Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
What is required is enough security to minimize losses to an acceptable level below the amount it costs to maintain the security (the same theory a WalMart, or any other retailer, works on). Because there's no point in spending a thousand dollars to save a hundred in theft losses. But if you can spend $95 to save a hundred dollars in losses, you're ahead by $5 (or, at least, $5 less behind).
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Steve, I honestly think we're already there. Nobody has been able to point to
any study which has attributed losses in sales of books, music, or movies to the darknet. The most we have is one study (let's call it that) reported by HarryT that found that nagging people about paying their shareware fees worked better than not nagging. (Note that this study also found that nagging worked!) What we have here is a problem in perception, and I don't think that needs a technical security solution. It needs more education and understanding about how the darknet really interfaces with the cash economy, so content creators and publishers can feel comfortable releasing their content, knowing they'll receive a return justifying their expenses-- if the content catches the popular fancy, that is.
Regarding the "money in the crowd" scenario, since money is deliberately made scarce, I don't think you can compare it to ebooks. Your analogy to the soda with the recipe on the side is more apt-- and I think the soda bottler would still make money in that scenario, so long as the product tasted good and was reasonably priced. There are a lot of things I
could do for myself that I pay someone else to do, like make clothing (or weave cloth or spin yarn, for that matter -- I know how to do those things). I pay someone else so I can have consistent quality and spend my time doing other things. The darknet is not user-friendly. Amazon is. If I could get replacements for my paper books in a non-DRM format at a reputable book seller for the prices you charge, I don't think I'd even bother with the darknet, even for books I'd already purchased. It would take a while, but I'd gradually replace my entire collection with well-formatted, legal ebooks-- and never look back. And I don't think I'm all that unusual.
Take a look at Linux, as an example. It's free, but takes some extra work to set up, even new "user-friendly" versions like Ubuntu, and then every task takes that bit of extra effort to figure out how to do if you're used to a commercial OS. But it's free, right? Wouldn't you think Microsoft would be completely out of business by now? Ok, MS may be engaging in non-competitive practices with regards to bundling Windows licenses on new machines, but apparently there are people out there who have
paid to install Vista, when they could have gone to Linux and gotten more functionality for
free.
As far as I can tell, all authors and publishers need to do to ensure sales is offer a good product at a good price, with--very important-- a good user experience during the sale and use of the product.