[Xenophon]

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

If GM doesn't sell any cars in my country, but Ford does, GM also forces me to buy from Ford.

Absolutely not. In this scenario GM certainly has not forced you to do any particular thing! All that GM has done is make it really really difficult -- but perhaps not quite completely impossible -- to buy from GM. They certainly have not forced you to buy from Ford; there's no GM representative holding a gun to your head saying "buy that Ford or I'll pull the trigger!" As alternatives, you could:

• Buy from a local manufacturer -- Tata in India, for example.
• Decide that a bicycle (or motorscooter, or horse & buggy, or...) will be an adequate substitute for that GM car.
• Spend the time and effort to design and build your own car. I know that's a big deal, but it has been done before... where do you think the Big N car companies came from in the first place?
• Travel where GM does business, purchase the GM car there, and ship it home.
• Any of a zillion other alternatives.

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

If the government forces you to go to a drug dealer to get your marijuana, and you like smoking marijuana and think there is nothing wrong with it, contrary to the govt's opinion, you will.

To put word that statement a bit more carefully:

IF (you want marijuana to smoke AND the government says it's illegal) THEN you can (EITHER acquire your marijuana through extra-legal means OR do without.)

I parenthesized a bit to attempt to clarify the conditions and choices. Note, however, that the Gov't is not forcing you to break the law. You do have other options including not wanting pot in the first place, moving to a locality where it is legal, etc. etc. I make no claim that the other options are palatable when considered in terms of your overall preferences. I simply observe that they exist.

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

Similarly here, they are forcing people to go to the "competition"; while it's all well and good that that competition isn't legally offering those titles matters little.
Black markets spring up in times of war, prohibition, trade barriers, etc.
I'm not talking about forcing to want, I'm talking about forcing to go to.

Nope -- not "forcing to go to," but rather "denying legal access to." And those two statements differ very significantly!!! But I do agree that black markets spring up when governments (or corporations, or producers generally) make poor decisions that attempt to deny access to things that the populace generally desires. The presence of such a black market is generally evidence of a problem crying out for a clever solution.

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

[SNIP]
Southeast Asia is rife with copied software just because the prices companies charge for their products are way out of the league of the people living there, not because they're all criminals (convenient though that may sound). Their demand for that software, however, is still legitimate, and will not go away just because it's not being sold to them at their idea of a right price.
[SNIP]

In the context of DVDs, it is interesting to note that the much-derided Region protection system was an attempt to segment the market in order to address this exact issue. They wanted to sell movies for $X in the developed world and for a much lower price in the non-developed world (think SE Asia, for example). But with a world economy, if you can't segment the market Gresham's Law guarantees that the low-priced 3rd-world product will crowd out the high-priced developed-world product. Assuming, that is, that the product in question is portable enough to substitute for the higher priced product elsewhere in the world.If the studios actually used the region coding mostly to adjust for pricing differences due to cost-of-living issues, I probably wouldn't even complain too much.

My personal rough comparison for local purchasing power is the "cost of a good beer in a bar" metric; others use "cost of a cheap breakfast" or equivalently simple ballpark measures of cost-of-living. As an example, when I visited Prague not long after the Velvet Revolution, I found that a liter of fine beer in a relatively up-scale bar came to about 8 cents US; a similar beer at a similar bar in the US at that time would have cost $3. That ~37x difference in cost-of-living was reflected in other costs I saw around me -- 20x to 40x price differentials were common for any product that was sufficiently local to resist world market pricing. So pricing DVDs then-and-there at 1/30th of the developed-world price would have been perfectly reasonable.

I note, however, that the studios used (and still use) region coding for all kinds of other purposes: staggered releases, available here-but-not-there discs, etc. And that sort of thing seems wrong-headed to me. It's a sign that they haven't thought through their business carefully enough.

On the copied software front, the issue is this: As a software producer living in the US, I must charge enough money to meet my expenses here in the US market. If I lower my prices in SE Asia, how do I ensure that I still make enough sales in the developed world to make ends meet? Won't the inexpensive SE Asian version simply be re-exported to the developed countries? I could lower my prices world-wide, but I'd have to sell many times more units to bring in the same revenue -- 37x more, in my Prague example above. Alternatively, I can decide that "piracy"* in the SE Asian market doesn't matter to me so long as I can make enough revenue in the developed world. Or, I can try to find some other business model.

But no matter how you slice and dice the business issues, I must still make enough money to support myself and my family. And if widespread copying wipes out my income, I'll wind up supporting myself some other way.

To connect all of the above back to eBooks, consider this: On the one hand, I have no inherent right to make a living in any particular fashion. Not via writing software, or writing books, or whatever. On the other hand, you have no inherent right to the results of my labor whether those results are a physical object, some easily copied patterns of electric charges (i.e. software or eBooks), or some dirty marks on a piece of paper. And if you (collectively) don't pay enough to make it worth my while, I'll stop producing software/eBooks/Literature/whatever and do something else instead. I rather expect that most authors have the same attitude. They might still write for fun (and I would certainly still program for fun), but the time and energy available for that activity will be strictly limited by the need to make a living doing some other thing.

No one in this thread has yet proposed a better model than copyright and monetary payment for managing the competing desires from the above paragraph. I certainly think that the particular implementation of copyright that we have today (in the US) is quite far from achieving its goals as stated in the US Constitution. That's not an indictment of the idea of copyright, but rather of the form it has taken by way of lobbyists and the gang of 535 (a.k.a the US Congress).

Xenophon

* I put "piracy" in quotes because I agree that it's really the wrong description. But I used it anyway, because I don't have a pithy term that fits the facts better. Ideas, anyone?