Randi128 at aol.com writes: > ddb writes: 'counting every pirated copy as a full-price retail sale in > stating the losses from piracy is absurd.' > > You are correct, not everyone who pirates a copy would have bought a retail > copy had the pirated copy not been available. But---- how else do you > determine the losses? If I sold 50 copies and 200 people pirated copies, I > would like to think that those people who pirated were just too cheap to pay > for their copies. So---the market is there. If pirating is killing your > business, maybe your charging too much. A CD or book is only worth what > people are willing to pay for it. Maybe it would be better to decrease retail > price to capture those pirates money? Teenagers who can afford to have a > system that can burn Cds and download Mp3's-----can't afford to buy music??? > Don't value the music enough to pay for it is more like it. Making an estimate of the economic losses to piracy that everybody will agree with is clearly impossible. Still, some estimates are more ridiculous than others. The estimate that "nothing" is lost is silly, as is the estimate that every pirate copy would have been bought at full retail if the pirate copy wasn't available. And the arguments are different for mass-market paperback books, say, than for high-end software packages (like say Autocad). It's closer to fair to count every copy of a book pirated as a potential sale -- mmpb books are about $8, whereas Autocad was (at the time I saw them try to claim every pirated copy was a lost sale) about $3000. Considering how the price relates to privacy, as you suggest, is sensible. If people feel ripped-off, they'll be much more likely to cheat, I think. I'm reasonably sure it's important to shut down organized pirating operations -- whether it's off-shore DVD producers, or Napster, or whatever. (Unless you change the whole model so drastically the words aren't even applicable any more). I don't think it's possible, or desirable, to shut down a small amount of person-to-person piracy, though. -- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b at dd-b.net / http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/ John Dyer-Bennet 1915-2002 Memorial Site http://john.dyer-bennet.net Dragaera mailing lists, see http://dragaera.info