January 20th, 2012, 10:21 am
Downloading a copy that you would have bought deprives the owner of money. From the owner & publishers point of view this lost income has an equivalent cost to theft, although no resources have been removed. The problem with the theft mindset is that you may be missing other bits of revenue. A downloaded copy that would (truly) never have been paid for deprives the owner of nothing, but builds a relationship between the owner and the downloader. There was a whole series of posts on techdirt about the economics of free which I recommend looking at. The philosophy can be summarized as, use the things that are infinite (anything downloadable) to promote things that are scarce (real world resources, access to people, time spent, space on a course, physical copies of books)Cuchulainn, in your case your books are infinite, but your time is scarce. Maybe by selling an electronic version of your book cheap/free, but charging for answering peoples questions (via write access to your website, keep read access open) you can make more money. The more electronic books you distribute, the more popular your courses are. You could even give electronic copies to anyone who pays to attend a course. In theory you should be charging for the responses you post here on Wilmott, although on here I think there is more value to be gained by enhancing reputation than by increasing the bank balance. For example, I don't want to be paid for this post, but I hope it makes others more willing to respond to my other queries. I'm not here to argue for or against piracy laws. These will or won't happen whatever my opinion. Maybe there is more value in picking up pennies than driving steamrollers (to twist an analogy).
Last edited by
Edgey on January 19th, 2012, 11:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.