Re: The unmentionable

Moreover, Dirk, there is also an argument
to be made that the crashing of the cost
of making and distributing a recording
and the crashing of the cost of discovering
and acquiring a recording -- alongside the
explosion of bandwidth -- those things brought
down the cost of music recordings just as much
or more than unauthorized copying of music.

Cable TV reduced the value of the TV broadcast
networks.  The net reduced the value of both.
Similar stories in the journalism and news reporting
industries.

Fonts: unlikely to be all that different.

-t



On Wed, 2009-07-29 at 16:36 -0700, Dirk Pranke wrote:
> 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 23:48:55 UTC