[J3L2404]

>People are valuing your product as zero. Where they don't, they buy.

No. The popular content is downloaded more. You can jump thru hoops and do backflips but the fact is people don't want to pay. Period. Everything else is justification.

[zanny]

Of course they don't want to buy, they recognize the cost of reproduction is zero. It is hard fact that once someone sets all the trillions of bits in a movie, game, operating system, or anything else we do, just ONCE, you can clone it for nothing as many times as you want.

Until we get off the distribution per unit model of retail we will have this war against consumers.

[J3L2404]

>they recognize the cost of reproduction is zero.

That is being very generous to the pimply-faced downloaders. I am quite sure the costs upfront or otherwise have no bearing.

[pfraze]

Pimples or no, anybody can recognize that ctrl-c, ctrl-v doesn't cost money.

[J3L2404]

Sorry to anyone offended by pimply, but this idea that anything copyable deserves no copyright is childish. Exceedingly so on a site about software.

[barrkel]

Copyright is a red herring. What we want is to encourage creation of valuable information products and services. Historically, copyright was one way of doing that, because copying information directly was difficult and required apparatus and physical tokens that could be policed relatively easily. When copying becomes as simple and trivial as breathing, policing the act of copying becomes intrusive and laborious.

So different mechanisms of encouraging content creation need to be found; the fight we should be fighting has little to do with preserving copyright in its historical form.

[J3L2404]

Whether you like or not copyright law still exists. It has been dismissed on message boards but has not been repealed.

When there is a viable mechanism of content creation it will gradually take over, just like every industry.

You can't tell people to give up their horse and buggy if the cars aren't ready yet.

[zanny]

All of the major historical changes of worth in terms of law and procedure all arose from doing things that were socially judged wrong but in hindsight we see they were right.

I feel copyright is one of those. I want to see the individuals that make the creative digital goods I consume well compensated and happy, because they make amazing things. But simultaneously, I realize my duplication of that good costs no one anything except potential lost sales and fractions of a cent of electricity.

[Androsynth]

Whether you like or not copyright law still exists

Because the govt is receiving boatloads of money from the entities that profit from copyright laws.

[s8qnze982y]

> the fact is people don't want to pay. Period. Everything else is justification.

This is a false and very cheap thought. For two reasons:

1) there isn't a thing such as "[all the] people". I know many people who don't want to pay, and I know many people who want to pay. you can't really prove even that most of the people belongs to the first category.

2) even if we assumed that "people don't want to pay", this wouldn't explain the examples of mainstream products that have been (successfully) sold by donation, which shows that there is a sufficient (at the very least) people that does want to pay. a couple of examples are radiohead and a comedian whose name I forgot, but also many others.

[EvilTerran]

"The popular content is downloaded more"? What does that even mean? How are you measuring popularity?

... by units sold, say? Maybe the best-selling content is so because it's downloaded more, not vice-versa as you asserted. Or maybe there's a third factor that causes both. Correlation does not imply causation.

What of those who, as the GP said s/he does, download for free, then buy a copy if they actually like it?

If a product is of unknown quality, but known to be free to copy, it's sound economics to value it at zero. Supply is infinite and demand is indeterminate. Once you know more about it, and know how much you want it, you may want to pay for it. Or you may not, if you don't like it or are a cheapskate. C'est la vie.

It's more likely than you'd think: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/apr/21/study-finds-pira...

[Retric]

Downloads say nothing about how much people liked the content because for in the vast majority of cases they have not seen it before they download. It's mostly a question of how much advertising something had, with quality only having knock on effects down the line.

[Androsynth]

Convenience. If you think that's not a relevant reason you're just being pig-headed.

I pay for netflix and Amazon Prime. In fact I would pay 2-3x more for netflix if they had everything. (Not even new stuff, but old stuff)

I don't buy dvd's because the value is not there for me. If I am just going to watch something once or twice, its worth ~$1 to me, not $20 like a new dvd.

I don't go down to blockbuster/Red Box because the negative utility of getting in my car and going to a store is worse than just downloading it.

[J3L2404]

Well I won't be pigheaded. I too would pay triple for everything to be on Netflix and don't buy DVDs. If you can buy it but choose to get it free that's your call, it's when you can't buy it anywhere that copyright really fails.

[Androsynth]

Sorry, didn't mean to call you names.

It's just that I have heard the 'people dont want to pay, period.' argument made before and I think its not true. I think there are multiple reasons why people download illegally and being cheap or being unable to pay is just one reason.

[antninja]

Consumers don't want to pay at the vendors' price and vendors don't want to sell at the consumers' price. The market is blocked.

(20 euros for 90 minutes of entertainment is a bit high)