Re: Java and avoiding software piracy?

Twisted wrote:
* The copy must be furnished. Its marginal cost is close to zero
unless it's trillions of bytes in size, however.

You keep harping on the "marginal cost" of reproduction, as if that were the only cost. What about the amortized cost of invention, just to name one, the overhead of keeping inventor staff working (utilities, health insurance, ...) during development?

What about the added value one's invention brings to the customer? Cost is not the only side of the price equation; there is also value to the customer.

If I provide a million dollars worth of value to you, and charge half a million, you're ahead even if it only "cost" me fitty ce't to do it. (We are, of course, in this case not ascribing a cost to the acquisition of knowledge that made it possible for me to succeed at your task, but we should.) What about the fact that my quality of work will be superior to that of a competitor who would "spend" the same amount on the marginal cost side, but didn't invest as much labor or cleverness in gaining skill as I?

Your economic argument is naive at best, disingenuous most likely, and fraudulent at worst. Even the most rabid Marxist would include the labor of developing a developer's skill set as part of the value, and the labor of creation, and the labor of marketing, and the labor of creating and maintaining a business structure to support the product, and a zillion other factors beyond the putative "marginal cost" of the byte stream.

"Marginal cost" is not the only variable in the price equation, but it does make a pretty, expert-sounding buzzword to make your argument less obviously flawed.

Econ 101 is a good idea in order to get a grasp on some of these concepts.

--
Lew
.

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