Shii Posted:

Stolen music accounted for 51% of all mp3 downloads last year; that’s 51% revenue for the companies and artists lost. That means they are having to DOUBLE the price on the rest of the music to make up for it.

The quality of my life may be reduced in certain ways if I don’t have access to the media, but that does not mean I’ll go ahead and purchase it over, say, buying food or paying my bills. If I don’t have any spare money, I’ll find other, cheaper ways to entertain myself. Your high prices have priced me out of the market. At that point, it’s irrelevant whether I download your product, since you haven’t lost a sale either way.

Doubling prices using the excuse of the loss of that imaginary sale only goes to push more people from the legal IP purchasing market, and into illegal downloading, or else, simply never seeing your overpriced, overproduced, price gouging product. Basically, it’s dishonest economics. You only push the prices up because some people are willing to pay more, and you make overall more profit. If the majority were able to pay those prices, you would have further proof that your business model is working, and you can push prices up even more. Why are console games generally higher priced than PC games, when they are identical products, but console games are more difficult to copy, and therefore pirated less? I realise the answer isn’t a simple one, but part of the reason for the high prices is *because* the copyright holder has a captive audience, not despite it.

Intellectual property is not the same as real property, since with digital distribution, infinite copies can be made at zero cost. The worth of the ‘item’ is defined and constrained by laws, but if those laws are mutable, wrong, illogical or unfair, then people are going to push back against them.