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Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
Not that I know of. However, at least legit online music sales exist, which they did not before.
You can offer consumers your digital product without DRM and let them pay what they want (or download for free), and people will still pirate it anyway.
http://www.forbes.com/2007/10/16/rad...radiohead.html
The idea that availability or high prices "drive" people to piracy is very likely one of those things that everyone knows to be true... that turns out to not to be true at all.  |
As noted in the other thread, the Radiohead pay-what-you-want-even-if-it's-nothing deal required buyers to register their name, email address and mailing address. I wouldn't buy from an unknown website like that if I had to register that information.
From the article:
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Garland argues that this kind of digital theft is more a matter of habit than of economics. "People don't know Radiohead's site. They do know their favorite BitTorrent site and they use it every day," he says. "It's quite simply easier for folks to get the illegal version than the legal version."
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Still, Radiohead moved more that twice as many copies through their own website, at whatever price, than were downloaded for free from pirate sites.
Ultimately, very little can be deduced from this experiment about individual buying/pirating decisions, and I don't see anything to overturn conventional wisdom about why
some people pirate. I'm sure there's a range of reasons and that, regardless of price and availability, some people will pirate incorrigibly.