Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo unite... to support internet censorship.

[Mr Khan]

Seece said:

Mr Khan said:

More accurate to say that if pirates do become paying customers, that it becomes a wash economically. You don't generate money from nothing, and its not like these people who might be consuming certain intellectual properties are sitting on the money that they would be spending, but it is generally acknowledged in economics that a good deal of piracy comes from customers who you are priced too high to access in the first place.

The alternate point is that companies could choose to meet such people in the middle through lower-cost (e.g. ad-supported), but they choose instead to whine to governments and continue to play their games of junk economics

Read HappySquirrel's comment on it in the thread i made, he states it more clearly

No, anti anti piracy people bend the argument anyway they can to justify it. Music and Dvd's I find hard to believe priced out of many people's price range, least of all the majority, I flat out don't believe that. For games there is used and renting, which is better than pirating. At the the of the day that excuse is whack.

In terms of generating money, you're right, middle to majority of people only have a certain amount to spend and if they are forced to buy a movie insted of pirating, then they have to give something else up (not ALL, there are people with a lot of disposable cash left over at the end of the month, and they pirate not because they can't afford the product, but because they can.)

However, this is why the games, movies and the music industry people are pushing these piracy laws, and making the government listen, because for that middle/majority of people that would sacrafice spending elsewhere to buy a movie of game, you're assuming they're sacraficing something of the same, wheras it could be a takeaway, or clothes, or something else entirely irrlevent to whoever is fighting for this.

Value is relative, which is the foundational principle of Demand. There are certain customers you will never reach, or certain customers that your business model cannot reach. That is not to say that objectively you have stuff priced too high, but that at the end of the day a given customer simply won't buy for the price you're willing to sell at. I am not saying that the majority of pirates could not afford to pay for these things, but that the will to pay for them isn't there

And that's the root of the fallacy here. You cannot make these people into customers, so why waste so much time and resources (and in this case, expensive propaganda campaigns to lobby Congresspeople) when at the end of the day, these are non-customers?

And then, of course, we have the hideous methods being employed in the course of this bill. We're talking about fundamentally changing the internet for what is, basically, no good reason at all.

You like your Prince of Persia avatar, right? Well after this law, VGC moderators will have to remove it, despite the fact that you are British and the site is British, because if Ubisoft has a mind, they could petition the Justice Department and VGC would lose all hits from the USA overnight. So out of fear of the law, VGC will have to enforce the law's standards internally