Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> A physical good (food, clothes) is depletable, and in that way too unlike digital data, which is for all practical purposes undepletable. But if you consider even highly inexpensive physical goods, they have various substantial costs of transportation, inventory, etc. associated to them, and thus they are not truly as fluidly and effortlessly reproducible in the way that digital data is reproducible for zero cost.

Right, that's why I said "not for free but for their low marginal cost." You're hand-waving with the "zero marginal cost" argument without addressing my counter-point. If the fact that something has a marginal cost approaching $0 means you are morally obligated to provide it for a price approaching $0, why is there not a similar moral obligation to provide something that has a marginal cost of $3 for $3?

View on HN

Oops, sorry I misread you.

> If the fact that something has a marginal cost approaching $0 means you are morally obligated to provide it for a price approaching $0, why is there not a similar moral obligation to provide something that has a marginal cost of $3 for $3?

If it were up to me, it would be -- or roughly something like that. But I have supposedly radical views on a lot of things (FWIW I affiliate to a local socialist party). I think a lot of the decisions made by big pharmaceutical companies, retail corporations, etc. are morally reprehensible. To give you a more direct answer of why I do not go down the streets at night shouting for change on this: because it'll be much harder for me to achieve that change. It'll be much harder for me to be an influencing force of bringing about a system I would be happy with. But because I am someone of a technical background, this fight is the fight I choose to participate in. Also, charging something $3 for something that has a marginal cost of $3 sounds kind of lousy -- I'm sure there's got to be a more elegant way of doing that. :)

I disagree with you, but admire your consistency. I think a lot of people pushing for "free information" draw an arbitrary distinction between digital things that are almost free to reproduce and physical things that are fairly cheap to reproduce.

I think the real difference here is not so much that the marginal cost of digital goods is low, but that customers also own the means of reproduction. That is the fundamental difference that leads to arguments over rights, and then to arguments over morals, as these things often do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com