I'm not fabricating anything. And this is not random picture.

If someone has misjudged the value of this painting and overpaid it, it's whether his choice or his mistake.

As I said, pricing is a complex process, and I was just denying having said that marginal cost is the only factor that intervenes.

But a zero marginal cost does reduce price through time, whatever the initial price was.

Also, a painting is always a unique object, so marginal cost concept doesn't apply there, by definition. If it was possible to exactly and physically reproduce this painting, the price of one copy would eventually fall to zero, even if the first instance initially was worth $1M.

According to me, copying a design should always be allowed. Only the signature, the branding, shouldn't be copied. Copying is good, unlike counterfeiting. That's the very reason of the existence of branding. It authenticates the original design, but anyone should be allowed to try to imitate it, or even improve it, as long as they use an other branding.

If I want to build a bicycle, do you really think I should pay something to people who invented the wheels and the pedals ? Come on.

You appear to have assumed that I was referring to yourself, sorry to burst your bubble but you weren't, I thought that we had finally reached a conclusion to the thread.

The thread was about whether Piracy was justified, your response above seems to imply you don't condone it but prefer that software is open and free. Fine, talk about that in a thread about that please not this one. The thread title has potential to be used as citing Maemo is all about pirated software and feed the media trolls thereby hurting the platform image.

This does make sense, indeed.

Thanks everyone for this debate that I've found thrilling, and helped me to clarify my thoughts on the subject.

Please stop using words you don't know the meaning of, azorni.

The fundamental issue at hand here is that it may be your opinion that piracy isn't piracy, that commercial software and digital copies are inherently worthless, but it's nothing more than just that: your opinion. Having an opinion doesn't entitle you to anything.

The laws are there, and there's more than one reason to have them. I support copyright, and I support the artists and products I like. However, I also strongly support Free Software; but neither are mutually exclusive.

Our current economical system is based on money. Sad, but true. People need money to survive. Worse yet, people need money to live. It's not a basic requirement, it's not a detail, it's the basis of western civilisation. It may sound materialistic, but guess what, so is 99% of our much beloved western society (... which by the way, is the only one thriving currently).

A bridge is indeed a a construction which "provide a desirable function that reduces time or effort in crossing a natural obstacle", but it can also be seen as a work of art, some bridges are mind boggling, masterpieces. And guess what? You have to pay a toll for a lot of bridges in order to cross them; especially when the convenience factor (also called luxury) is its main advantage.

However, I feel we're drifting very far away from the initial subject (and on a sidenote, man, dude, you have waaaayyy too much time on your hands to be guarding a thread this much). I would have liked to see this thread move in a positive manner, but as usual it's the same story, one guy versus the rest of the world, recycling the same arguments over and over, and bringing really, nothing, utterly nothing new to the table.

The point I wanted to bring across in my first few paragraphs was that people need money to live, but not everyone can be doing the same thing. Some people get next to nothing to be working in a factory day in, day out. Some people get paid massive amounts of money to wiggle their *** and pretend to be singing in front of a massive audience.

And guess what? The latter are there *because* of the former. Not thanks to, because of. This is something that is very, very important to grasp. Celebrities are celebrities because people pay attention to them. If they didn't, they'd just be another person on Earth. Whether you feel uncomfortable about that is not the issue, and you shouldn't deflect on piracy and copyright because you feel there is an issue with society (because that's what this is starting to sound like).

I did quite like the turn when mmurfin87 started to think in terms of functional value rather than exact value. If you look at the exact value of a painting, its pure worth in terms of materials, sure, it's not much. But value is made of so much more than the basic building blocks -- this is the foundation of our whole world; I just can't fathom you don't realise this.

If you buy a brick, it's not worth a whole lot. Hell, if you gather a million bricks, it's still not worth much. You can start stacking them, and maybe throw some mortar, and you'll end up with a basic structure that has a lot more value than the bricks alone, but still not worth that much. Throw in an architect, who will design things in a way that makes efficient use of the space, makes the whole structure appealing to the eye... And the value of the structure just soared compared to anything one could have built on his own (and this is without counting in the added value of the workers who'd actually build the thing).

The same thing applies to code. Instead of using the same old car metaphor that never works, I'll keep going with the house metaphor.

A program is exactly like a building. Some have the ability to house your family (software you use to make a living), others can be no more impressive than your shed (catorise would be a very good example of a "shed"-like application).

The building blocks that compose an application is code, or lines of code to be precise. A line of code, on its own, is usually quite useless, however if you have a few hundred thousands lines of code, and have a few architects that make it efficient, and designers who make it appealing to the eye, you suddenly obtain something which has a huge amount of value. How it is stored doesn't matter. How much the developers get paid doesn't really matter either. It's the whole package which holds the value, and it is only that package you pay for.

I'd also like to point out that you are oversimplifying things, and not setting up a disclaimer for it. Some applications cost $1, others cost a few thousand. I am a consultant for an application for which the contracts rarely have less than a million written on them. Is each developer entitled to a straight cut of that? Of course not. Because developers are far from the only ones that help build an application.

In the same way that a house requires people doing very different things in order to get a house stamped out of the ground, building an application requires people with very different skills. You need a finance division, who will run the numbers of the company, and make sure that we don't spend too much compared to what we sell. We need sales, because the product isn't going to fly off the shelves on its own. We need marketing, so that the packaging looks appealing. We need IT to make sure everyone has a system that allows them to work efficiently. We have assistants, who help very busy people not forget their heads. If your product is in a specific segment, you also need pre-sales, because well, you need to be able to show proofs-of-concept to your customers, you need to demonstrate that what you're promising is possible. You need a technical office, who will research what the next technologies could be, what directions the company should aim itself at.

And not a single person in all of those I have listed will ever touch a line of code; but they still need to be paid. For most companies, the Engineering team will represent tops 1/3 of the headcount.

Selling a product over and over keeps a company in business. The price point at which they sell the product is usually way below anything that it has actually cost to produce. A product like Photoshop or Lightroom requires investments in the order of millions. Yet you can buy it for a fraction of that. How come? Because they sell it multiple times.

Well, obviously, at some point they make a profit, and in some cases they even make a massive profit, but so what? Where's the problem with that? What alternatives would we have?

Everyone paying a fair share of what the product actually cost to produce, plus a little rounding up so everyone feels ok? Yeah, why not. But the product would never sell.

If you told people: "If everyone buys this product, right now, at this very instant, it will cost you $1. If you don't, this company and the 300 workers are without a job.". Nobody would buy.

Edit: Damn that was long just for a "quick reply".

I would have hoped that a coherent arguement such as this would have had some effect but apparently not - seems ignorance knows no bound on this and thanks for contributing the albums!

End price is not really the same argument. If something is too expense then simple don't have it. By your noted arguements already regarding supply and worth it would fail and the concept would disappear.

But surely the copyists were producing something physical and you are arguing about an intellectual product.

So you are paying for something - how is this relevant to piracy? The arguement about platform portability is relate but not the same arguement. Again, if you don't like the terms of the contract don't engage and don't buy the product. The supplier will allow economics to remove unpopular practices.

As many developers and artists will tell you that your opinion is not born out by basic facts. People generally will grab anything they can for nothing and think nothing of it.