|
A twist on this — I lived in Bolivia a few years ago and routinely walked through the market, where copies of Adobe's Creative Suite, a $1300 package, were sold for 80 Bolivianos, or about $8. I have no idea where in Bolivia you could have bought a legit version. Same for movies, music, you name it. It was all bootlegged. And that was just one small, poor country in South America. Think about in terms of the fraction of the world that pays the original producer for information, and the huge amount of the world that doesn't, and there's a staggering differential. Whether you can say that the money is lost to producers such as Adobe is another matter. I think the average Bolivian income at the time was about $300, while a well-paid middle manager at a utility made about $10,000. Not much of anybody was going to be paying $1300 for an application suite.
|