How much money have you saved with Pirate Bay

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You have destroyed the basis of commerce when you decree that you can simply take that which you would not buy. It is illegal to walk out of a bookstore with a book or CD* but it is perfectly legal to buy a different author's book or a different software company's or musician's CD instead. That competition will drive down prices if the one you want but allegedly can't afford is losing sales to a competitor. Instead of taking the easy way out, some might save up for the software in question. But even that is irrelevant; this is a moral question. They wrote it, they own the rights to it, and you only have the right to use it if they say so. Unless you give them the amount of money they request, they do not grant you that right. If you have a problem with that, don't use the product. Most open-source software is available free of charge.


*Before you harp on the theft of a physical object being the distinction, that is really not the concern as marginal costs in that area are close to negligible

I know you told me not to, but I will point out that piracy isn't theft at all. See the pic I posted on the last page - it's something the law agrees with.

Anyway...

Of course you could use different software instead, but other photo manipulation programs simply aren't as good. GIMP has a horrible UI, for example, and while I personally use Pixelmator, I would be able to do so if I didn't have a Mac (as most people don't) and if I wanted to do more advanced editing, I wouldn't be able to.

However, Pixelmator is £60 whereas Photoshop is £400. That's utterly stupid, it isn't good value. But, as I explained, it still has qualities which make it better than the competition... Just not £340 better.

Now, if the competition decided to add more features to their software, they could convince people to look their way instead of using Photoshop, but that's where competition comes in - it's up to those companies to make a better product than Adobe, and they just don't, so people who agree that Adobe's prices are stupid will just pirate their software.

If Adobe were really losing money over this, they'd just reduce the outrageous price of their software, but as they haven't, we can assume they're still making a tidy profit, because they're aiming to sell to the professional market anyway, not so much the hobbyist.

So, there we go. Competition in commerce is already in effect. The onus is on either Adobe to set a more attractive price or developers of alternatives to create a better product.

This economic osmosis is the real issue. The morality of piracy and duplication, and all the arguments about not taking something unless you would not buy it at the asking price, are all distractions.

The real issue is how you, as a consumer of a product that provides you with value, ensure that the producers are paid and given the incentive to continue producing the things you are enjoying. Major record companies do virtually nothing to support music education and the evolution of new musical acts. Major film studios do little (but more than record companies) to support film production education. Major publishers actively destroy aspiring authors, while siphoning all the new authorship profits into the over-promotion of increasingly fewer titles by increasingly over-paid celebrity authors.

Perhaps iTunes and micro-payment models do target end-user funding back into encouraging talent and production. The free and open-source software model certainly does have the effect of encouraging the production of software (funded mostly by gifts from major corporations and government departments). Cheap self-publication of books and music preserves diversity, especially where markets exist to feed the content producer.

But piracy absolutely, definitely does not encourage any musician, author or software developer to do anything.

It's really irrelevant in the context of media though. Publishers couldn't give a damn about the physical paper and ink and binding on a book, or an actual physical CD. Those are dirt cheap. The contents- the intellectual property- contained inside are what is valuable.


Tough luck. You can either afford the best, or you make do with something cheaper. Nothing entitles you to simply take whatever you want without compensating those who produced it.


So don't buy it. Make do with a cheaper alternative. Simple as that.


Throw the GIMP a donation and some feature requests, then. Better yet, learn to code and write your own damn program.

Quite right. When I was writing my book I looked into self publishing. I priced it out and I could print copies for as little as 15 cents each, and thats with a glossy soft cover. The book was a notebook sized programming tutorial with a spiral binding.

Additionally, Dan Ariely busted the concept of supply/demand wide open in his research. It is detailed in his book "predictably irrational" under the section of perceived cost vs free. Purchase or pirate or otherwise pre-empt a copy as is your wont. I highly recommend it to anyone that wants to understand what makes people tick. The book isnt just about economics(or piracy).

If you want a taste of it, you can watch his TED talk(s). This one is 17 minutes.

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_ask ... sions.html

Adobe will never drop the price of photoshop. Piracy will never exert the sort of pressure that will enable that.

But if they saw their market share drop enough, and they thought they were at risk of being displaced by the GIMP or some new commercial challenger, they might reconsider their pricing options.

Whether or not I'm entitled to pirate Photoshop in your opinion is irrelevant, though. As I've already said, I make do with Pixelmator anyway, but since Adobe isn't being competitive with price, they can expect to not make as many sales as they would at a reasonable price. Clearly this isn't an issue for them because they're chuffing along just fine while ripping their customers off.

The other software available isn't as good, as I've explained. Yes you can suggest features for GIMP, but that doesn't mean they'll magically be added, and it's hardly reasonable to tell everyone who wants a decent cheap or free photo manipulation program to code their own.

So we have the element of competition. Neither solution is being competitive, so piracy becomes more attractive, and it's up to the companies in that market to fix that problem, which they aren't doing. There is market failure, and the externality caused by that situation is mass piracy. It's basic economics.

No. Very doubtful I think. That would violate the perception of the value of their product, and they would only lose money. MS is in a similar boat(and Apple even moreso). Apple really could charge competitive rates to generic boxes(and phones). Yet they keep the price high and stay with 10% of the market. Why?

If Apple permanently dropped their prices by 50%, whats the first thing people would think? That Apple started selling crap. They would think they were using cheap components. And what would the shareholders think?

So each version the cost of windows goes up too, for this very reason. When you raise the bar of entry, perceived value climbs. So a 300 dollar windows 7 is seen as having more value than the 150 dollars people paid for windows xp. Ariely talks about this. Likewise, Jobs marketers probably know pretty well what Ariely is saying, and that is why there are cheap(er) low end macs.

I have a personal anecdote that reinforces the idea.

When I worked at the bar, the DJ used to offer women money(100 bucks) for their clothing. Sometimes it worked, but when it didnt he would raise the offer. This NEVER worked, and standing on the floor I was privy to women discussing it, but as the price went up, their willingness to disrobe in a crowded room full of strangers came down. Their perception of the cost of the transaction climbed faster and greater than the DJs promotional allowance.

If he had started dropping the price, scarcity grows and opportunity diminishes. Its the same reason it worked so well the first time, but once he started doing it every week, it wasnt so effective.

Likewise, dropping the cost of an Apple computer means cachet drops, perception of quality drops, scarcity drops and opportunity grows.

Yep, this is all very true. If you sell a product perceived to be "luxury" and you set a high price, you can increase your sales. Companies from Apple to Rolls-Royce do that. It's a very interesting concept us humans have that makes us think something's better just because we pay more for it, IMO. But then, I'm typing this on a £700 MacBook, so what do I know?

How about the opinion of the law then? Is that also irrelevant?


Of course. That's how the market works. Raise the price, sell fewer copies.


Their customers are not being ripped off. They clearly think it is worth the amount they paid, or they would not have paid. No one is holding a gun to anyone's head and forcing them to buy a particular product.


OK, so the best product happens to be the most expensive as well. Are you surprised? Guess what? In the real world, quality often costs money. Pay up or do without, and quit acting like you're entitled to free stuff.

Depends. How many people have been taken to court and lost a case over pirating Photoshop?



That's how it works for the majority of products, yes, but there are a few exceptions as I mentioned in the post above yours. Since the price of Adobe's software is so ludicrous, we can assume they are one those exceptions, but that doesn't mean your average joe will buy a disc for £400, just the same as not everyone will spend a fortune on a Mac or an iPhone.



Not always - you can get many cheap cars that are very reliable, for example. It's just that, in this particular market, Adobe has something of a monopoly, and they can get away with charging stupid prices because their product is perceived as a luxury good. But what if someone doesn't wanna pay £400 for a bunch of ones and zeroes which you can easily get for free? Then they will pirate it. That's a fact. And, again, if another company came along with a comparable product for a better price, the portion of the market that pirates Photoshop would be more likely to get that instead. But this product doesn't exist, so it's up to the free market to come up with one, or the market failure of piracy will continue.

You raise an interesting point actually. It might well be that Adobe doesnt want the average joe as a customer. That certainly cuts down on customer service costs(and headaches) for instance.

Exactly. They don't care if average joes pirate their software because they aren't their target audience anyway, professionals are, and they will cough up. I actually said that exact thing a few posts ago.

Not exactly, or they wouldnt put the anti-license spoofing mechanisms in.

The ones that are always cracked virtually hours after each release?

Yup. And the one they keep replacing? Thats a lot of wasted effort for "who cares", so who are you fooling with the claim that "they dont care about piracy"?