Quote:
Originally Posted by rflashman
If anything, studies have found that most pirate downloads are not 'lost' sales but non-existent sales. When NAPSTER shut down music sales did NOT go up. When Macrovision started shipping on videotapes, movie video sales did NOT go up.
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Macrovision probably enhanced some hardware sales! I bought an APEX dvd player (the one with the back door), and one of the reasons was because you could zap Macrovision with it. And I bought a Central Point Option Board years ago, because with it you could copy almost any protected diskette (and the board paid for itself 50 times over whgen people requested that I make backup copies of WP and 123 that they had bought and couldn't copy).
IMHO, piracy reflects pricing in many respects. There are a certain number of people who would pirate a product no matter what, but who would NEVER pay to buy a product. These "pirates" don't account for lost sales. Then there are those who pirate because of high prices, or unavailability of a product. Lower prices, or make the product available at reasonable prices, and they WILL buy. Don't give me an ethical argument when most people cannot even agree on a rational ethical foundation- give me a rational response to market forces.
If you're a publisher, and want to sell- don't worry about piracy. Add value, price fairly, if you really MUST use DRM, do it unobtrusively like Ereader, and you will sell. And watch the market- prices for information have been dropping steadily. If you keep your information highly priced, you are doomed to failure.
I would like to see a vibrant ebook market; if publishers continue to shaft the e-reader by absurd pricing and ridiculous DRM schemes, this vibrant market will never appear. Throw greed away, and look at the marginal price of ebook publishing.....