> Louis CK released his $5 show with no DRM or protection. He treated his customers with respect, but if you look at the torrent networks, it was immediately sh

> Louis CK released his $5 show with no DRM or protection. He treated his customers with respect, but if you look at the torrent networks, it was immediately shared and now is all over the place. > How is this respectful? It's not, but you're using the same flawed argument that the RIAA, MPAA, etc.'s use, that a pirated file automatically equals a lost sale. This very simply isn't true. You have to account for the people who wouldn't have purchased the product at any price, either because they're incredibly cheap (or just poor, I suppose), or because they've never heard of Louis CK, don't much care about him either way, and just want to grab the file to check it out. The latter case seems like just a special case of the first, but it's more of a special case, namely that it's not that they wouldn't buy it at any price, but that they wouldn't buy it sight unseen at any price. It's possible that there are people out there who pirated the special and then decided that it was worth it to buy the thing. My point is that it's an incredible challenge, probably an impossible challenge, to quantify the effects of piracy. Some pirates would have never paid regardless, and some pirates will pay only because they've pirated. I think the rest of your comment makes a valid point regarding smaller vendors and the anchoring of prices. My response is simply that it hasn't played out enough yet that I'm willing to outright agree right now. The era of having a few large companies with massive budgets bringing in massive revenues could be ending, but that doesn't mean that independent studios will die. It could be quite the opposite, with many smaller niche studios rising up. For app store revenues, I can't disagree with you. My only response is that if you're not making money at a $50 price point, then you probably need to try a smaller one. $50 seems like a high price to me for many consumer apps anyway, even on a PC, and especially for a mobile app (n.b. I have a dumb phone, I don't have an iPad, etc. I'm not the target market for these apps, so I'm not speaking from experience). Basically, if you're failing at $50, try dropping your price. I'd bet a lot of people who would pirate at $50 would buy at $5. If you can gain 10 buyers at $5 for every pirate at $50, you break even. It's all about finding the right price point for your product. If you can't find one, then you can make a "lite" version with reduced functionality and try segmenting the market.