The Pirate Bay Trial

[Oyvoyvoyv]

SlorgNet said:

Oyvoyvoyv said:

 To point 1.

The copies are cheap, but making the game (for instance) is expensive.

 

To point 2.

I think that's just completely wrong. With Pirate Bay, you keep the song/movie/game for yourself, in addition to giving it to someone else. By buying it used, the seller no longer has it.

 

Top-tier games for new consoles can be expensive, but the vast majority of games are not. Mobile media, cellphones, handhelds of all kinds - that's where most of the games are and will continue to be. That means a totally different marketing and financial model. We have to stop assuming that Big Money = High Quality = The Way To Go. That's what Hollywood's ripoff artists and Rupert Murdoch would like us to believe, but it's just not true. We need a diversity of financing and funding models, including freeware, low-cost payware, and public mass media.

As for Point 2: when I make a non-commercial digital copy, I'm not taking away, violating, or infringing on the ability of anyone else to enjoy that product. I've made a new copy, on my own hardware, for my own private use. That should be as legal as glancing at a book, taking a photo of a river, or writing down a poem using words I've read in a book somewhere.

One final point: most human beings on this planet (70%) simply can't afford $30/30EUR DVDs and Big Media's IP monopolies. They would never have the money to watch a film or listen to any music in a pure profit system, so they pick up pirated copies for free, or at much lower prices. Rather than criminalizing file-sharing, we should be asking deeper questions about whether we really want a vicious, cretinous market fundamentalism to dominate all aspects of human culture.

 

 You're suggesting to change the law, aren't you? Well, Pirate Bay is at trial for breaking that law. Even if the law is changed, Pirate Bay broke it, didn't they? Thus, whether or not the law is correct has very little to do with the trial.

 

Additionally, I'm not saying high production is the way to go, but it does give higher quality. The high priced games are also the ones selling the most, and it is actually the smaller (the ones that try to make many low-cost games) that go under. The high production cost games don't seem to be losing a lot more than the low production cost.

 

Finally: There's 850M people that buy over 90% of the video games. The ratio is probably a bit lower for music and such, but still over 75% I'd guess. There's 6.5 billion (or more) people on the planet. That's 13% of the world's population.

Those are also the 13% that have the highest - by far - prices for music, games and movies. (Well, some countries have higher prices at some of those, but not many).

 

So, why cater to the other 85%? They have lower prices, but yet buy far less. You'd have to go considerably lower in price to make them buy rather than pirate, and I'm fairly sure that if you do, you'll lose sales in the western world.