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I Think Your App Should Be Free

blog.earbits.com

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Re: I Think Your App Should Be Free

#41

Post by briandear »

jrockway wrote: post #20

What is the moral of this story? "I'm an App Developer, therefore I shouldn't pirate music"? Ultimately, piracy breaks down to "people want your stuff, but you've priced it too highly". In the case of apps, that's all it is. In the case of music, it's a little different. Music is cheap, but it's rare that you can get it in a good format: everything is lossy, and for people with good audio kit and good hearing, that m…

I would be willing to be 100 downloads of my app that price isn't really the issue on music piracy. If you charged $0.10 per song, it wouldn't result in a massive sales increase. The barrier to paid downloads is that people have to use a credit/debit card, usually register somehow and other things that form a barrier to entry. I think $0.99 isn't much to pay for a song or an app, but there are people (a fairly sizable number) who just want to download without going through the presumed hassle of the payment process. I bet if you were giving away CDs outside of the mall and charged $0.25, people wouldn't think twice about tossing a quarter into the can. Take that same song and put it online and the same people happy to toss you the quarter would rather steal the song than process a payment of 25 cents.

The problem isn't price -- it's the barrier of payment.

Re: I Think Your App Should Be Free

#42

Post by snippyhollow »

decklin wrote: post #37

I pirated some music today[0]. I went to my usual shops to try to buy it, and for some reason the label had explicitly decided not to offer downloads of any sort. Just vinyl and CD. I wanted it now, and I couldn't really be arsed with those choices, so I stole it. What would an honest Android-app allegory for this be? Perhaps a consumer is faced with these options: 1. An official shop, which accepts money (yay!), giv…

You didn't steal anything (nobody no longer has it because of you), you pirated it.

Re: I Think Your App Should Be Free

#43

Post by shabble »

recoiledsnake wrote: post #33
shabble wrote: post #21

For all the potential parallels with the music industry, I think there are quite a few significant differences. Firstly, what are the current equivalents of a mobile App Store for (pirated) music? There are definitely a bunch of places you can find it if you look, but few of them are as "one-stop-shop" as current app stores. Secondly, does pirated music often outrank the artists/album name/track titles in general int…

>I forgot to mention "They’re doing the best they can, they say. Most of all, they’re complying with the law, they say." - I can't imagine many people who download pirated music do so without realising that it's illegal and/or immoral. Legitimate looking services like streaming sites are harder to judge - they might have a license for the content, or they might not. The reference there is to the filesharing sites, no…

Ooops, that's a good point. I suspect that the whole DMCA safe harbour "we honour all correctly submitted takedown requests" is a bit of a get-out for a lot of these sites. Especially the ones that are pretty much basing their entire business model on access to pirated content.

At the same time, there are legitimate indexing & hosting services who probably are genuinely displeased with the abuse of their systems. The same problem as the homebrew console hackers often enabling subsequent game piracy.

The tricky part is how to tell them apart, and what the legitimate concerns can do to prevent abuse, and the content rights-holders can do to deal with the bad-faith lot.

Providing the value/product that consumers are looking for as well is another big deal - from what little I know of mobile app-stores, the low-friction discovery/payment/install process, along with low-cost high volume business models is reducing piracy to some extent. Contrast with music, where DRM, onerous formats, and unavailability of a lot of content is encouraging or even forcing people to go the illegitimate route.

Re: I Think Your App Should Be Free

#44

Post by jamesaguilar »

snippyhollow wrote: post #42
decklin wrote: post #37

I pirated some music today[0]. I went to my usual shops to try to buy it, and for some reason the label had explicitly decided not to offer downloads of any sort. Just vinyl and CD. I wanted it now, and I couldn't really be arsed with those choices, so I stole it. What would an honest Android-app allegory for this be? Perhaps a consumer is faced with these options: 1. An official shop, which accepts money (yay!), giv…

You didn't steal anything (nobody no longer has it because of you), you pirated it.

I think nearly everyone here is aware of the distinction. Speaking only for myself, I will continue to say "steal" since both words describe the same action (assuming you're not a prescriptive linguist), and steal better connotes what I believe to be the economic impact.

Re: I Think Your App Should Be Free

#45

Post by epicureanideal »

snippyhollow wrote: post #42
decklin wrote: post #37

I pirated some music today[0]. I went to my usual shops to try to buy it, and for some reason the label had explicitly decided not to offer downloads of any sort. Just vinyl and CD. I wanted it now, and I couldn't really be arsed with those choices, so I stole it. What would an honest Android-app allegory for this be? Perhaps a consumer is faced with these options: 1. An official shop, which accepts money (yay!), giv…

You didn't steal anything (nobody no longer has it because of you), you pirated it.

He stole it. However, I think it's perfectly moral although illegal to download the materials and then buy the hard copy.

Re: I Think Your App Should Be Free

#46

Post by dekz »

baddox wrote: post #28
kylec wrote: post #13

This is nothing more than a thinly-disguised allegory about piracy in the music industry. There are several big differences between the music and the software industry which I won't go into, except to say that: even taking this story at face value, for the developers to then start suing everyone downloading the fake copies of the app would still be a huge dick move.

From a business/industry perspective (ignoring for now the ethics of piracy or the wisdom of combating it with mass lawsuits), the biggest difference between digital software and digital music is that lots of software providers are still providing value from distribution . Especially with database-driven apps and SaaS products, distribution (hosting) is still most of what you're paying for. If someone leaked the back…

Nine Inch Nails seem to be one of the few bands who are able to look into the future. They offer most(all?) of their music for free to download and make their money touring and selling other merchandise.

Re: I Think Your App Should Be Free

#47

Post by epicureanideal »

william42 wrote: post #15
goodside wrote: post #11

I must be missing something really obvious here. I haven't used Earbits, but as a streaming service, why not enforce things like this server-side, rather than trying to suppress pirates from distributing the cracked client app? (No victim-blaming or other moral subtext intended. Just curious.)

You're missing the fact that it's about music piracy.

I don't see how it has to be about music piracy. Software piracy is just as real.

Re: I Think Your App Should Be Free

#48

Post by epicureanideal »

dekz wrote: post #46
baddox wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a business/industry perspective (ignoring for now the ethics of piracy or the wisdom of combating it with mass lawsuits), the biggest difference between digital software and digital music is that lots of software providers are still providing value from distribution . Especially with database-driven apps and SaaS products, distribution (hosting) is still most of what you're paying for. If someone leaked the back…

Nine Inch Nails seem to be one of the few bands who are able to look into the future. They offer most(all?) of their music for free to download and make their money touring and selling other merchandise.

In a future with rampant piracy, what I see is a whole lot less music and software. We won't even notice. It's not like we'll wake up and suddenly apps will be gone. We probably won't even be able to measure a decrease year-over-year in app production. What we'll never notice is that twice as many apps or ten times as many apps would have been created, or would have had much better quality, if the creators had been properly incentivized.

Re: I Think Your App Should Be Free

#49

Post by earbitscom »

epicureanideal wrote: post #48
dekz wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nine Inch Nails seem to be one of the few bands who are able to look into the future. They offer most(all?) of their music for free to download and make their money touring and selling other merchandise.

In a future with rampant piracy, what I see is a whole lot less music and software. We won't even notice. It's not like we'll wake up and suddenly apps will be gone. We probably won't even be able to measure a decrease year-over-year in app production. What we'll never notice is that twice as many apps or ten times as many apps would have been created, or would have had much better quality, if the creators had been p…

Amen.

Re: I Think Your App Should Be Free

#50

Post by dekz »

epicureanideal wrote: post #48
dekz wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nine Inch Nails seem to be one of the few bands who are able to look into the future. They offer most(all?) of their music for free to download and make their money touring and selling other merchandise.

In a future with rampant piracy, what I see is a whole lot less music and software. We won't even notice. It's not like we'll wake up and suddenly apps will be gone. We probably won't even be able to measure a decrease year-over-year in app production. What we'll never notice is that twice as many apps or ten times as many apps would have been created, or would have had much better quality, if the creators had been p…

I agree with your assertion of a decrease in apps and music in time, but for complete different reasons. There are numerous songs and apps out there which aren't even worth the cost of listing them.

Hopefully in time we'll see a lot less fart apps for $5 and the umpteenth song about a weekday from people who see it as a quick way to make cash and not something they have a passion for.

If both of these industries were about passion and not money then piracy wouldn't be such an issue.

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