Quote:
Originally Posted by Ben Thornton
I agree that the ebook business is still pretty small, but do you think that it would necessarily be stopped if it made an impact on corporate copyright holders? Corporate copyright holders haven't got their own way as far as music is concerned. They continue to make attempts to stop piracy, but I'm not cinvinced that they can succeed.
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While it will never admit it publicly, the music industry has benefitted greatly from piracy. Without piracy there would have been no mp3 players. Without mp3 players there would have been no mass market demand for legal mp3 sites. Without legal mp3 sites a lot of their profit would have been lost in manufacturing and distribution costs.
It is no coincidence that music industry profits have risen dramatically post-Napster. The people who still download for free were never going to pay whatever you did. But there are still ways to make money from those people -- that is, after all, what a lot of the download sites are doing now ...