Quote:
Originally Posted by pramjockey
Honestly, Goober, all you're really doing is trying to rationalize stealing. The music companies are not just CD producers. They specialize in the discovery, mixing, recording, and promotion of music and musicians. They have a right to protect themselves from stealing as much as a producer of any other product or service.
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It ain't stealing, it's copyright breach and the two are very different beasts indeed.
If I steal a car the car is no longer available to the rightful owner. If I copy a software CD the original is still 100% available to the owner. In both cases the original manufacturer is not denied any profit - as there is no profit to be made from people who are not willing to spend. The insurance industry (may vary from region to region) will only cover the loss of a physical CD (<50 cents) not the IP on it as it is not stolen.
Unless you are a fundamentalist, one is more wrong than the other. Little Johnny grabbing a copy of Photoshop from a torrent to make funny pictures of his big sister is harmless compared to him going out and 'jacking cars for remanufacture. It may even lead to a fulfilling career in graphics design where he will go on to recommend the tools he grew up with to every employer he comes in contact with. Employers generally buy.
I have worked in software sales most of my working life. These were highly specialised, big ticket ($10,000 plus) software tools. My market territory had several known users (and probably more) of our product that had not paid for their copy. As I was paid for my sales performance you might think this would worry me. Not at all. Instead of attacking these people through the legal means I had available to me I made them my "friends", got to know them and learnt that they were never a good sales prospect to begin with but maybe one day that would. Should I waste my time or follow up genuine leads? Extracting $2K to $10K plus each from 3,000 users is hard work unless your product is quality, and (most of the time) it was.
The bottom line is people buy quality at competitive prices. They copy crap when it's convenient and wouldn't be real worried if they couldn't get hold of it. Companies need to respond to this and do some serious evaluation of their product to determine what is it about their product that would compel people to pay for it - then stop bitching and go out and sell it. If there is a segment that just won't pay no matter what you do - forget 'em there are plenty who do, just look at Microsoft.
Another approach is to sell the distribution systems rather than rely on per unit sales. There are any number of value adding distribution models that can be implemented making profit from advertising sales and added services. Many of these are used today (eg Linux) and the greedy companies just need to get with the program.