[free-sklyarov] Arguments from consumer rights pov

[Christopher R. Maden]

At 08:30 25-07-2001, Austin Hook wrote:
>On Wed, 25 Jul 2001, Christopher R. Maden wrote:
> > This last point isn't *quite* true.  Even if you didn't intend to buy it,
> > there are two damages caused by your copying.  One is that the perceived
> > value of a scarce resource is lowered; people place a value on having
> > something that not everyone else has (such as limited editions) or on 
> being
> > able to own things that have a high cost of entry.
>
>Think again.  That might be true with stamps or antique cars, but they are
>special cases.  So far there is not much of a collector's market in old
>software.

No, but there is a rarity argument.  Publications will pay a premium for 
exclusive use of fonts (Newsweek, The Washington Post, Sports Illustrated, 
Time, Le Monde, Wired, all use custom fonts for their text), and high-end 
software has fewer piracy problems because the customers don't *want* other 
people to have it (typesetting software like XPP and Advent, old-school 
ebook software like DynaText).  In the mid-range, there are tools like 
FrameMaker and Photoshop, which retail for several hundreds of dollars, but 
if piracy didn't exist, Adobe could probably get away with charging more 
since there's really no competition.  (I'm not saying that this is a good 
thing.  And I know there are alternatives, but they are not commercial 
software and they are relatively obscure, to the general public that 
comprises Adobe's target market for this stuff.)

>It is not the normal case of a scarce resource, like water or energy,
>except as artificially constrained.

Exactly.  But it's inaccurate to say that pirating an artificially 
constrained resource doesn't diminish its value to the producer.

-crism
-- 
"You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though
it does big things badly, does small things badly too." - J.K. Galbraith
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