No, producers will move to platforms where it is difficult to impossible. Care to guess how many people have pirated the SaaS version of Bingo Card Creator versus how many have pirated the downloaded version?
I am not the only person to have done the math here. Look at the sales of, say, MW2 on consoles (where piracy is hard) versus PCs (where piracy is trivial). Look at the PC games which actually sell, where World Of Please Pirate This Shiny Flat Paperweight is probably, what, 4 of the top 20 SKUs at any given time. There used to be a thriving PC games market. It has, predictably, shrunk to those sectors where it is actually profitable, avoiding sectors where 90% of the "customers" steal the product.
Every time I hear the online crowd whinging about nickle-and-dime models like microtransactions, and not being able to "own" the software they planned on stealing, I have a brief moment of that very hard to spell German word.
Sure, SaaS is a good model for some things. It certainly does have that nice feature of being unpiratable. That makes sense of course... in SaaS you aren't selling a digital copy that is fundamentally worthless. You are selling computing power, updates, support... stuff you don't need bunch of arcane laws to protect!
As copyright laws ease, some will turn to SaaS, but others will embrace the model of letting a lot of people have something for free, and charging those that can afford it.
Heck, people like to give books as an example of media that must be protected and that will never be free. But guess what... the most popular Kindle authors these days give many books away for free.
Moreover, the biggest companies have been turning a blind eye to piracy because they believe it helps them sell more software, for ages. Microsoft is the biggest example... as Bill Gates once said (and I paraphrase) - I'd rather you steal my software than buy my competitor's.
I think its because a lot of people on HN run businesses themselves which could or are negatively affected by piracy, because software is easily pirated - so they (we?) are naturally hostile towards the idea that we're doing business wrong and that our hard work should be free.
Honestly, I don't know what I think of it. On the one hand the pro-piracy people do make some sense, but on the other hand, a world of free everything is impossible to sustain and messy to do business in. Unlike OSS people like to think, support is not enough to.. err.. support all businesses. It works in some cases, sure, but it doesn't scale very well and for some businesses simply doesn't make sense.
The author is postulating that the price of a good is determined by its cost of production, which is essentially the Marxist theory of value that has been discredited for over a century. Else, he is proposing that the demand curve is completely parameterized by cost of production, which is a radically new idea that I sadly don't see much promise in.
I agree with you that demand isn't dependent on costs always - and I don't think the author is either.
He's saying that demand is still high, as is supply. But because the marginal cost of each unit is so low (on the postulation of infinite copies), that piracy is how the price is "fixed" economically speaking.
This isn't a pro-piracy position, but if you see it as each copy of the game had to be physically manufactured piracy would drop to zero - otherwise it'd be called theft.
That the marginal cost of copying media is zero is a pretty mundane observation. The author goes beyond this to hypothesize that demand moves according to some abstract "fair price" (that happens to suit the author's semi-Marxist definition of fairness), and that piracy only occurs when the market price is set above this value. This second point is the only novel bit of the author's post, and it's just not very good.
> No, producers will move to platforms where it is difficult to impossible.
Short of increased enforcement I completely agree with you - this is the only viable long-term solution. Ad supported software is always suggested as a another workable solution, but I don't buy that argument. Ad supported software suffers the exact same problem, it can be hacked to the point where eventually all the ads are removed.
Oddly enough I've always wondered why publishers haven't fought harder against the e-books. Books were already "on a platform where it is difficult to pirate". The move by publishers towards the Kindle seems to directly contradict: "producers will move to platforms where it is difficult to impossible".
The big screen experience has always been different to what you could get at home. That apparently didn't stop people from watching pirated hollywood content on their small tubes.
Likewise 3d screens will dripple into homes the same way radios and tv sets have.
No, producers will move to platforms where it is difficult to impossible. Care to guess how many people have pirated the SaaS version of Bingo Card Creator versus how many have pirated the downloaded version?
I am not the only person to have done the math here. Look at the sales of, say, MW2 on consoles (where piracy is hard) versus PCs (where piracy is trivial). Look at the PC games which actually sell, where World Of Please Pirate This Shiny Flat Paperweight is probably, what, 4 of the top 20 SKUs at any given time. There used to be a thriving PC games market. It has, predictably, shrunk to those sectors where it is actually profitable, avoiding sectors where 90% of the "customers" steal the product.
Every time I hear the online crowd whinging about nickle-and-dime models like microtransactions, and not being able to "own" the software they planned on stealing, I have a brief moment of that very hard to spell German word.