What is the moral of this story? "I'm an App Developer, therefore I shouldn't pirate music"?
Ultimately, piracy breaks down to "people want your stuff, but you've priced it too highly". In the case of apps, that's all it is. In the case of music, it's a little different. Music is cheap, but it's rare that you can get it in a good format: everything is lossy, and for people with good audio kit and good hearing, that makes the music unusable. Therefore, people that both Want It Now and want full quality are going to download the FLAC torrent rather than buy lossy MP3s. (They won't buy the CD because it takes too long for the mailman to deliver it.)
The same goes for movies and TV. Nobody will sell you those things without DRM, so if you use Linux exclusively, you have no option but to pirate the content. Make every TV show a standard non-DRM'd HTTP download for a buck, and piracy (among people with money) evaporates instantly. But the content producers want a bogeyman to blame for all their problems, so they intentionally keep piracy alive.
(If there were no such thing as the ability to pirate movies, people still wouldn't have bought the 88th redo of Star Wars. We liked it the first time. But it's easier for Lucas to blame the evil greedy pirates than his evil greedy self.)
I would be willing to be 100 downloads of my app that price isn't really the issue on music piracy. If you charged $0.10 per song, it wouldn't result in a massive sales increase. The barrier to paid downloads is that people have to use a credit/debit card, usually register somehow and other things that form a barrier to entry. I think $0.99 isn't much to pay for a song or an app, but there are people (a fairly sizable number) who just want to download without going through the presumed hassle of the payment process. I bet if you were giving away CDs outside of the mall and charged $0.25, people wouldn't think twice about tossing a quarter into the can. Take that same song and put it online and the same people happy to toss you the quarter would rather steal the song than process a payment of 25 cents.
The problem isn't price -- it's the barrier of payment.
Now that is probably the most sensible thing that's been written in this entire thread.
Figure out a way to make the transaction as seamless & low-risk as "tossing a quarter into the can" and you've gone a long way to solving the piracy problem.
How you do this, I have no idea. I would look at iTunes & Steam as examples of services that have been successful at smoothing the friction & establishing trust. People spook easily when asked for CC info…
Who determines what is priced 'too highly'? Also, do people have a right to content/things created and sold by others? Whatever happened to going without? If we were talking about clean water, I can get behind saying every person has a right to it.. but with rights comes duties.. though when it comes to the latest TV shows and other things I must admit I'm a little indifferent. An example is here in Australia for the longest time for seemingly arbitrary reasons we've always been very 'behind' America when it comes to showing new episodes of TV shows so many people say that's the reason why they 'pirate' TV shows. Why can't they just wait? Once again, if it was water there is a certain amount of possible time they could wait but when it's the latest episode of House..
Ultimately I would say piracy usually breaks down to people wanting things for free. If we stop looking in our inside circles (Enthusiasts, developers, etc—the 'enlightened') and then look outside at the mythical average man, or, the masses.
Recently someone in my Facebook feed made a comment about loving BitTorrent (Hey, at least he and others are moving on from Limewire) because he could get movies for free. This comment had a few 'lol awsome' words in it. Also, think of how people latch onto "GET RICH QUICK" schemes, late-night ads promising amazing abs at minimal work, etc.
Hell, consider myself too. Back in high school I would pirate a lot of games and finish them. Why? Because I wanted them and didn't always have the money. Note: Throughout my life I've also purchased a ton of games starting back with Hocus Pocus, Raptor and Warcraft. ;) I've long since stopped and now if I want to play a videogame I will either buy it or go without. Take Portal 2 for example, I've been more carefully budgeting my money and am yet to buy it. I haven't died, yet!
Also, do people have a right to content/things created and sold by others?
Nope! But they steal it anyway. ("Bean counters said I couldn't fire a man just for being in a wheelchair. Did it anyway! Ramps are expensive!")
Ultimately, I'd gladly pay for Netflix. But it doesn't work on any of my computers, so I just get better-quality stuff from Illegal Places instead. Honey badger don't care, and neither do I.
It does, but when you rely on a subset of the market that will never pay for your stuff anyway, the value is more than just a little skewed.
"Honey badger don't care, and neither do I."
Good. I don't like paying taxes because they are just too expensive..so I don't.
It's funny because when businesses do the same thing with workers (the american programmer is too expensive, so we just decided to hire from India), people get all upset.
>It does, but when you rely on a subset of the market that will never pay for your stuff anyway, the value is more than just a little skewed.
No, it means you have no market. Find a new one.
>Good. I don't like paying taxes because they are just too expensive..so I don't.
You - as a supplier - are not the government, and you don't have any inherent right to be in the particular business you are in.
>It's funny because when businesses do the same thing with workers (the american programmer is too expensive, so we just decided to hire from India), people get all upset.
Some people do, yes. Usually it is the same group that fail to understand the idea that the consumer - not the supplier - that defines the worth of a product. The American programmer is too expensive - in some definitions. That is why first world programmers add a hell of a lot of value over spec following developing world labour these days.
I don't get upset when businesses outsource to India. If anything, hiring me the first time would result in less work for me. If I was hired for a few months to solve problem foo, then I'd be finished and gone and not getting paid. But because there is so much damage caused by bad programmers, I have to stay employed indefinitely just to keep the damage from being too bad. Multiply this by the number of good programmers in the world, and we're wasting a lot of money on outsourcing.
So yes, please outsource your programming some more.
The market is true.. as long as someone follows. For example, the market average for an app that is a dictionary is $1.99, if some developer makes their own dictionary app and charges $29.99, the only person who dictates the price is the creator.
My point being, no one can tell an author how much to sell his content for. They can quote market average, scream and do whatever but they cannot make that developer sell it for a price they choose which comes back to "people want your stuff, but you've priced it too highly" and the idea that people have a right to content/software which therefore backs the bizarre act of stealing/illegally acquiring. People might feel like it's priced too high but that doesn't make it a 'fact' that it is.
I'd gladly pay for Netflix too but it's not available in my country. So, I'll go without or I'll rent movies from a video store for $1 on Tuesday. Netflix not being in my country doesn't give me a right to pirate content.
I think audiophiles who can't stand mp3s are a pretty minuscule part of the pirating population and not much to hang your argument on. The vast majority of people who are pirating music and movies just don't want to pay for it.
Yup, and they wouldn't have bought it anyway. Someone not buying your shit and someone stealing your shit both get you $0.
(I mostly buy CDs these days because of the lossless issue. But if I'd have to import the disc from another country, I just torrent it, because fuck paying $30 for a CD.
And yes, I know that 44kHz is not "lossless". So that's fine, let me buy 24-bit 192kHz files instead!)
Ultimately, piracy breaks down to "people want your stuff, but you've priced it too highly". In the case of apps, that's all it is. In the case of music, it's a little different. Music is cheap, but it's rare that you can get it in a good format: everything is lossy, and for people with good audio kit and good hearing, that makes the music unusable. Therefore, people that both Want It Now and want full quality are going to download the FLAC torrent rather than buy lossy MP3s. (They won't buy the CD because it takes too long for the mailman to deliver it.)
The same goes for movies and TV. Nobody will sell you those things without DRM, so if you use Linux exclusively, you have no option but to pirate the content. Make every TV show a standard non-DRM'd HTTP download for a buck, and piracy (among people with money) evaporates instantly. But the content producers want a bogeyman to blame for all their problems, so they intentionally keep piracy alive.
(If there were no such thing as the ability to pirate movies, people still wouldn't have bought the 88th redo of Star Wars. We liked it the first time. But it's easier for Lucas to blame the evil greedy pirates than his evil greedy self.)