France set to cut Web access for music, film pirates

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Does anyone remember audio cassettes? The music industry urged governments to tax blank cassettes because they knew people would make recordings of LPs (um, LPs are "Long Playing" recordings of music on foot-wide black vinyl disks), and "share" them, thereby "hurting" the record industry.

Although it made about as much sense as taxing blank paper because people would photocopy copyrighted works, some well-intentioned governments did put the new tax in place.

CDs were supposed to put an end to music pirating because they were "perfect" quality (no clicks, pops, and hiss like vinyl), and they were impossible to copy. But when CDs came out at $25 a pop while vinyl was selling for $10, which motivated a lot of folks to figure out how to copy CDs. Wwe know how that turned out.

Similarly, DVDs were impossible to copy, and they had stunning quality as compared to video tapes. Same story as CDs: Copy programs appeared, and they defeated the copy protection schemes. Remember that when DVDs first came out, they sold for around $35. The same DVDs, factory originals in a case with artwork and pamphlets, now sell for $10 for many non-current titles as the new HD-DVD and Blu-ray disks are appearing.

The Internet makes music copying and distribution just that much easier. You can get a "free" MP3 of a song, or you can pay $15 for a CD to get the one song you want at 100% quality. Or you can pay $1 for that song at some eStore to get an MP3 copy, and have to deal with the copy-protection hassles.

Similarly, you can download a "free" AVI or DivX copy of a movie, or perhaps a huge 8 GB double-layer ISO image (which is identical quality to the original DVD), or you can shop for that new release and pay the going $25 rate.

The lesson here, should be taken by media distributors: Sell your products cheaply enough, and with such convenience, as to make it irresistable to the consumer! At $10 a DVD, landed at my house, it's worth it to me to have the original disk, bonus disk, case and artwork. And the convenience of not shopping.

Balancing "what the market will bear" and maximizing revenue have always been a tough game for vendors. The Internet, and the easy of piracy there, has changed the rules for ever. The motivation is simply too great to make it possible to get the genie back in the bottle again.

Posted by: SteveMak   Posted on: 11/24/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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