Re: The unmentionable

On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 3:59 PM, Sylvain Galineau<sylvaing@microsoft.com> wrote:
> I must admit I've sort of assumed that the primary font buyer was and would
> remain a design professional for quite some time, in which case the future
> piracy of today's non-customers could not hurt anyone's bottom line since
> you already earn $0 from them today.
>
> Which is indeed very distinct from the music business where the average
> customer is much more likely to substitute a free illegal copy for the
> legal version i.e. even if they copy much more than they could or would buy,
> the availability of free means they may no longer buy at all.

Actually, I believe that this is very much a contentious and unproven
point in the music industry as well. Many would argue that the people
downloading files would never have bought the music otherwise, and so
no net revenue has been lost. Similar arguments are also made about
software piracy, of course ;)

At any rate, the point is that the mechanisms that can be used to
prevent IP theft also prevent legitimate use cases, since you cannot
technically distinguish between the two. Whether or not that tradeoff
is acceptable or not to the various parties involved in the standard
is the question. Obviously, different industries (and different
companies) vote differently on this.

-- Dirk

Received on Wednesday, 29 July 2009 23:37:38 UTC