disagreeing with you that the price should be lower, just questioning how you arrived at that conclusion.
Suppose we want that information: Can you think of a test which would detect displaced sales?
You'd have to be able to read people's minds and know what they would've done in the case where piracy was not available.
I did hear of one developer who posted fake registration codes on the internet, though. He then tracked the IP addresses of people who tried to use the fake codes, and then watched how many of them came back to actually pay for a copy when the registration code didn't work. His numbers were that about 1/3rd of those people bought a copy. I've heard widely varying estimates, though.
In any case, the only thing you can do is try to shut-down piracy because most everyone believes "lost sales" is above 0%. Even worse, the percentage of people who would've bought could vary significantly depending on other external factors. For example, if no one combats piracy, then maybe it will pervade society and then you really are losing sales because piracy has changed from "something poor teenagers do" (where the piracy to lost-sales ratio is, say, 2%) to "something everybody, even the working public does" (where the piracy to lost-sales ratio is, say, 50%). I still remember one girl I know complaining to a friend of mine that she should pirate her music instead of buying off iTunes. This friend of mine and her husband both have very good jobs -- and by "good jobs", I mean that they earn around $150,000 per year together. Yet, here was this girl telling her that she should pirate her music because she couldn't understand why someone would pay instead of not-pay.
Surely the real question is: How many of the people who are using pirated copies would pay for a copy if the pirated copies were not available?
Okay, a reasonable question.
This is the RIAA fallacy, presuming that all pirated copies represent lost revenue.
Wait, what? You suddenly presume that everyone's answer to your first question is "100% of pirates would've bought" and then shoot-down that argument? What if it's less than 100% but more than 0%, which is what nearly everyone (outside lobbyists and laywers) would say? If it's more than 0%, then people can start talking about lost revenue, and I don't think any reasonable person can argue that it's 0%.
Selling games is strictly self-serving also. Apparently, you think its fantastic for companies to be driven by greed, but the customers should be selfless?
Er - what? First, where did he say that it was "fantastic for companies to be driven by greed"?
Second, there is a difference between working and wanting to get paid (as much as possible*) for your work. (*This is what we're talking about when we talk about "typical" corporate greed. Nobody likes the "sucker poor people / ambulence chaser / sell cigarettes even though they kill people" type of corporate greed. Nobody thinks it "fantastic" when companies don't pay the people they're supposed to pay - e.g. their workers, their suppliers, etc.) The type of customer greed you're talking about is "take stuff for free, don't pay people for their work" type of greed. There is a difference - and that difference is how you act and how you compromise your morality in pursuit of that greed.
Okay, if you want a slightly closer comparison, how about this: you can decide, after the meal, whether you want to pay the wholesale cost of the meal (which doesn't include paying or tipping the waiter, or paying the cook, or paying to help the restaurant keep the lights on or their rent). The cost of your meal suddenly gets reduced to the wholesale cost of the ingredients.
Anyway, I think the analogy is flawed for another reason: most people will pay in that kind of a restaurant because of social pressure. People feel guilty, and they don't want dirty looks from the staff, and they don't want people talking behind their backs about being a cheapskate. (In fact, if you look at who tips the most in restaurants, it's people on dates - because they don't want to look cheap, they social approval.)
None of that is true with piracy because it can be done so anonymously. Even worse, because people know that they've cost the restaurant money by consuming the food, they feel bad about paying nothing. Pirates, on the other hand, can sate their unwillingness to pay with excuses that "I'm not taking anything from you" which can drive up the number of people who aren't paying. In other words, if it was legal to screw over a restaurant by not paying, 90% of people would still pay because of the desire for social approval and guilt over costing the restaurant money. But, if it's legal to screw over developers by not paying, 90% or more would feel fine doing it because they are anonymous and they don't *feel* like they are screwing over the developer because they aren't lowering his inventory.
I'd like to take a minute to point out the obvious: despite the fact that many slashdotters complain that software development is a racket because software can be sold over and over for "doing the work one time", the reality is far more complicated. This story is a vindication of the copyright system. It shows that business that depends on copyright are not, in fact, getting rich. The reality is that when we, as software developers spend X years writing a piece of software, we HAVE to sell it multiple times to break-even. The result of us selling a product multiple times allows us to spread-out our costs over many consumers. This lowers the cost for all consumers. For example, if I spend one year writing a product and I want to earn $40,000 per year, I can either sell it once for $40,000. Or, if I'm writing software for the general consumer, I can hope to sell it for $10 to 4,000 people. This means each of those 4,000 people get the benefits of one year's worth of software development. Where else can you get a years-worth of work for $10? The fact that we can sell a product multiple times does NOT mean that we are rich. The fact that we can sell it multiple times means that you (the consumer) get a lot for your money, and it means that we (as software developers) can earn a living. The alternative - abolishing copyright, as was suggested by commenters in the recent Slashdot story "100 Years of Copyright Hysteria" - means we will all lose.
Funny how Slashdot recently added the story: "Road To Riches Doesn't Run Through the App Store", showing how your '$100,000 per year ad-infinitum for one year of work' doesn't reflect the reality of software development.
Actually, they might have done that, but their main...
Well, I wasn't really planning on discussing Standard Oil. It was a peripheral point meant to show that sometimes companies can benefit when you steal their product if it means not paying a competitor. (Also, Lessig's writing also provides another example: alcohol and drugs. I'm sure my local drug dealer would be okay with me stealing a little of his meth, heroin, crack, etc if it meant that I'd come back for more. That's why they give away samples.)
Bruce's work is exclusively available from one "label" so I can't go to Warners or MCA (etc) to see if they can deliver the "same" product at a lower cost.... There's no tiered pricing mechanism in the so-called "legitimate" marketplace, so, for all intents and purposes the price of the item is "posted" (in the same way that Standard "posted" their arbitrarily-set pricing of oil back in the pre-anti trust days).
That may be, but you have alternative artists and alternative media (TV, movies, games, etc). Anyway, you can make the exact same argument about concert tickets -- tickets are only available at the price that Bruce Springsteen sets. Should we allow people to print-up their own tickets, which are entirely valid? Should we allow companies to print-up and sell tickets to Bruce Springsteen's shows even though they have no affiliation whatsoever with Bruce Springsteen? Essentially, that's what piracy is.
horribly skewed by the labels's insistence on enforcing the myth of "scarcity" despite the de facto existence of truly unlimited copies of the same item, etc.
The problem with the "you can make unlimited copies" argument is this: the consumer cost of a product can NEVER reach the marginal cost of a product. I've heard arguments that costs should always fall to the marginal cost. The problem is this: there's development costs. If you have a digital product that only 10,000 people in the world want, you'd better figure out how to pack your development costs into 10,000 sales. If it costs you 50 cents to print a CD, and $50,000 to record an album, then you HAVE to charge $5.50 per copy in order to break-even on 10,000 sales. One problem is that piracy ignores the whole "development cost" part of the equation and pirates think they should only have to pay the marginal cost (50 cents). Now, I'm not claiming that top-selling musicians aren't meeting their production costs, but there's a severe flaw in the pirate's calculation about how much they should pay. If everyone acted like them, then musicians would not be able to pay their production costs, and you'd find that more and more musicians are just recording music live (because that has the lowest production costs). Even worse, I think many of us in the software industry are operating much closer to the red-line of "paying our production costs" than musicians are.
When the band, Radiohead, made a new work available on an honor system they were incredibly successful.
I'm not so sure they were. Further, I can think of plenty of reasons that system doesn't work long term. For one thing, their system of "pay what you want" was no novel that it garnered lots of free press. If bands routinely gave away their music on a "pay what you want" basis, then none of them (not even Radiohead) would get the kind of press that you saw the first time around. So, maybe the free-press drew in 10x as many listeners, and only 10% of them actually paid. In the end, that evens out, but if "pay what you want" becomes routine, then instead of 10x listeners, you'll see smaller and smaller numbers of people hearing about it. Eventually, it could become so commonplace, that bands get zero additional press and no additional listeners from a Radiohead-like stunt. Additionally, it's possible that people were so grateful to Radiohead that they wanted to pay them for their generosity. If "pay what you want" becomes routine, the charity of the public could fade with time. I've heard art
First of all, I don't believe your story. $20? 5,000 copies per year? $100,000? One year of work? Those all sound like nice round, made-up numbers. You say that he "just wrote a program", but then you already have yearly numbers? The fact of the matter is that that scenario is most definitely the exception, not the rule. When I look around at some small software companies, I've seen companies go out of business, cut-back on staff, ask programmers to go without pay for months at a time. They aren't raking it in, driving gold-plated cars like you'd make them out to be.
A far more common situation would be one year of work, $20 a copy, 1,000 copies the first year, 500 copies the second, 200 copies the third year, 100 copies the fourth year. At those numbers, he'd be getting 1800 x $20 = $36,000 for a year of work, and it's spread-out over four years -- which isn't very good pay for a software developer. Jeff Vogel (of the Bottom Feeder blog) laid out how much he got paid for a typical game he created a while back. His numbers were pretty similar to the number I've laid out here.
Further, even if I really did believe that "your friend" made $100,000 per year *AND* he was consistently making $100,000 per year on an ongoing basis (which you don't actually know since he "just wrote a program" -- instead of "he wrote a program five years ago"). Then what? Apparently, he created a lot of value for a lot of people. And, if you abolish copyright, because your jealous, then what? He'd get $5,000 for a year of work, would decide not to write software anymore, and all those people who were happy to pay him $100,000 / year for his work no longer have the value of that software? Is that the ideal situation you want to see?
computer programmers should only get paid for their time actually programming.
And how, exactly would that work? In your world, you've abolished copyright. Do you think that money will just float through the air and land on programmers desks each time they write a few lines of code? You mention "performance", but you haven't laid out what that means for software developers, since there is no such thing as performing a piece of software.
Copyrights and patents are unfair, and cater to a small portion of society. Copyrights and patents treat certain industries as if their time is somehow more valuable than the average person.
Nonsense. Copyrights give creators a basis on which to negotiate with the consumer. If the consumer wants to pay the price, if they think the software is worth the money, they can buy it. Without copyrights, creators have zero power in negotiations - it turns software developers into beggars. Even though people want their stuff badly enough to pay for it, they'll pay nothing, essentially getting all the value of the programmers work for free, and paying him nothing in return. Abolishing copyrights treats creators as if their time is worthless, as if their time is somehow less valuable than the average person.
In general, competition drives down prices and revenue in the software industry. You used to pay $40 for a crappy game for the Atari 2600 created by one person. Now, you can get a copy of Killzone 2 for $50. It cost $70 million dollars and was built by hundreds of people. The fact that creators can sell their work multiple times means that they can spread-out the costs on more people -- instead of charging $70 million to one person. All of this means that copyright enables companies and software developers to spend huge amounts of time and effort on a product. They raise the bar for everyone, and then the company next door has to try harder. If you eliminate copyright, then expect the amount of time and effort companies put into products to dramatically decline because it simply doesn't make sense to create valuable stuff for society if it won't repay you. Get used to cheaply-made products.
It takes time to create digitial media, and the people who make it have limited time. Copyright enables a group of people to collectively pay for the work of the creator. It's not such a bad analogy.
Consider the situation with MS Windows. While they would prefer that people buy it instead of copy it, they prefer people to pirate windows [itwire.com] than use a competing product.
Two problems with that argument.
First: Operating Systems serve as foundations for software developers. People buy operating systems based on the amount of software available for the OS, and software developers write software for platforms where the users are. This creates a self-reinforcing cycle. So operating systems naturally tend towards monopolistic patterns. Microsoft doesn't want people to break out of that cycle because they're on top. Most digital media is not in that situation.
Second: people claim that companies benefit from piracy, but there's something very bizarre in the whole calculation when piracy goes to 100%. If piracy of MS Windows went to 100%, then Microsoft wouldn't be much of a beneficiary. At best, they could charge for consulting and could maybe steer users towards certain products, but most digital media creators aren't in that situation, either.
Even Lawrence Lessig (a piracy advocate, and who I disagree with on a lot of things) says the Microsoft Windows case is a bad example to use when thinking about piracy and whether it has benefits. Here's what Lessig - a piracy advocate - says in his book:
"Finally, we could try to excuse this piracy with the argument that the piracy actually helps the copyright owner. When the Chinese “steal” Windows, that makes the Chinese dependent on Microsoft. Microsoft loses the value of the software that was taken. But it gains users who are used to life in the Microsoft world. Over time, as the nation grows more wealthy, more and more people will buy software rather than steal it. And hence over time, because that buying will benefit Microsoft, Microsoft benefits from the piracy. If instead of pirating Microsoft Windows, the Chinese used the free GNU/Linux operating system, then these Chinese users would not eventually be buying Microsoft. Without piracy, then, Microsoft would lose. This argument, too, is somewhat true. The addiction strategy is a good one... Still, the argument is not terribly persuasive. We don’t give the alcoholic a defense when he steals his first beer, merely because that will make it more likely that he will buy the next three. Instead, we ordinarily allow businesses to decide for themselves when it is best to give their product away. Thus, while I understand the pull of these justifications for piracy, and I certainly see the motivation, in my view, in the end, these efforts at justifying commercial piracy simply don’t cut it. This kind of piracy is rampant and just plain wrong. It doesn’t transform the content it steals; it doesn’t transform the market it competes in. It merely gives someone access to something that the law says he should not have. Nothing has changed to draw that law into doubt. This form of piracy is flat out wrong."
Can you think of any seller of a tangible product that would prefer you to steal their product than use a competitor's product?
Didn't Standard Oil lower their prices below wholesale cost (i.e. selling their product at a loss) so that they could drive other oil companies out of business? Not exactly the same thing, but if you were a gas-station, you could reason from that case that it's okay to pay oil companies $90 for $100 worth of gas. You'd be underpaying them - maybe they'd even describe it as stealing $10 - but it might harm their competition, and therefore be "a benefit" to them. I can imagine other scenarios where a company is in bitter compet
"Piracy" is a clever term coined by the music and file industry to associate file copying directly with stealing.
You may be interested to know that "piracy" is also a term used by the cable and satellite-TV companies to refer to using their signal without paying them. Do you really think companies are going to spend $50 million or $100 million dollars putting satellites up into the sky if the whole world says, "I don't have to pay you; but I get all the channels for free"?
Existing information is replicated or copied nothing more and nothing less.
And if everyone treats cable piracy (or music piracy, or software piracy) as a non-crime, then why shouldn't everyone do it? The ultimate end-point of "companies provide a service + you won't pay them for it" is "you don't get the service anymore".
That may not be legal by current law, and there might be an "opportunity loss" for the content owner, but that is not "piracy" nor is it "stealing".
It's as much stealing as not paying your doctor or your plumber for work performed. Sure, you can claim "I didn't take anything physical from you, therefore, you aren't actually losing anything when I don't pay you", but work needs to be done, you want the benefits of that work, but you balk at paying for it. Piracy creates an unsustainable situation which results in people not getting paid for their work, even though you want the benefits of that work. How long do you think people are going to "volunteer" their time and effort just so you can benefit without giving anything back?
... and the reason music piracy never took off is because libraries also have music.
Personally, I don't really care if copyright lengths are reduced - even down to 10, 20, or 30 years. I think that's fine. I just think abandoning copyright is a little bit like trying to solve Health Care by not paying doctors. In the end, you'll drive people out of the career and we'll all be a lot worse off.
Pretty much every bookstore I've been to has a literature and philosophy section filled with books by dead people. Many books for various university curricula were written by dead people.
In the current context, we're talking about people who are dead and who's works are still under copyright. Quite a few philosophers' works are out of copyright.
No, it means people don't want to read your book on their screens. They probably read a chapter or two then "upgraded" to a print version. Just wait until electronic readers are cheap and good-quality. Right now, printed versions are still the best versions available.
Welcome to Slashdot. The first thing you have to realize is that a lot of readers are pirates. This means they demand your work for free. Being unwilling to work for free makes you evil. An evil, evil man because you want to pay the bills using your time, hard work, and talent. Logic and debate about it's negative effects on authors, the production of new works, and the long-term effects on society won't get much play here because the question revolves around their own short-term interests.
If their attitudes become widespread, I'd recommend a career in mowing lawns. Sure, it will be less beneficial for society than production of new books, but if society selfishly discards copyright so that they get all the benefit of your works and repay you nothing, then it's hardly worth your time and effort if you're homeless because you can't pay the bills. In the end, their attitude will screw everybody.
"let's hope that copyright doesn't stand in the way."
I think you meant to write: "to hell with authors getting paid for their work, we need free stuff, even if it means we undercut the ability of authors to earn a living - they are our slaves, we are the masters. Welcome to the reverse civil rights movement, bitch!". I find it bizarre how the pirate crowd demands free stuff, but would raise hell if anyone else wanted them to work full-time for free.
Besides, your point about dead authors is moot. Walk into any bookstore. What percentage of books there are older than 10 years? Next to none. Most of the books people read are current.
Exactly. It's one of the myths of the anti-copyright movement that copyrighted works only help society when they fall into the public domain. As if copyrighted software hasn't helped make society wealthier, more productive, and more efficient. If you were to apply to same logic (it only helps society if it's done as charity; i.e. the consumer doesn't have to pay for it) to the rest of the economy, they'd have to conclude that automobiles, airplanes, medicine, and computers haven't helped society at all because they aren't free.
Doctorow is an advocate of piracy. Companies need to earn money for their work. One possible impetus for cloud computing is to act as a defense against piracy - since you need an account, just like World Of Warcraft. What I'd really like to see is Doctorow admit that his pro-piracy stance is fueling the impetus for cloud computing. He simply cannot expect other people to work hard creating the software he uses if he demands getting it all for free. Companies aren't going to sit around and get the rug pulled out from under them.
No, he didn't. You wish he did because that would give you something easier to argue against. The fact of the matter is that copyright-defenders argue that eliminating copyright would have a big effect on significantly reducing digital creation. Pointing out the existence of music before copyright or Linux doesn't get you anywhere under that argument.
Here's one of your strawman arguments:
So, if eliminating copyright eliminates 95% (instead of 100%) of all digital content creation, apparently, you think you've won the argument - that copyright should be eliminated. Right. How about this: let's stop paying doctors. SOME doctors would continue to keep working as volunteers and 95% of them would quit. Imagine how much money all of us could save by not paying doctors. Ah ha! I've just proven that "not paying doctors" is a better healthcare system than paying them because I showed that less than 100% of doctors would quit - healthcare would still exist, and we wouldn't have to pay for it!
Just because people in the past struggled-along with a particular system doesn't mean we should go back to it; it doesn't mean it was a good system. Pre-modern people struggled along without modern medicine, relying on sham treatments for "healthcare". They were largely illiterate, denied rights to women, and held slaves. The fact that people in history lived under those bad conditions doesn't prove anything about how we should live today, or what systems best serve society.
To use you're quote: it must be nice to live in a complete fantasy world where you can throw around non-sequiturs to justify your bad economic system where you get everything for free.
Let's see -- TheVelvetFlamebait said, "there is a very good chance that it would never have been created without copyright."
Which you twist into "You assert that without copyright there is no content." and then accuse him of "the old 'Big Lie' method of propaganda". Geez. The fact that you can't argue against him without twisting his words around into a strawman shows just how hollow and dishonest pirates' arguments are.
For a better indie game, consider World of Goo: two coders, $10,000 development (including food and rent)
"According to Carmel, the tiny two-man company spent $96,000 during a span of two years as it created World of Goo."
Don't use the word "reformed" when you talk about the Pirate Party's intentions with copyright. "Reformed" is way too mild, and it definitely smacks of spin. It reminds me of the phrase "collateral damage": a euphemism used to cover-up and soften what's really going on. I remember talking to someone on slashdot a while ago who was advocating complete abolishment of copyright. So, I asked him: should Walmart be allowed to print their own copies of books, music, and software and sell them without paying the original creator anything at all? He replied, "good luck selling them when torrents are available for all of them". Which seems like a pretty good point against the people who argue for "non-commercial" use of copyrighted material. If you allow for non-commercial usage, then "good luck selling them when torrents are available for all of them" also applies to the original creator trying to sell his work. So, people who think they're being moderate by allowing for non-commercial use (e.g. Pirate Party) really aren't that different in the end than people advocating for the complete abolishment of copyright. Calling the Pirate Party's ideas "copyright reform" is hiding the ugly truth. They want to gut copyright, leaving nothing but token scraps.
Red Hat makes money through support, training and consulting services. Sure, they write code, too, but their business isn't really based on writing software - except to the extent that it supports their other activities. The only reason their model works is because they're providing support for a complex software. What percentage of all software is complex enough that you can charge for support for it? Less than one percent?
Why do they _have_ to live from their art? Just because someone says so?
Why do filesharers have to screw over our "common culture" just so that they can get all their entertainment for free?
"Do we as a society at large really want to support criminalizing our fellow filesharers just in order to enable a certain activity (art) to be performed at a professional, for-profit level?"
If you ever want the Godfather, Apocalypse Now, or Star Wars, then YES! If you want to spend the rest of your life getting your entertainment from amateur YouTube clips, then fine - I guess you've got a point.
I know the industry wants that, but do _we_, the democratic majority, really want this?
Yes, it is. I even know filesharers who are aghast at the idea of eliminating copyright. Why? Because the elimination of copyright means that they'll have nothing but amateur junk to pirate.
"Every Windows user should consider making these utilities part of their standard applications" ... the very first application they list is "Filezilla". Um, what? Why should every Windows user make Filezilla part of their standard applications?