Since one of my friends has put a link on my pirate thoughts of last week to an interesting case in Sweden, I thought I’d blog about this topic.
Some full disclosure. I violate copyright on a pretty regular basis. I download the occasional movie, some music and lately a metric fuckload of books on programming.
That being said, when I violate the copyright of the owners of this content, more often than not, if the product is good, I pay for a legal copy, and in many cases, I seek out works by the same author/artist and buy more.
Now here’s the kicker. If I were the author/artist of these works, I’d really hate the pirates of the world. They are essentially taking money out of my pocket by providing my works at no charge.
Here’s the difficulty when it comes to copyright for me personally. Let’s take an example like Adobe. Their software is powerful, fantastic, and the industry standard. I really want to learn how to use it and make great web content with it. The difficulty is, that the package I want to learn costs about $2500.
Now, to Adobe’s credit, they are a progressive company and offer the exact software that costs $2400 to students for about $1000.
Unfortunately, they only offer the student price if you can show you are going to an accredited institution. There are no options for self learners like myself.
Now I respect Adobe’s right to charge whatever the fuck they want for their product. I am happy to see that they are offering more product for less money lately too. That package that I want used to run closer to $3500.
But the question is, after development costs, what is a reasonable price to charge for a product? Now the answer in a capatalist society like ours, is whatever the market will bear.
What Adobe is missing out on though I think is after you’ve made back your development costs, if you price your product at a more reasonable price point, you’d gain 3 things. First, more profit, second user loyalty and third an even greater stranglehold on the market.
Once the development costs have been recouped for a software product, it costs absolutley nothing to duplicate the product. There is a storage overhead in hard drive space, and a bandwidth cost when offering the product for download, but this is peanuts in the software world.
Every $2500 product purchased from adobe is pure profit. It is not like a car where there are raw material costs to create the product.
So if Adobe sold the software for a more resonable price point, they would make much, much more money. Since more people would use the product, it would be better entrenched in the industry and people would be less inclined to switch to something else. Once you learn something, you are less inclined to want to learn something else.
I think $375 is an entry point cost that would push people into purchasing on a mass basis. I recently purchased a year of access to a video training library at www.lynda.com. I felt I got value for my money. Had the cost been $500 I wouldn’t have signed up. They priced their product at a point where I feel I am getting great value for my money.
Adobe isn’t there yet. I think $2500 is too high for me to get value for my money, since I am just learning. I can’t go out and make that $2500 back easily enough.
So people who hold copyrights take heed. There are people out there like me that want to buy legal copies of the software. But if you price it too high, we will resort to piracy.
Music companies also take heed. There are many people like myself out there that only buy music after they’ve heard it and we buy a lot more once we’ve decided we like an artist. Lawsuits that go after people and fine them ungodly amounts of money make us want to pirate music out of spite. You get better results by not pursuing file sharing.
