Believe me, lest it not have been previously clear, I do understand
both the rationale and genesis of such a viewpoint. It's a natural
reaction to first assume that some money grubbing Scrooge McDuck is
after your hard work, but my points are merely thus:
1. This is actually rather rarely the case, and people are notoriously
bad at calculating the true costs of doing things like CDs. I don't
know how often I've heard people say things like "Hey, CDs cost $1
apiece to make if you buy 1000 from the factory, so you guys are making
a 400% profit at $39.95!! You scum!!!" Yeah, right. If only that were
true. It might make us scum, but we'd be very rich scum. You have
employees to pay, and phone bills and 800 number charges and marketing,
catalogs, mailing lists, rental, electricity, computers, etc etc.
Plus most CD sales are to distributors, and you can bet your fanny that
they pay considerably less than $39.95 per CD. Suffice to say that
if we only charged production costs for the CD, we'd lose money and you
can bet that the CD would never be made again. It has to be _reasonably_
profitable just to be able to have any kind of future, and in today's
low margin world, a reasonable profit is going pretty good.
2. Even assuming a money-grubbing capitalist who has somehow managed to figure
out how to make and sell thousands of CDs using only a hacksaw, 5000 pounds
of beach sand and a roll of electrical tape, the cure is worse than the
disease. It's like littering - sure, one gum wrapper isn't going to
have us up to our necks in trash, but have everyone dropping gum wrappers
and pretty sure the place starts looking like Beiruit on a bad day.
If everyone restricted their FAQs, there would be on FAQs to put on the
CDROM. And once the FAQs got that way, everyone else would figure they
were being ripped off and do the same. Pretty soon, you can kiss the
free software CD market goodbye, and that would be a real shame since
the entire world isn't on the Internet and won't be for some time (not
that it's exactly free either). This may sound alarmist, but if you
think I'm exaggerating then you should perhaps attend one of those
symposiums on software law that discuss where it is now and where it's
headed. Your hair will stand on end, just before turning white, and
you'll walk out kissing a picture of Richard Stallman. Well, maybe not
that bad.
In any case, the real problem is that this is all relative. Your
ideas concerning an appropriate amount of "restriction" for the
copyright, or who's evil and who's not, or even how much profit
defines "evil" and how much defines "natural distribution costs", are
all very likely to be unique to you and you alone. Someone else will
have slightly different views, and this is why I take a very black and
white position on all of this and always have - there are too many
shades of grey in the middle, and you can easily get lost in them,
exchanging volumes of email very much like this thread! :-)
I think I've made my feelings abundantly clear on this topic at this
point, and lest folk start accusing me of going bandwidth crazy along
with Eric, I'll bow out..
Jordan
[
Usenet Hypertext FAQ Archive |
Search Mail Archive |
Authors |
Usenet
]
[
1993 |
1994 |
1995 |
1996 |
1997
]
© Copyright The Landfield Group, 1997
All rights reserved