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Well Said Bingle welcome to the real world. IF the sign says Stolen Apples or Free apples the fact is the name of the game has changed.
The music industry is having to adapt to it and The Publishing industry and authors will have too as well. May make life harder for Publishers and Authors but.. The invisible hand does not care. The beauty of it is now the consumer has more say as opposed to before where the consumer had most of his "choices" shoved down his throat...and the choices were few. Granted the internet creates a lot of JUNK but then so do publishers and many authors....
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Originally Posted by bingle
This is the part of the equation that's changing, though. Currently, that's the way it works - people have to pay for a copy of everything in order to subsidize the massive up-front costs of the product. But the fact of the matter is that it's easy and free to copy certain products, and that's not going to change.
Someone earlier said that the free market didn't include things like The Pirate Bay - except, it does. If you set up an apple cart next to the guy with the "free apples" sign, you're not going to be doing a lot of business. It may not be fair, or even legal, but the invisible hand doesn't seem to care. Consumers know how to easily get free copies of books and music and software and movies. If you want to make money off of those things, you'd better find a way that doesn't involve selling copies.
To clarify, I'm not advocating piracy. But if you're planning a business that revolves around intellectual property in this day and age, you need to keep piracy in mind (and YouTube, MySpace sample tracks, fan fiction, Open Source, and all the other legal ways of distributing content for free.)
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