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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Sounds great. The big bad record companies can't treat music like a bag of crisps. Neither can independent artists. Neither can Notch, because a game is no more like a bag of crisps than a CD track.

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The consumers can and do. We collectively decided that a .99 cents for a song or $15 for a physical album isn't worth it. Equilibrium will eventually happen, the smart artists are already making money in the new music industry.

The recent HN post about xx comes to mind. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4504851

Sure is easy to decide songs aren't worth $0.99 when the alternative is to just take them for free, whether the owner wants you to or not.

Yes and no. The pirating situation isn't that simple. I used to pirate a lot of games, but then Steam came along and I've pretty much not pirated anything since. Pirating was, for me, not just about being free in cost, but also a way to get the games via the internet without having to go into a shop and see if they had it, then possibly wait until they ordered it in. There was also the pain of license keys when they didn't work - it only takes a couple to start making you gun-shy.

Admittedly it's not music and I'm not familiar with the pirating in that arena, but it seems to me that pirating is a more complex beast than most people paint it.

We'd all be doing the same thing with tomatoes and chips if they could be duplicated for the cost of wiggling some electrons back and forth.

In the words of a good friend of mine: "You wouldn't download a car? Man if I could download a car off the internet for free, you bet your sweet ass I would!"

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