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Piracy just tells us that there's a market inefficiency. In other words: Movies, music, software, books a.s.o are too expensive for some market actors. The same
by jk4930 16y ago
Piracy just tells us that there's a market inefficiency. In other words: Movies, music, software, books a.s.o are too expensive for some market actors. The same with black markets and shadow economies. It just means there's something wrong with the current distribution or pricing system. Piracy isn't nice, but that's because markets aren't nice but true: They reflect both sides, the producer and the consumer.
- rsheridan6 16y agoNot true. A pirate may well be a someone who would have bought the product retail if piracy wasn't available, but chose to pirate it instead because it's cheaper. Even for those who would not have bought the product retail, but would have bought it at a lower price, that may be a market inefficiency, but it's also unavoidable. It's not currently possible to tell how much each customer would pay for a product and price it accordingly for each of them.
- orblivion 16y agoI sortof disagree, or at least look from a slightly different perspective. Stealing is always an option for any good. The only reason it's not efficient is A) people's morality and B) consequences. No matter the price, if the price is high enough and the good desirable enough to overcome B and fear of A, it will happen. So I guess where I differ from you, is that the situation we find ourselves in could have come from media going from being inexpensive to becoming expensive as you suggest, but it also could have come from the increased ease of doing and getting away with piracy, and the general sense of entitlement that people have about it which overcomes the morality hurdle. And if you don't think piracy is stealing, then piracy is just a very efficient action in the information economy, so there's nothing really to call wrong here.