This is fun, BTW...
It's a value-free assertion.
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Is it really, though? You might say "you have brown hair" and that I would believe is a value-free assertion. I think you were saying the bit about communism to tell me that I believe what I do because I'm young and naive, but I'll grow out of it.
I acknowledge that throwing a "communism" label around is fraught with unintended consequences. You win. No labels.
I disagree with the philosophy of forced sharing.
I disagree that time and effort is money.
At least we are clear where we disagree.
Look at it this way, Justin. Roddy Hart spends lots of time and effort traveling around the WORLD trying to get people hooked on his music so they will buy it. Listen to the Jackson Browne "One more song" or Bob Seager's "Turn the page." This is not glamorous.
The time and effort they spend doing all the things that make it possible for you to know of the existence of their music is time and effort they can spend on something else that will give them economic return. That's what economists call "opportunity cost." It gives all those efforts a fair market value of a sort.
If you are not willing to pay for all that, then Jackson Browne and Bob Seager maybe can make a living painting or even teaching music lessons. That would be a tragedy, wouldn't it?
Roddy Hart is struggling, and he's making great music. He deserves every penny of the price of a CD. He's probably on the verge of giving it all up, and my friend Tara Lane did (for now). Or maybe a few more people will buy some CDs. Roddy will be able to afford one more Big Mac at Burger Biggie, and not run around in a bonked mental state from calorie deprivation. Maybe he'll stick with it, and make a career out of it.
I certainly hope so.
The labor it takes to download a song is more comparable to the labor it takes to pick up the remote and turn on the TV. It's not particularly comparable to the money you would have made if you had gone and worked for however long it took you to do download the songs.
You are right, Justin. Both situations speak to a value for the services. One situation implies the value may be higher than the other. Ultimately the consumer and the producer of services come to an agreement on the unit price of those services - or not.
Let's speak to our world of perfect enforcement. If only one out of ten people pirating music would buy something, then that's a substantial amount of money that goes to the vendor. The vendor then has the ability to lower the unit cost and still be profitable. Lower the price a bit and then even MORE people jump in. This is called economies of scale.
By cheating the system, those people who perpetuate the venue actually make the unit price of the services HIGHER than they would be if everyone either bought or did without. Whoa...wait a second. That means that the cheater is cheating BOTH the supplier AND the honest consumer.
The "five finger discount" in retail causes the price of all goods to go up. In grocery stores where the margin is a couple of percent, that means that the poor person such as me in grad school has to pay more for that 3 pound box of macaroni than I would if everyone was honest. That isn't fair, and that translates to fewer pounds on my already ectomorphic frame.
If the unit price of CDs were just a little bit lower when I was in school, maybe I could have afforded just a couple of more CDs when I was living hand-to-mouth, Justin. It isn't fair that the unit price is higher for me the poor but honest consumer because we are losing a small but significant number of potential customers.
The fundamental difference though is that the company making the car loses something if they give the car away for free, or for less profit. The music industry loses nothing for an electronic duplication transacted between independant parties that would not have made a purchase
Many hands touch the product, Justin. Many people are affected when one sale doesn't happen. Even the folks that store and distribute the digital media lose out because they had to provide all those electronic online services for illegal activity that they shouldn't have had to provide. MIPS and DASD and such cost big money.
And of course I already mentioned about the honest but poor consumer having to pay more.
the value is not something objectively set by the universe, it's a matter of personal opinion.
No. In a working free market economy where everyone is honest, the value of services are set by the free market. If A-Rod can get tens of millions for his serrvices as a Yankee, then that's what his services are worth. If not, then either he has to accept less money or practice a little harder.
Downloading music doesn't cost anything over and above what you would pay anyhow. Computer, electricity, internet connection. Those are the requirements, and anybody who downloads music is going to have those things already.
I already pointed out the fallicy of this. My company actually pays by the MIP, and by the unit of disc space. We lease all that BY THE MONTH. The costs on the server end of things are not trivial.
I'm not making a legal point, since I think that is irrelevant.
Law is not irrelevant. Just laws protect peoples' rights.
I don't think it's a fundamental human right to have control over ideas that you have distributed in some way to the world.
If that's the case, Justin, then one of the companies I work for fails and goes out of business. They pioneered and patented the concept of creating an episode of care with medical claims data. Other companies tried to copy it. It was a brilliant idea, but simple and easy to copy. Had they succeeded, they would have put tiny Symmetry Health out of business. Instead they won several lawsuits that allowed them to recover damages when mammouth companies (e.g. Medstat) tried to copy the idea for free.
One day a big company called Ingenix tried to copy the idea. Symmetry sued. Ingenix called up and asked what they could do to make the lawsuit go away. The rest is history.
Two people from Symmetry Health (both Yale grads in an MPH program) retired. Happily. I now work for a much larger Ingenix/Symmetry. And Ingenix protects its newly-purchased patent.
That's the way it should be, Justin. All those "makes no sense" cases that we defend on principle allow for a just case like this to happen.
- Bill
