The people who choose not to copy the game without paying are depriving themselves of the benefit of the game even though they don't have to vs. the people who decide its ok to play the game even though they can't or won't pay. So what is the difference between the two people? The economics is factored out (neither person pays) so the difference would seem to be one of personal morals.
I certainly don't have all the answers to this one and I certainly can't claim sainthood when it comes to software piracy. I have copied more than my fair share of programs, but, like Jeff, this was mainly done in my younger days. Now I don't. You can argue that when I did copy things it was in my younger days when I didn't have any money and so I justified it by saying it was OK because I wasn't hurting anyone, and now I don't because I have more money and can afford it. That is the argument that Jeff makes to explain why he doesn't pirate software anymore. But I think the "now I'm older" may have more to do with it than he realizes. I could logically say that I'm not depriving someone of a sale, but emotionally I could not reconcile getting value from something without reciprocating. So in some sense I feel I would be depriving the creators of realizing the value they have created for me. For me, the moral/emotional balance sheet wouldn't add up somehow. From a pure economic standpoint there should be no reason for me to pay for something when I can get it for free. However these arguments are complicated by the fact that I am a programmer by trade so perhaps I feel more of a need to reciprocate to my own kind than I would otherwise.
Thank you for depriving me of a great deal of software that would otherwise not demand per-seat registration and kernel module license monitors. Thank you for depriving me of a great deal of software that would not cost $600 retail if it wasn't so hard to keep users from circulating it.
Nonsense. The vendors set the price to maximise the profit from those people who buy their product. This is the same whether some people pirate or not.
Depriving how, exactly? I'm talking about non-sales. I am talking about people who literally DO NOT HAVE ANY MORE MONEY. If they download something, how can you count that as a 'lost sale' or a 'loss to piracy'?
You just can't. That's making something from nothing.
Most of the people who pirate Illustrator do not "literally have no money". They simply choose not to spend it on Illustrator. So they take it, and let people like me pay extra to make up for it.
And maybe the small fraction of people who literally don't have $600 should spend $30 on Lineform, or help out with Inkscape, instead of just taking the $600 piece of software and pretending that the rest of the market doesn't exist.
I think his point is that the software probably wouldn't cost $600 if they weren't figuring in theft. Things in retail brick & morter stores also cost more due to "shrinkage".
Stealing has a price whether we chose to "logic" it away or not. Think of it this way: if everyone just did as you suggested and took all games for free, wouldn't most companies just stop producing games?
Stealing does NOT always have a price. And using shrinkage is a fallacious argument. Physical goods in store have an actual production cost. What's the cost of dragging and dropping a file to make a copy of it?
A few cents for your time, maybe fifty cents to a dollar for storage costs? It's not equivalent to a an actual physical good which could have a material cost of anywhere from a few cents, to hundreds (thousands) of dollars.
Of course it does. Shrinkage isn't fallacious, companies look at how much they lost to theft and adjust their prices accordingly.
What do you think companies do when they see that their product has an 82% piracy rate? They think "we only made 18% of what we should have on this!!!". What they do after that depends on a lot of things, but some people stop making things, some jack up the price to their real customers and some implement ridiculous things like DRM that even terrorize their customers. But all these things have a price and most of us pay it one way or another.
This is rubbish. Companies set their prices to maximise their returns. If they could make more money out of you by raising their prices they would, piracy or not.
Nobody is saying companies would lower their prices just to be nice; they're saying that if the market for a piece of software was broader, because it included the people pirating it, prices would come down naturally as the vendor addressed the market to maximize their return.
As it stands, there is no point to making Photoshop cheaper, because even if it cost $200 instead of $500, a huge portion of home users would still just steal it.
Sure, companies are in business to make money. But do you truly believe that piracy has no cost? It should be an extremely simple logical exercise to prove it does: just imagine if everyone always did it in every situation.
I don't think it causes an increase in the price of goods, although I don't doubt that an increase in piracy leads to a decreasing number of products being developed.
You don't see how it could increase the price? Think about all the money (e.g. developer/researcher time) being spent on trying to stop piracy. These are costs that are passed directly onto the customers.
That's complete nonsense. A software company will always choose the price they believe will generate the most revenue.
If they are acting rationally they would choose exactly the same price regardless of whether the software cost $100 to produce or $100 million.
You are suggesting that there is some other consideration involved, which necessarily means that the company will act against their own interests and price their software irrationally.
If 3x as many people will buy your product at 1/2 the price, it's rational to cut your price in half. However, if the 1/2 price targets a market segment 90% populated by software pirates, everyone gets to pay 2x as much, including the 10% of honest people downmarket.
So what you advocate is the ajkirwin planned economy, where things cost what ajkirwin thinks they should cost. Games: fifty cents to maybe a dollar of storage costs. Can I lobby you on prescription drugs? The marginal cost of a pill is like $0.05.
I spend money on movies and games and don't pirate software, but...
There is a finite patent of prescription drugs so over time they go to their marginal cost. Anyway, I see little advantage to extending copy write on games over 7 years. The idea that you can make money selling copy's of something who's author died 65 years ago seems stupid. Society decided to extended copy write protection to promote people making things, pretending it has value beyond that is silly.
PS: I hereby copy write every number from 1 to (12345 ^ 12345)^ 12345 converted to binary, which covers every software that is ever going to be produced until the end of time. Now pay me money.
That's an interesting question too, but not really related to what I was asking and probably off-topic for this thread.
I'm serious.
If somebody has no money and wants to use some expensive commercial software, what is the cost to the copyright owner of letting them use of that software for free?
None at all? Maybe even less than that?
Now what is the benefit to that person and to society in general?
I'm sorry, but the cost of a piece of software has nothing to do with the cost of delivery of that software. The point of selling software is for a company to make money and survive. Just because there is 0 cost involved to deliver a piece of software doesn't mean that there is no value associated with a pirated license. Frankly, the cost to the company should have absolutely nothing to do with the cost the consumer pays, other than the fact that the consumer should pay more than the cost to the company.
The idea that people have that just because something costs a company a small amount or nothing to deliver somehow gives them the right to steal it is mind boggling. It doesn't matter how much it costs the company, it's none of your business. What is of import is what the company says the item costs.
Taking that for free without paying is stealing, no matter how you attempt to justify it.
Well, this is the problem. There is the cost and the perceived cost. And, right or wrong, the perceived cost ends up costing a lot of people. Usually the ones who are actually paying for the product (that useless country code thing on DVDs has got to be one of the most asinine wastes of time ever).
I don't know what the answer is. Personally if the software does what I need but is more then I can/am willing pay I seek a free alternative. If that didn't exist, I'm not sure what I would do since as far as I remember that situation hasn't happened to me yet.
