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| Xiaou2:
(+_+) , (<--- interesting reply name!? heh) I agree. I also think its very wrong that they try to make people buy the same media again and again because of format changes. If we bought Indy once... then we should never have to buy him again. If there is a format change... then we should only have to pay a very small upgrade fee... and not the Full retail rape. You know... if they charged about $3 a movie... they would make like 20 Trillion dollars in a single week of sales. They wouldnt even know what to do with all of that money. Even at a loss of typical profit levels, the shear number of discs sold would give them more profit than they have ever seen in the history of selling discs. |
| DaveMMR:
--- Quote from: mr_doles on December 08, 2008, 07:11:35 am ---You should absolutely be able to try before you buy. Ever go to a car dealership and buy a car without test driving it. I can't count the number of tapes that I have bought as a kid because I heard 1 song on the radio and found the real reason there was only 1 song on the radio. With that being said most stores like Walmart and Amazon will let you listen to samples of each song before you buy it. Well that's just my 2 cents anyway, which would not even buy 2 seconds of 1 song. ??? --- End quote --- You can do that in most record stores nowadays - as well as iTunes. But if you find yourself at the receiving end of the RIAA's madcap dash to sue their customers, downloading a full song with an intent of just "trying it out" is probably a weak defense. Of course, IANAL (heh, heh "I Anal!"). --- Quote from: RayB on December 08, 2008, 01:24:57 pm --- --- Quote from: DaveMMR on December 07, 2008, 07:59:56 pm ---However, someone NOT buying a product is lost income. They still need to pay the bills. So yeah, it cost them money. --- End quote --- It's not lost income unless the customer would have otherwise bought it! --- End quote --- As far as the RIAA, software distributors, etc. are concerned - anyone who went through the trouble of obtaining it (no matter the difficulty, or lack thereof) wants it. A "lost sale" is essentially a "lost opportunity". How could you accurately prove that someone "wasn't going to buy it anyway"? On top of that, there are cheap people who will always go for the free over paying for something, despite quality, even if they want it. |
| RayB:
--- Quote from: DaveMMR on December 08, 2008, 08:13:01 pm ---As far as the RIAA, software distributors, etc. are concerned - anyone who went through the trouble of obtaining it (no matter the difficulty, or lack thereof) wants it. --- End quote --- I want a Ferrari. But I can't afford one. Companies spend billions of dollars on marketing to creating "want" desires in people. Wanting something is not the same as a sale. --- Quote ---A "lost sale" is essentially a "lost opportunity". How could you accurately prove that someone "wasn't going to buy it anyway"? --- End quote --- Back to the Ferrari again, a quick look at my net worth would easily show I couldn't buy one even if I sold everything I own. So the solution: Hire skilled and impartial statisticians to figure out the % that likely would have spent some dough on what they otherwise got for free, scale it to the disposable income of those people and that estimate will be close to the actual losses. Internally I'm sure companies already do this, but they will never publicly use those more modest estimates since it doesn't help their agenda. --- Quote ---On top of that, there are cheap people who will always go for the free over paying for something, despite quality, even if they want it. --- End quote --- Agreed. But again, if that person has 1 million mp3s, but a disposable income of only $400 a month, can $1 million in losses be claimed? You can say the MP3s represent a retail value of $1 million, but they are not 1 million lost sales. At most you could claim he might have otherwise been able to buy $400 worth per month for X number of months (over 10 years he still would only have spent $48000). That's the distinction that's not usually made in the news media when companies talk about piracy (or when lobbying government), in order to make their side seem worse than it is. *Note, I would never argue this same position when talking about physical goods. A theft of a physical item takes it away from the possibility of being sold to another customer, thus an actual lost sale. But if the company went to its insurance company and made a claim to replace the stolen item, the cost of the loss is not the retail price, but the wholesale price. However, you can bet that if the company were to announce news of a theft in the media, they would state its retail value, not wholesale. |
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