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The author isn't recommending that they give anything away for free. He is talking about how to determine a fair price. Your analogy does not apply.
by brownleej 16y ago
The author isn't recommending that they give anything away for free. He is talking about how to determine a fair price. Your analogy does not apply.
- zavulon 16y agoI don't think it's really the "fair" price.. it's the price that he, the author, would consider buying the books instead of pirating them. Whether that price is really "fair" is debatable. Now, I love freedom of information, torrents, open source, and all of that, but putting myself in any author's shoes, I think it would be infuriating to hear this kind of argument. "I can pirate your book for free, so a fair price would be $1 dollar. I don't care how much work you put in it." (Yes, I know Ian Fleming is dead, but this applies to any other author as well)
- jerf 16y agoThere's no such thing as a universal fair price. There's the situation when the price is lower than your personal valuation of the good, then you buy it, and there's case where it isn't, in which case you don't. (And don't forget opportunity costs when factoring in your "personal price", there's a lot of things I might be willing to spend $10 on in isolation but I can't actually buy all of them, and you have to factor that in to your personal price.) It's not wrong to sell it for $10, it's not wrong for your price to be $1, the latter fact doesn't give you a license to pirate it simply because your personal price is lower. You can sort of composite up a semi-universal concept of a "fair price" by looking at a suitably chosen large group of people but it's still just an approximation.