we live in a society, so we’re partners, then we have the right to vote, if we do not agree with the rules we shouldn’t follow them.

the rules aren’t fair, they never was, historicaly we had a lot of wars, cheat, slavery, dictatorship on the past who give power to an elite, who did everything to keep the power, and that power was passed ahead along the generations, through particular schools and others legal forms (and the people agree that this is fair)

its not my fault what my ancestry did, i don’t have to pay for this, but its not fault of the descendants of slaves too, and they are paying for what hapened in the past until nowadays.

in my country, the price of cd’s is an absurd, completely out of the reality of the power of consumption of the ordinary people, they argue that they have prejudice due the piracy, and had to overcharge who pay to recover the prejudice, but that is not what i see.
in normal circunstances, if you want e.g. a software for editing images, and cant pay for a photoshop, you look for alternatives.
the competition grows, and adobe has to keep improving photoshop, or drop the price, but thanks to the piracy no! they can keep selling it for the price who they want, and those who can pay (and really need this software, work with this) pay for it, and those who cant, piracy it, the competition dont grow, adobe has nothing to worry about.
so, as you may see, the piracy is helping, now they can sell for the price who they want without carry about the competition, they pretend that they care about piracy so the people who can pay, continue paying for it.
the piracy dont affect the the big industry, affect the small. that is what they dont want the people to see.
that is just my thought, but i had good reasons to conclude that.

when you say Free Software, do you mean Freeware or Free (fredom) software?
for me, all software should be free (freedom/open source) but not all free (no cost)

“I’ve always been a proponent for paying a reasonable fee for music, movies and software. “Software, music and digital content.”

I watched anime PAYING FOR IT during 10+ years in cable tv, and what i got? censorship on the content, scripts and musics replaced, i was cheated, they sell me fake content legally!
so now that i know that, i dont have money to pay for watch every single episode/music importing from japan+taxes+price, so by now i’m dowloading, but whenever i have money for this i will pay for it right now, but whenever i have, i will pay!

so, what you sugest me to do? keep being conned watching fake anime? whatever they want me to like, but not anime, because they assume that no one will like it and refuse to provide?

the internet allow me to know more culture than the standard method allow, thanks to the internet i’m know new artists who i may never discover in the traditional way, and if i donate money for some one who is providing he/she music for free, 90-99% of the money goes to the artist (instead of 10% in the traditional way)

nowadays anyone can produce music with a semi-professional audio quality, so why they keep selling CD’s of “Avatar” for a price higher than the DVD? the cost of production is higher? no.
sorry for my english.

Sure – I don’t think anyone is suggesting that software should be maintained, supported or updated for free. All those things have a marginal cost and there are business thriving today in supplying them against free/gratis software. As for the cost of creation – it is surely there, software does not write itself. But access to the software is increasingly a loss leader (especially given open source development), and it is surely hard to maintain and update software if you are not developing it.

I don’t think “my logic” leads to the conclusion that a music CD should cost 10 cents, at the same time, the price of music on media today is greatly inflated. As a music lover, I strongly believe that musicians should be afforded a very good living. But that does not mean that I believe that we only have great musicians because they are paid a great amount. Mozart was not a rich man. It did not prevent him from composing. I would separate industrial goods from the arts for the purpose of this conversation.

When you say, “let the free market decide each products’ value and cost”, do you mean the price? If so I agree: and this is what the market is doing, and prices are going down as free alternatives increase the pressure on proprietary providers to reign in the marginal profit on each copy of their software.

In reality, the total lifecycle cost must be considered, along with supply/demand to determine the final price. If people stop paying for software/music/movies, then people will eventually get what they pay for. I appreciate my local bar band, but they are definitely not U2, for which I’m willing to pay money to see and listen to.

This goes back to my core point: let the free market decide each product’s value and cost.

uh…are you saying you pay for it?

More to the point, you need to define “value”. The value of anything is closely related to its scarcity: given that digital assets can be reproduce with almost no cost, any scarcity is artificial. The other things you list all have a cost of marginal unit production associated with them (even sex).

I’m not saying all digital assets should be free, just that your analysis misses the point about what makes software, and all digital content, different.

We can feel disgruntled and upset that no one wants to pay for our product/tune/movie – but we better get used to it. People have discovered the optimal method for consuming content they are interested in. Measures to hinder the experience (such as DRM and ads) are annoyances that just aren’t necessary to them: “Advertising is a form of censorship which the Internet routes around” (http://blog.futurestreetconsulting.com/?p=39)

It’s too late to turn back now. If something can’t be freely forwarded then it’s broken and the people don’t want it.

Like Weave Jester said – shrug and put on your thinking caps!

But I have a more basic question about Timm’s article: if everything was free why would I need to poop out golden eggs by the dozen?