Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
I really must disagree. If a criminal, who would have otherwise bought the book, steals it (excuse me - "copyright infringes" it) instead; then that is clearly a lost sale. The author will not receive the income for that sale - it is indeed a lost sale.
Of course, if the criminal would not have bought the book, it isn't a lost sale.
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Yes, that's true. But it's not a lost sale simply because someone downloaded it on a black market site. It's a sale that never happened. Only in this digital market do we have the concept that someone can illegally obtain something and someone else can treat it like it was a sale that would happen.
Let's go back to the Boeing and Airbus scenario.
Boeing did not "Lose" the sale. They lost the contract to someone who made a better offer. In the RIAA/electronic world, the response Boeing would have is to sue the air force for every plane that Airbus makes that Boeing could have made because they went with a method that Boeing didn't like. That's a crazy concept, and shouldn't change simply because we are dealing with files instead of airplanes.
So again, the concept of the lost sale is a misnomer. It's incorrect. Boeing didn't "lose" the sale. They never made the sale to begin with! They lost the oppurtunity to make the sale, yes, because a competitor out bid them. THey really really wanted that sale and they're going to stomp and cry about it, but the difference between what they and the RIAA are doing is that the RIAA is putting the "lost sales" in their "damages" category, which can technically be a loss on their taxes.. and what Boeing is doing is just going to have to involve not selling tankers to the government. So they don't get big bonuses and they don't get to spend money on other things.
And not only that, if you look at their concept of Lost Sales as used by the RIAA, you'll notice that for each infringing "song" they find, they multiply that by a few hundred because they assume you'll share it with everyone. Then they multiply THAT by a court allowed "damages multiplier." So even _IF_ the concept of lost sales existed, it's certainly not mitigated by the "wouldn't buy it anyway" factor.
It'd be different if a lost sale existed, and we could actually track the market to the point where we would know if someone was going to buy something really and truly and didn't because of a free product.. but , we don't have that granularity on customers, and multiplying damages by a thousand fold or more certainly don't seem to show any interest in being realistic towards those numbers anyway. It's just a cash grab.