What happens if everybody eats mince pie on Christmas? Life goes on as usual.
What happens if nobody pays for a copy of Windows 8? There won't be a Windows 9.
What happens if nobody pays for a copy of Windows 8? There won't be a Windows 9.
And trying to produce it on a public basis produces problems in deciding what to fund. You run into this in public funding of science to, but there often are at least some public goals which helps guide this decision. It would be much more difficult to do with other forms of intellectual property (though we do in fact already do it to a limited degree, look at the National Endowment for the Arts).
Look at it this way: Does Ubuntu or OS X suffer from being pirated? Not really. Windows needs to figure this out for themselves.
Ubuntu (and open source in general) works because of inverse-free-riders, "free helpers" we might call them. That seems to be a sustainable model, but it likely won't work for annoying grunt programming - note the poor driver support in many Linux distros. For some tasks, someone needs to be paid.
If people were stealing iPads from Apple stores, would you suggest Apple should “figure [that] out for themselves”?
Secondly, stores actually do deal with shoplifting--they euphemistically call it "inventory shrinkage" and just chalk it up as an expense. "Unauthorized" copying isn't even an expense!
Windows may not be the best example since it’s so massively profitable, and sells a lot to enterprise customers and OEMs who won’t pirate it. That said, I suspect the business case for producing high-budget, non-mass-market consumer content (say, HBO shows) is starting to tip. How many people pirate Game of Thrones for every one that pays for it?
In the end, we live in a capitalist society — the people making software, movies, music, books, etc. have to get paid for the stuff be made.
Again, I know this analogy isn’t perfect, but what you’ve said is not all that different from telling a shop owner who was robbed that maybe he should do something else instead.
A more suitable analogy would be to a bookstore owner who's struggling because of (legal) Kindle downloads. Sucks for him, but time marches forwards. Perhaps he should partially convert to a coffee shop or similar.
And there it is, an artificial market created through technology and legislation, just like the copyright market. I'm sure plumbers would be eager to point out the virtues of having such a system.
Gates has said so himself: http://www.itwire.com/it-industry-news/market/23137-how-pira...
Gates has also, in the past, confirmed how important piracy is to Microsoft: "Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software... Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."
All listings are free. With the exception of job postings and agent housing ads in NYC. The exceptions provide enough revenue for the small (~40) staff of CL to keep things rolling. The free postings zero out revenues for anyone else looking to compete in the same space, establishing a large marketplace with strong network effects and an effective monopoly.
LOL. Is that a threat?
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/windows-drops-to-no-3-ca...
This is not a new problem, nor is it without solutions.
* libraries have a limited amount of copies. So the amount of non-paying readers is not indefinate
* the readers have to return the copies of books or DVDs they have rented
These inconveniences makes buying a copy for personal use much more attractive for the consumer.
That would never happen unless MS charged an outrageous sum for it.
If any company finds itself in the position where nearly all of the users are pirating, then there's something wrong. They're charging too much or the DRM is too onerous, or something.
EDIT: if you charge a fair price and make something available, people will buy it rather than pirate it. Louis CK and lots of other people have shown this.
There are two problems with this assertion. The first is that people's current working definition of a "fair price" seems to be $0.00. Are we really to believe that paying $1.29 on iTunes, or $0.99 on Amazon, for a DRM-free music track is "unfair"? Or that the user experience on either of those services is horrendous and painful? Come on. People pirate, in large part, because they prefer not to have to pay for something if they can get it for free. Let's be honest about that fact. If there's an impulse to "stick it to the man," so be it. I'll be the first to admit that the targets of this mentality -- the entertainment and software industries -- could use a good sticking-to. But let's not pretend that the moral-crusade argument is the sole -- or even the primary -- motivation behind most people's piracy of content. The primary reason is the price, i.e., zero.
Second, while I agree that Louis C.K.'s release shows promise, he seems to be an exception to the rule so far. Who are the "lots of other people" that have "shown" that charging a fair price leads to buying over pirating? Let's take the highly-touted example of Radiohead's pay-what-you-want release of their album "In Rainbows" in 2007. According to the post-release data, 62% of all downloaders of the album paid $0.00.[1] The next-largest segment, 17% of users, paid somewhere between $0.01 and $4.00. If Radiohead were not Radiohead -- i.e., not enormously successful prior to the release of the album -- then they'd not have been able to bear the razor-thin margin on the sale. Essentially, Radiohead gave the album away because they could afford to do so.
When Trent Reznor and Saul Williams released an album online that same year, in the Radiohead model, they gave users the choice between paying $5 and paying nothing. Approximately 154,449 users downloaded the album, and 28,322 users (about 18%) paid for it. At $5 per unit, that's a grand total of $141,610 in revenue for the album, and more likely than not, the production costs met or exceeded that revenue.
And those were hardly releases by big, onerous, anti-consumerist conglomerates, either. Those were pro-consumer, digital-friendly artists willing to put themselves out there to test precisely your proposition: that, if given the choice, people will pay. It seems that, by and large, they won't.
[1]http://financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/2007/11/study-free-...
Then the business model needs to change. $100K+ is way more than enough to produce an album with modern technology, and it's only going to get cheaper. Music doesn't make as much money as it used to, there isn't room for dozens of middlemen siphoning off the inefficiencies.
Lastly, I was a huge Radiohead fan until their "In Rainbows" release. I thought it was horrible. After previewing the songs, I didn't buy/download it. I wanted to very badly, because I wanted the experiment to work. I think they did the experiment on that collection of songs because they knew they sucked.
I wasn't the biggest fan of "The King of Limbs," however.
What's fascinating about "In Rainbows" is that roughly 8% of the users accounted for approximately 80% of revenues from the site. That speaks volumes, and it dovetails really well with recent blog posts (linked here and elsewhere) about the new metrics of success in digital distribution: i.e., monetizing loyalists. A small core of loyalists who are willing to follow you to the ends of the earth are worth more than fairweather fans.
I'm actually contemplating doing a more in-depth analysis on this, Louis C.K., Reznor, and others in this space. While I believe the jury is still out, and I believe that most people will pay nothing if offered the opportunity, there are clearly those who will pony up -- and even those who will pony up big. Piracy -- or free acquisition, in this case -- doesn't seem to matter too much if the loyalists are there, and you can differentiate the product for them. (In this case, the notion of a "fair price" actually seems to be relative).
It's interesting how Radiohead seemed to succeed by recognizing this fact, whereas Reznor's experiment failed to account for it. And Louis C.K. avoided the free option altogether, which is another way to go.
Copyright exists to solve a genuine problem. When it was conceived in the 18th Century, is was explicitly to encourage and reward the creation of new works (such as Windows 9) that would enrich the public domain.
Few people would argue that the problem has gone away. The current debate is whether the copyright mechanism is still a viable solution.
For multi-platform titles, typically 360 and PS3 titles are developed in parallel. Often the PC version comes later, after the console releases have finished and a small subset of the console devs have time to polish the PC port.
Usually two reasons are given. One is that it's not worth the extra management complexity and dev time to release at the same time as the PC. The other is that the piracy rate on PC is so high that launching all platforms at the same time actually cannibalizes both PC and console sales.
PC games generally cost less at retail, but manufacturing costs are lower and no subsidies go to console owners. Dev costs are slightly harder due to the challenges of developing for a wide range of hardware vs two fixed targets. I think that the profit per unit sale is slightly higher on PC than console (I could be wrong).
That doesn't take into account that many of the pirates wouldn't have purchased the game if piracy wasn't an option. If we consider that, then we'd need many more pirates, maybe twice as many (18 times as many pirates than purchasers in total), to account for the lower PC sales.
The PC gaming market is very healthy, probably healthier than ever, so I honestly do not know what you are talking about here.
Triple-A games aren't targeted to consoles because of pirates, they are targeted to consoles because consumer demand is higher for console games. Only a few genres are more popular on PC, like RTS, MOAB, and MMORPG.
The estimated PC install base for one of the console-led titles I've worked on is in the same ballpark as each of the consoles.* The actual sales on PC, however, were far, far less than the consoles.
* We know this due to, e.g. number of people pinging the multiplayer servers, checking for updates etc.
The free rider problem generally won't affect entities that are very large, rich, and established. Microsoft has a ton of profitable relationships that won't just go away. Besides, they have so much money in the bank that they could easily fund the development of Windows 9 even if they did not receive a penny of revenue from Windows 8. Likewise, Radiohead is not checking the latest rates of piracy before deciding whether to put out another album. They have a big enough fan base that it doesn't really matter.
But, if the free rider problem is bad enough it harms the ability of new entities--who do not have deep cash reserves or established relationships--to grow large enough to challenge the incumbents. To go from garage to professional success means making enough sales to either bootstrap or convince investors to buy in. If most customers are taking the product and not paying, that obviously is going to be a lot harder to do.
There may not be a windows 9, but you can bet there will be 200 flavors of Linux.
I think the business model needs to change a bit. That's all.
By the way, are GPL violations equally just anachronistic hippie pipe dreams or real crimes?
maybe adobe's creative suite.