Warez: A discussion

[Red October]

Well lets address the economics of the situation. Thier are indeed huge marketing and production (not jsut the cd) costs with games, movies and music. They are often passed on to the consumer in the price. We know that. Video tapes and tapes were touted to be the end of the industry because people would just copy the video or tape. Well, it didn't happen. Most people just copied a tape for thier own use (should thier VCR or tape deck eat their original) or gave a copy to a friend who was too cheap or too poor to buy it. Thus sales were not heavily impacted and the record companies looked like a bunch of money hungry bigots. Thier was no impact because thier was no infrasturcture to distribute "pirated" copies.

Today is a different story, there is an infrastructure for pirated copies and record sales are down. Now are the sales down because of this infrastructure for pirated distribution? Or is it because the price is too high and/or quality is poor? I would argue both. I don't buy as many music cd's because...well most of it just sucks. As for DVD's, I usually just rent. If I like the movie and have a high probability of watching it again, I buy it. As for video games, rent first, wait for price to drop, then buy. I don't pirate or buy pirated stuff because I don't have the ability to record DVD's and CD's (yet) and pirated stuff can some times be of very poor quality. But when I do get the ability to copy, will I? Hell yes. I spent money to buy this stuff and I want the ability to make a back up copy. But I'm sure some have made this into a business.

The pro's of this, people who want to get "published" can do so via electronically (no or little production/marketing costs and don't need some executive to tell them yes). The con is business's who invest $$ into an actually good product may never realize a profit (thier in this for profits, make no mistake about that) because a free version may be downloaded.

So who's at fault? In my opinion, the recording industry for falling asleep at the wheel. When CD's, first came about, the recording industry embraced them (a high quality product exceeding tapes with little ability by the general public to reproduce) and the CD player manufacuturing companies got what they wanted because it forced everyone to buy CD players.. This gave recording companies what they wanted, lots of profit. But the problem is they rested on thier laurels and technology moved foward. Evenutally economics caught up and their once "unique" product no longer was unique. The writing was on the wall that tech would eventually eclipse and recording CD's and electonic copies would soon be available and the ENTIRE industry did nothing (which makes no sense since a new media outlet would have companies scrambling to be first on the market...which leads me to believe thier wasn't any competition and collusion may have been occuring). Had the industry been on the up and up, they would have embraced the new media outlets (slowly phasing out CD's as thier primary sales, just like tapes) all the while developing the technology to make it very difficult to make electronic copies that could be redistributed (don't tell me that it can't be done, I'm sure it could be if they paid someone enough to do so).

The reality is the recording industry cannot afford to litigate every single person that copies from the internet (litigation is costly and sends a bad image), what thier doing now is simply using scare tactics in order to curb some of it untill they can technology wise catch up. Proof of the pudding; video games are coming out with just your basic game while having the real content via onlin w/ paid subscriptions (which is economicaly and business wise fantastic, you can literally caputure large sums of the market...assuming you have worthwhile products). Music companies are now starting to offer music via online and the music can be tracked should it end up being swaped with everyone (which allows them to eventually catch abusers and perhaps deny service...how do you think they find every new major file sharer), but its still going to take time to catch up. I think this is a good lesson for the inustry to learn that resting on thier laurels (and perhaps relying on collusion) will be detriment in the long run.

Sorry if this doesn't seem to coherent, on allergy meds right now.