There are plenty of artists who are coming up who charge much less.

The question then is how the ability to pirate affects that "reasonable price" threshold, amongst other hard to quantify effects of piracy.

For some customers it is absolutely too high so they resort to piracy. For others, it is the correct price or even too low. In a perfect world, the seller could use your income to determine price (or some other even better metric for what you are willing to pay) and charge everyone differnet amounts. Very wealthy people would pay huge amounts, impoverished people would pay very low amounts, maybe even nothing.

The question then is how the ability to pirate affects that "reasonable price" threshold, amongst other hard to quantify effects of piracy.

I imagine it pushes the price down slightly, but who knows if the record companies are acting rationally (pricewise) or could even predict the correct price they should charge to max profit. (I imagine they have some very smart people modeling pricing, but models can only get you so close).

Only there's no effort on their side to take your order, and it's way more than 18%.

However, strict ideas of "Intellectual Property" can constitute suppression of freedom of speech. That's a principle we can all get behind. "Intellectual Property" is at least moderately un-American.

Let me guess - you either don't write software for a living or you're lucky enough to write the kind of software that can't easily be copied?

I don't write software for a living right now, but I have in the past. Go right ahead and take a look: http://stratigery.com/source.html Take a copy, too. On the house.

I'll give you an example: a while back I wrote some code in C, to push an element on to a linked list. I forget exactly why, but I ended up passing the head of the linked list as a "struct list " or something like that. That project died, but I kept the function just because I was so proud of it.

Years later, I saw a programming quiz. The question was almost exactly my task. The answer to the question was my function, with the variables renamed.

Independent invention. It ruins "Intellectual Property" as property.

And yes, I'm deliberating conflating copyright and patents, because the rest of the world does so. It's "World Intellectual Property Organization", not dual "World Patent Property Organization" and "World Copyright Property Organization".

http://torrentfreak.com/piracy-is-theft-ridiculous-lost-sale...

> Stealing their stuff just empowers them to get dumb laws passed.

Theft is the removal of ownership. It's not stealing, it's copying.

1) Musicians should be angry with their labels. 2) Musicians should not buy into the bullshit that piracy is decreasing their cut. "Hey man, we'd pay you more, but there's so much piracy going on! The revenues aren't there! You should be mad at the pirates."

The ironic thing is that all the defenders of "free culture" piracy do is drive creators into the arms of Orwellian walled gardens like iTunes and empower legislators to write dumb laws like SOPA.

Maybe they are't as pissed off at the labels as you think?

Many are incredibly pissed at the payment structures. Take a look: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120622/16193319442/myth-d...

TLDR: Spotify has been accused of barely paying artists, when in fact they pay the labels, who in turn barely pay the artists. But if you search for artists who hate Spotify because of their low income, you'll find plenty of rants.

The marginal cost of printing a book is in the pennies because the cost is spread out over millions of books (across multiple titles). Materials only add a dollar or two more in costs. The majority of the cost of a book is in fixed costs prior to printing, i.e., proofreading.

Moreover, distribution costs real money (unless you also own the pipes).