ThePirateBay.com – simply put, never pay for digital anything, ever!

The rest of you who don’t like it, can Suck. My. Rooster.

Until it is offered at a fair price, piracy abounds. That is a fact of life. It does not matter if we are talking spices like nutmeg (the Dutch once owned all the islands where it grew) and other spices, to things unions control (like shirt buttons). History is full of cartels that have come to an as the price of the item adjusts to some value not out of proportion to the cost of its production.

With the advent of the computer and the Internet, music, video and books all want to adjust to the cost of free or near free. You can call it piracy, you can make laws against it. In the long run, the markets adjust and people find business models to sell a product at a price where people are not willing to pirate it.

For music, the price is somewhere less than a dollar a song. Apple is selling a lot at this price. There is still lots of piracy. The market demands at least one of three things. (Using Music as an example)

The first, would be that even with a price of almost nothing. Such as mp3′s for 5 cents each. Those that produce them could make enough of a profit that it is worth there time to continue to create the product.

The second, would be that with so much “content” out there, it would be worthwhile to pay some service that would be worthwhile to access the same content for almost free. Such some system where you pay a fee to be a member and they make recommendations about new music you might be interested in, and they pass some of the cash back to the content producer.

The third, is that there is some other tangible product that can’t be replicated cheap, with good overhead that music would sell. Concert tickets to see a band, tee-shirts, autographed items. Someone listens to “free” music, discovers a band they like, and buy other things at a premium price, thus covering the cost of the item. Think of an MP3 the same way you think of junk mail. No one would pay for junk mail. Junk mailers send it out because it is cheep and promotes the sale of some product they make enough money off of to justify what it cost to do junk mailings.

Right now, just because we have not figured out how to turn a good solid profit on reading material, video and audio that longs to sell for not much above what it costs to distribute. Does not mean that there is not a way to do it. It will be done at some point that is the way markets work. If you sell it for too much, there will be a market for someone who can provide it for you just above the cost of producing it.

I still have the offending piece of plastic to remind me of the awfulness of copy protection.

Also, you wrote:

“The copy protection which EA defended but dialed back after the consumer revolt.”

EA did not “dial back” copy protection. They just increased the allowed number of activations slightly. The copy protection is still in full force, and is in no way “dialed back”.

Again, this reeks of the same uncritical swallowing of EA’s propaganda as the praise heaped on Spore above.