Obviously I have no way of knowing, but I suspect they aren't selling any copies at $180, and that that price was chosen just to be a slight discount off the physical version. Even researchers with book budgets are going to think hard before spending that kind of money on a book. If that's the case, then bringing the price out of the stratospheric range might increase profits.
In five years, the book will be 5 more years out of date, and I will have moved on to different research projects, making it far less valuable to me than it would be now. Because of its limited shelf life, in my case no sale now likely means no sale forever.
They could lower the price to $5 to get my sale, but then nobody would pay $50 so they'd have to sell 10x as many copies to make the same profit, a dubious proposition at best... And yes, they can (and do) wait for a few months and start reducing the price to pick up additional sales, but that doesn't really solve the problem, especially if continued forever.
It seems like some publishers/content owners do this, but others don't. You gave the example of games (I myself have picked up $5 and $10 specials on Steam); it also happens with books (paperbacks are released later and cost significantly less).
Thing is, I doubt it will happen with the book I gave as an example. It's too limited an audience to justify doing a paperback version. Yet the book was published in 2008. It's five years old, and the e-book price is still $180. I'd imagine they've probably sold most of the physical library copies they're ever going to. Why not reduce the e-book price so that people might actually buy it?
Or, what I'd really like to see is an agreement between publishers and print-on-demand services, so that I can buy a deeply discounted electronic version, and have it printed cheaply elsewhere and mailed to me.
And if you want it, then surely you should agree that it is _worth_ paying for. You can't seriously argue that you want it but it's not worth money.
The problem is, that logic runs into pricing issues. Take this book for example. At the time I wrote this post, the new price was $218, the Kindle edition was $180, and used copies also sold for $180. I would be happy to pay for that book, but not $180, and certainly not $218. I might pay $30.
In reality, I'll pay nothing, since it's so expensive that I'll just have to rely on the library's copy.
Now you can argue that this is a special case since it's a limited run academic book, but the point is that when there is a gap between what someone is willing to pay, and the actual price of the item, you have a lost sale. With respect to physical goods, maybe that's a sale you don't want, since you'd have to take a loss. But with respect to copyrighted goods, in many cases any price is going to net you a profit.
You're definitely right with respect to patents. However, I'm not sure the R&D Active/Inactive distinction matters as much for trademarks and copyrights.
Trademarks are valuable to all kinds of companies, so for trademarks I think the relevant category probably is "all companies", not "R&D active" companies.
Copyrights are more complicated. The survey explicitly excludes the development of most copyrighted products from the definition of R&D: "R&D also does not include literary, artistic, or historical projects, such as films, music, or books and other publications" (pg. 399). So there will be plenty of non-R&D active companies that stand to benefit significantly from copyright.
But, their definition of R&D would include software development, which falls under copyright (and possibly patent as well). So with respect to copyright, it's not obvious which category of company (All, R&D Active, or non-R&D active) would be best to use.
I looked more closely, and I think GP is right. I was misled by the initial description in the survey, but in the data tables they note that R&D active company statistic "are representative of companies located in United States that performed or funded R&D," and the sample does in fact include some companies that have reported zero R&D.
The survey is by definition confined to the target population of companies with 5+ employees and that "perform" R&D. However, they break down results and report by "all companies" as well as those that are especially R&D active versus those that still "perform" R&D, but not are not particularly R&D active. But "not active" does not mean not performing R&D at all.
I'm actually planning on merging this survey data by NAICS codes with other data from the Statistics of US Businesses and Economic Census surveys to look at precisely these questions. It's not a huge amount of work to do this, but it's not trivial, either.
FWIW, I was still surprised at the survey data in isolation... e.g., TFA notes that even if you look at a sector in which you'd expect people to say that IP is important (like software), only about half say that is important.
You do realise that trademark protection exists with or without registration, right? Registration confers additional rights to your trademark, but even without registration, other businesses are not permitted to imitate you... Therefore, even without taking the step of registration, there is still formal intellectual property protection, which the GP is correct in saying that businesses that trade on their reputation rely on.
Yes, I've take several IP law courses. The problem with this logic in my mind, however, is that there is no way to directly trace the effects of formal protection to the empirical outcomes we witness in the world.
E.g., you could say the same exact thing about copyright. Copyright applies whether you register or not, but registration confers important advantages. Does this mean that everyone who creates anything copyrightable "relies" on copyright?
If a business wasn't able to have exclusivity over the name tied to their reputation, such a reputation would be very difficult to foster in the first place.
That's obviously true, but it assumes that trademark law is the only thing providing exclusivity. Or to put it another way, it assumes that every competitor is waiting to jump in and rip off someone's name and image, and the only thing preventing them is trademark law. I don't buy into that logic for tangible property: I don't assume that everyone is planning to steal from me, and the only thing restraining them is the law.
Your local "Quickie Laundromat" may say they don't care about IP. But if I open another business right next door called "Quickie Laundromat", and if I copy their ads and signs word-for-word, they might change their minds.
Thing is, this survey probably suggests that your scenario doesn't happen that often. In your example, I'd suspect laundromats tend not to open up right next to each other unless there's adequate demand (e.g., next to a university). And even if they do, washing clothes is not a particularly differentiable product. Sure, maybe one laundromat has machines that always work and a change machine that is well stocked, and the competitor wants to trade on the good name of Quickie Laundromat... but that ruse is only going to work one time, if that.
IP is more than just patents. It also encompasses trademarks and copyrights. 10% say they care about IP. The other 90% don't understand what IP is.
TFA states that when directly asked about trademarks, "87.2% of businesses reported that trademarks were 'not important' to them." Perhaps most business owners don't know what trademarks are (though that seems a bit unlikely), or perhaps they just don't see value in the formal protection offered by trademark law. Instead they're probably relying on informal branding, reputation, word of mouth, the community, etc. There are certainly intangible aspects here, but they don't require trademark law to function. Trademark law helps deal with disputes, but perhaps those disputes are less likely than we might think.
The article doesn't claim that IP doesn't matter to grocery stores. It just points out that it doesn't make sense to attribute the entire employment figures of all grocery stores across the U.S. to intellectual property. Which is precisely what the Patent Office's report did.
It may be fair to call grocery stores an IP-intensive industry, but if it is, that's a definition of "IP intensive" that most people aren't thinking of when they talk about patent and copyright policy.
I'm still waiting for the pdf to download, but I can smell the BS from here. Does anyone really believe that most businesses wouldn't mind if a competitor misappropriated their name and opened a competing establishment with the same name across the street?
No, no one believes that. However, apparently this isn't a big enough concern for most businesses to get them to respond that trademarks are "somewhat" or "very" important. I wonder how realistic the "You've Got Mail" scenario of theft of goodwill for the Shop Around The Corner bookstore actually is.
For most small mom and pop businesses, the reputation attached to their trademark is EVERYTHING.
Well, their reputation may be everything, but I'm guessing many businesses don't even bother filing a trademark registration. I think one of the takeaways from the survey may be that formal intellectual property protection isn't always valuable to most businesses, even though intangible things like reputation may be very valuable.
According to the NSF, the Business Research and Development and Innovation Survey (BRDIS) “is an annual, nationally representative sample survey of approximately 43,000 companies, including companies in manufacturing and nonmanufacturing industries. The target population for BRDIS consists of all for-profit companies that have five or more employees and that perform R&D in the United States.”
It is logical... unless you're the U.S. Patent Office, which claims that IP is responsible for 40 million jobs and 35% of the U.S. GDP.
The survey results throw a wrench in the narrative that IP is critical to "the economy." It's clearly critical in certain industries, or for certain companies, but if 90% of businesses say its not important, blanket statements about how IP an economic "engine", etc. need to go.
But IP also includes trademarks, which in theory are relevant to virtually every business... unless maybe you supply a purely fungible commodity.
That said, I think you're right. When I considered my experiences with small businesses (a cabinet shop and a veterinary hospital), I realized that not even trademarks were particularly relevant. There was simple no real danger of someone ripping off the name of the business... it wouldn't really make sense to do so.
I'd love to see how politicians and government officials react when confronted with this kind of survey data.
Sounds good in theory, just so long as the "remote provisioning" can be handled by the user of the device, and the user doesn't have to ask permission from anyone.
I bet most of the commenters here don't complain when their favorite sportsperson gets paid millions.
I would like to see how pro sports salaries/contracts would be affected if teams were responsible for the cost of building their stadiums, rather than taxpayers. Let's remove the public subsidy and see if pro sports remain a viable financial enterprise.
This draft text is dated August 30, 2013. You're absolutely right that earlier (and later) texts will likely reveal very different patterns. So what I did is really just a snapshot in time. Ideally, I would have had multiple texts in chronological order, which would make it possible to provide an animation of changing patterns.
However, I'd argue that having any insight into the process, even if it's just a single point in time, is better than nothing. We'd all like to see more transparent negotiations, along with legitimate releases of draft texts, but for now we're stuck with Wikileaks.
I'm adding a table showing the ratio of sole country proposals to total proposals from that country. It does change the order, though the main observations remain intact. Japan, the US, and Canada, come at the top, Malaysia and Brunei at the bottom.
Actually, the graphs did not entirely match what I expected to see. I expected far more concordance between the US and Australia, the US and Japan, and Australia and New Zealand than what I actually saw. I wrote the analysis after generating the graphs in an attempt to explain what I was seeing. FWIW, one of the reasons I did this was to contribute something to the discussion of the TPP that was actually based on data, rather than just a general "feel" one gets after reading the leaked text.
I did note in the article that Japan appears to be just as isolated. But I don't know how Japanese businesses influence their government nearly as well as how I know US businesses influence the U.S. Trade Representative, so I didn't focus on that in the article.
As for the Peru/Chile statement, I called such connections "natural" based primarily on geographical proximity or shared languages. I think it's entirely reasonable to expect more overlap of positions in an international trade negotiation between countries on the same continent, speaking the same language, than between far-flung continents with totally different languages. Such a connection doesn't mean anything more than that the countries agree on an issue in the text.
Definitely true in most sciences, but not the norm in political science (yet). A lot of political scientists are still using proprietary packages... in my department, I think there are only two people (myself included) who use R. Everyone else uses Stata. For text processing, some people use Nvivo rather than free alternatives. Also, code-sharing for facilitating replication is still not standard practice, though some journals are now requiring submitters to address this.
Author of the article here. Michael Simeone from the University of Illinois asked for my data and code so that he could experiment with some D3 visualizations. He did a little bit last night, and I thought I'd share the results.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously I have no way of knowing, but I suspect they aren't selling any copies at $180, and that that price was chosen just to be a slight discount off the physical version. Even researchers with book budgets are going to think hard before spending that kind of money on a book. If that's the case, then bringing the price out of the stratospheric range might increase profits.
In five years, the book will be 5 more years out of date, and I will have moved on to different research projects, making it far less valuable to me than it would be now. Because of its limited shelf life, in my case no sale now likely means no sale forever.
They could lower the price to $5 to get my sale, but then nobody would pay $50 so they'd have to sell 10x as many copies to make the same profit, a dubious proposition at best... And yes, they can (and do) wait for a few months and start reducing the price to pick up additional sales, but that doesn't really solve the problem, especially if continued forever.
It seems like some publishers/content owners do this, but others don't. You gave the example of games (I myself have picked up $5 and $10 specials on Steam); it also happens with books (paperbacks are released later and cost significantly less).
Thing is, I doubt it will happen with the book I gave as an example. It's too limited an audience to justify doing a paperback version. Yet the book was published in 2008. It's five years old, and the e-book price is still $180. I'd imagine they've probably sold most of the physical library copies they're ever going to. Why not reduce the e-book price so that people might actually buy it?
Or, what I'd really like to see is an agreement between publishers and print-on-demand services, so that I can buy a deeply discounted electronic version, and have it printed cheaply elsewhere and mailed to me.
And if you want it, then surely you should agree that it is _worth_ paying for. You can't seriously argue that you want it but it's not worth money.
The problem is, that logic runs into pricing issues. Take this book for example. At the time I wrote this post, the new price was $218, the Kindle edition was $180, and used copies also sold for $180. I would be happy to pay for that book, but not $180, and certainly not $218. I might pay $30.
In reality, I'll pay nothing, since it's so expensive that I'll just have to rely on the library's copy.
Now you can argue that this is a special case since it's a limited run academic book, but the point is that when there is a gap between what someone is willing to pay, and the actual price of the item, you have a lost sale. With respect to physical goods, maybe that's a sale you don't want, since you'd have to take a loss. But with respect to copyrighted goods, in many cases any price is going to net you a profit.
You're definitely right with respect to patents. However, I'm not sure the R&D Active/Inactive distinction matters as much for trademarks and copyrights.
Trademarks are valuable to all kinds of companies, so for trademarks I think the relevant category probably is "all companies", not "R&D active" companies.
Copyrights are more complicated. The survey explicitly excludes the development of most copyrighted products from the definition of R&D: "R&D also does not include literary, artistic, or historical projects, such as films, music, or books and other publications" (pg. 399). So there will be plenty of non-R&D active companies that stand to benefit significantly from copyright.
But, their definition of R&D would include software development, which falls under copyright (and possibly patent as well). So with respect to copyright, it's not obvious which category of company (All, R&D Active, or non-R&D active) would be best to use.
I looked more closely, and I think GP is right. I was misled by the initial description in the survey, but in the data tables they note that R&D active company statistic "are representative of companies located in United States that performed or funded R&D," and the sample does in fact include some companies that have reported zero R&D.
The survey is by definition confined to the target population of companies with 5+ employees and that "perform" R&D. However, they break down results and report by "all companies" as well as those that are especially R&D active versus those that still "perform" R&D, but not are not particularly R&D active. But "not active" does not mean not performing R&D at all.
I'm actually planning on merging this survey data by NAICS codes with other data from the Statistics of US Businesses and Economic Census surveys to look at precisely these questions. It's not a huge amount of work to do this, but it's not trivial, either.
FWIW, I was still surprised at the survey data in isolation... e.g., TFA notes that even if you look at a sector in which you'd expect people to say that IP is important (like software), only about half say that is important.
You do realise that trademark protection exists with or without registration, right? Registration confers additional rights to your trademark, but even without registration, other businesses are not permitted to imitate you... Therefore, even without taking the step of registration, there is still formal intellectual property protection, which the GP is correct in saying that businesses that trade on their reputation rely on.
Yes, I've take several IP law courses. The problem with this logic in my mind, however, is that there is no way to directly trace the effects of formal protection to the empirical outcomes we witness in the world.
E.g., you could say the same exact thing about copyright. Copyright applies whether you register or not, but registration confers important advantages. Does this mean that everyone who creates anything copyrightable "relies" on copyright?
If a business wasn't able to have exclusivity over the name tied to their reputation, such a reputation would be very difficult to foster in the first place.
That's obviously true, but it assumes that trademark law is the only thing providing exclusivity. Or to put it another way, it assumes that every competitor is waiting to jump in and rip off someone's name and image, and the only thing preventing them is trademark law. I don't buy into that logic for tangible property: I don't assume that everyone is planning to steal from me, and the only thing restraining them is the law.
Your local "Quickie Laundromat" may say they don't care about IP. But if I open another business right next door called "Quickie Laundromat", and if I copy their ads and signs word-for-word, they might change their minds.
Thing is, this survey probably suggests that your scenario doesn't happen that often. In your example, I'd suspect laundromats tend not to open up right next to each other unless there's adequate demand (e.g., next to a university). And even if they do, washing clothes is not a particularly differentiable product. Sure, maybe one laundromat has machines that always work and a change machine that is well stocked, and the competitor wants to trade on the good name of Quickie Laundromat... but that ruse is only going to work one time, if that.
IP is more than just patents. It also encompasses trademarks and copyrights. 10% say they care about IP. The other 90% don't understand what IP is.
TFA states that when directly asked about trademarks, "87.2% of businesses reported that trademarks were 'not important' to them." Perhaps most business owners don't know what trademarks are (though that seems a bit unlikely), or perhaps they just don't see value in the formal protection offered by trademark law. Instead they're probably relying on informal branding, reputation, word of mouth, the community, etc. There are certainly intangible aspects here, but they don't require trademark law to function. Trademark law helps deal with disputes, but perhaps those disputes are less likely than we might think.
The article doesn't claim that IP doesn't matter to grocery stores. It just points out that it doesn't make sense to attribute the entire employment figures of all grocery stores across the U.S. to intellectual property. Which is precisely what the Patent Office's report did.
It may be fair to call grocery stores an IP-intensive industry, but if it is, that's a definition of "IP intensive" that most people aren't thinking of when they talk about patent and copyright policy.
I'm still waiting for the pdf to download, but I can smell the BS from here. Does anyone really believe that most businesses wouldn't mind if a competitor misappropriated their name and opened a competing establishment with the same name across the street?
No, no one believes that. However, apparently this isn't a big enough concern for most businesses to get them to respond that trademarks are "somewhat" or "very" important. I wonder how realistic the "You've Got Mail" scenario of theft of goodwill for the Shop Around The Corner bookstore actually is.
For most small mom and pop businesses, the reputation attached to their trademark is EVERYTHING.
Well, their reputation may be everything, but I'm guessing many businesses don't even bother filing a trademark registration. I think one of the takeaways from the survey may be that formal intellectual property protection isn't always valuable to most businesses, even though intangible things like reputation may be very valuable.
From TFA:
According to the NSF, the Business Research and Development and Innovation Survey (BRDIS) “is an annual, nationally representative sample survey of approximately 43,000 companies, including companies in manufacturing and nonmanufacturing industries. The target population for BRDIS consists of all for-profit companies that have five or more employees and that perform R&D in the United States.”
It is logical... unless you're the U.S. Patent Office, which claims that IP is responsible for 40 million jobs and 35% of the U.S. GDP.
The survey results throw a wrench in the narrative that IP is critical to "the economy." It's clearly critical in certain industries, or for certain companies, but if 90% of businesses say its not important, blanket statements about how IP an economic "engine", etc. need to go.
The problem with this logic is that the survey specifically targets businesses performing R&D. From TFA:
"The target population for BRDIS consists of all for-profit companies that have five or more employees and that perform R&D in the United States.”
But IP also includes trademarks, which in theory are relevant to virtually every business... unless maybe you supply a purely fungible commodity.
That said, I think you're right. When I considered my experiences with small businesses (a cabinet shop and a veterinary hospital), I realized that not even trademarks were particularly relevant. There was simple no real danger of someone ripping off the name of the business... it wouldn't really make sense to do so.
I'd love to see how politicians and government officials react when confronted with this kind of survey data.
Sounds good in theory, just so long as the "remote provisioning" can be handled by the user of the device, and the user doesn't have to ask permission from anyone.
If you think a Harley (from TFA) can sustain 100 MPH.
I bet most of the commenters here don't complain when their favorite sportsperson gets paid millions.
I would like to see how pro sports salaries/contracts would be affected if teams were responsible for the cost of building their stadiums, rather than taxpayers. Let's remove the public subsidy and see if pro sports remain a viable financial enterprise.
This draft text is dated August 30, 2013. You're absolutely right that earlier (and later) texts will likely reveal very different patterns. So what I did is really just a snapshot in time. Ideally, I would have had multiple texts in chronological order, which would make it possible to provide an animation of changing patterns.
However, I'd argue that having any insight into the process, even if it's just a single point in time, is better than nothing. We'd all like to see more transparent negotiations, along with legitimate releases of draft texts, but for now we're stuck with Wikileaks.
I'm adding a table showing the ratio of sole country proposals to total proposals from that country. It does change the order, though the main observations remain intact. Japan, the US, and Canada, come at the top, Malaysia and Brunei at the bottom.
Actually, the graphs did not entirely match what I expected to see. I expected far more concordance between the US and Australia, the US and Japan, and Australia and New Zealand than what I actually saw. I wrote the analysis after generating the graphs in an attempt to explain what I was seeing. FWIW, one of the reasons I did this was to contribute something to the discussion of the TPP that was actually based on data, rather than just a general "feel" one gets after reading the leaked text.
I did note in the article that Japan appears to be just as isolated. But I don't know how Japanese businesses influence their government nearly as well as how I know US businesses influence the U.S. Trade Representative, so I didn't focus on that in the article.
As for the Peru/Chile statement, I called such connections "natural" based primarily on geographical proximity or shared languages. I think it's entirely reasonable to expect more overlap of positions in an international trade negotiation between countries on the same continent, speaking the same language, than between far-flung continents with totally different languages. Such a connection doesn't mean anything more than that the countries agree on an issue in the text.
Definitely true in most sciences, but not the norm in political science (yet). A lot of political scientists are still using proprietary packages... in my department, I think there are only two people (myself included) who use R. Everyone else uses Stata. For text processing, some people use Nvivo rather than free alternatives. Also, code-sharing for facilitating replication is still not standard practice, though some journals are now requiring submitters to address this.
I did not try that, but the R igraph package does have a "spring" layout, so I may give it a shot. Thanks!
I've never used Python, though I did read this article from R-bloggers yesterday that made me think I should probably start learning it.
I used Perl mostly because it's what I grew up with, though I rarely do that kind of coding anymore.
Author of the article here. Michael Simeone from the University of Illinois asked for my data and code so that he could experiment with some D3 visualizations. He did a little bit last night, and I thought I'd share the results.