All in all Google is actually handling this pretty well. They're not shutting off Works with Nest, merely deprecating it. Existing functionality will continue until, to paraphrase Google's press release, the majority of skills and devices under that program have of been migrated to Google Assistant. In particular, they're working directly with Alexa to migrate over support, and have similar partnerships with other companies. It's hardly an apocalyptic event. While the danger the article points out is a valid concern, in general, it doesn't have much applicability to this particular situation.
The handwringers don't seem to realize two very important things. First, GitHub was bleeding cash. The only choices were acquisition or a new round of VC funding. However, opening the books for that would have not only raised doubt for new investors, but potentially chased current ones off, as well. Regardless, without one of or the other there would not even be a GitHub for much longer. Second, Microsoft is GitHub's single largest user.They have systematically moved all of their development platforms there: .NET Framework, .NET Core, ASP.NET Core, issue tracking, even things like VS Code and their developer documentation.
What this boiled down to was that GitHub was in trouble, and Microsoft is now hugely dependent on GitHub. They could either buy it and control their own future or sit back, let it be acquired by someone else, and potentially be beholden to some other company, likely a competitor.
Now, they will surely push it on Enterprise customers and try to make it profitable or at least self-sustaining, but they have a vested interest in keeping it the robust community it is. Microsoft is indeed a different company now than in the past. Open-source is hugely important to them, and in many ways they can't survive without it. The work the GitHub community has committed to it's developer tools and platforms is measureless and most would not exist without them. The Microsoft of today is fully aware of this.
I routinely see ebook prices exceeding those of the paperback and sometimes even the hardcover versions of the same book. I'd imagine the average older affluent person can easily recognize that the ebook version cuts a great many distribution costs: printing and publishing, shipping, warehousing, brick and mortar retailing, etc. Instead, there's only the initial cost of digital production, which is inherent regardless of the ultimate format the book may take, and that of storage and bandwidth. The latter of which are so cheap as to be almost inconsequential 8n the equation. So, yes, ebooks should still cost something, but no where near what publishers think they should be able to charge. Until they correct this dissonance, piracy will remain an issue.
First, until recently I was a long term iPhone user. So long term in fact that I remember before iMessage came out and all the bubbles were green. Green has always been the SMS bubble color. When Apple released iMessage they needed something to differentiate between an iMessage and an SMS message, and decided on blue for whatever reason. You're free to assume I suppose that they chose blue because it was more serene, but this is then merely a positive spin on a new technology rather than a negative spin on an old.
Second, this is hardly Apple vs Google. While perhaps Android has the most marketshare of any source of those green bubbles, it's just SMS, so any phone, Android, Windows, etc. would display the same. Even iPhones can generate a green bubble when iMessage is unavailable or turned off.
Third, using an Android phone hardly means you took the cheap way out. My current Android device retails for more than most iPhone models.
If anyone actually believes that Apple is suing Samsung because their sales were legitimately hurt by Samsung's copying or this is otherwise about money in any way, I've got a bridge I'd like to sell you. Apple is just fine with out-innovating. It's what they do, have always done, and continue to do. Their beef is not that Samsung created a successful line of products; it's that Samsung blatantly and unabashedly copied Apple down to the dock connector and even the packaging it comes in. Apple licensed a ton of their IP to Microsoft for the Surface, and if you have more than a withering fragment of a brain you can see that Apple has made zero moves, overtly or covertly to attack Microsoft. Now, the naysayers will naysay that Microsoft's mobile footprint is so small as to not even present a challenge to Apple, but the truth is that Apple is 100% OK with a truly competing line of products. They are not however okay with a competing line of products that is simply a mirror of their own products with a different brand slapped on it.
Seriously? Going to go with that, huh? The iPhone was revolutionary. No one contends that point (except apparently you). Whether or not you believe Android copied it or not is one thing, but saying that the iPhone is a rip-off of Android or anything else is nothing short of pure psychosis.
It's not about "inspiration". Android pre-existed the iPhone, but it looked *nothing* like it does today until after the iPhone. In fact Android was more a facsimile of BlackBerry at the time. Jobs was pissed because Android saw the success of the iPhone and made itself more iPhone-like to then compete against the iPhone, and rightly so.
Windows Phone 7, while not hugely successful yet, proves that you can make a good phone UI that doesn't just copy everything the iPhone does. Pretty sure that Jobs didn't have a problem with WP7. Microsoft did what Apple did: they took an existing idea and made it their own. Google took an existing idea and nothing more.
I'm the last to defend Google. While I use Google search religiously, get my email through Gmail, etc., Google has been making some damn boneheaded moves lately: it's two-steps-back alliance with Adobe, booting h.264 support, etc. However, this is a clear-cut case of flat-out theft. Google does search. Their data from search is work-product that improves their product, adds competitive edge, and overall increases their valuation as a company. For a competitor to come along, and use that data to create a competing search product is unsavory at best and actionable at worst. And, we're not even talking about some independent little company just trying to make it into the game; I might actually understand that, though the approach is still wrong. We're talking about Microsoft -- a huge hulking behemoth of a company with more revenue and greater valuation. Sure, their search product is crap and is probably only mildly successful because of ripping off Google's data, but the correct response to invest in R&D, in strategic hiring, etc., NOT ripping off another companies data. I hope Google sues them and takes their lunch money.
I'm convinced the people who make these decisions are all addicted to crack. Why in name of everything that is good and holy in this world would you pay $20-$30 to watch a movie once in your home when you could just wait 30 days and get rent it for $5 at Blockbuster or even cheaper from Netflix if you're willing to wait 30 days more. OR you could just wait 30 days and BUY the movie for $15-$20 and have a physical hard copy that you could watch over and over again until the end of time.
I've never understood these outrageous pricing schemes for disposable digital media anyways. Why would I pay the same price for a digital copy of something as a physical hard copy? Not that I want another DVD on my shelf collecting dust, but at least I know that there's some inherent value in that item since it's an actual manufactured good.
The IE team may have thought they had a novel idea, but it wouldn't have worked out nearly as well as they planned. Seems they forgot about certain APIs online that have tons of installed users. Google's AJAX API, Yahoo's YUI, and things like Facebook Connect would have all been "caught" by this rather short-sighted plan. There's also a good chance it would even catch things like calls to Google Maps API scripts, since they're so prevalent around the web.
Sounds pretty typical of IE, though. Jump head first into the water with the first idea that comes to mind, no matter how ill-thought.
Now, I'm sure there will be a good deal of strain on Hulu walking the fine line it has to walk, but ultimately the CEO's statement hear is pretty meaningless. It's like when CNBC interviewed all those CEOs whose companies plummeted like rocks later in 2008. They all said their companies were in great shape, profits were up, etc. ad infinitum. The truth is that they couldn't say anything else, because had they come out and told the truth, their stocks would tank for that reason alone - a type of self-fulling prophecy.
It's virtually the same here. Hulu's hands are tied publicity-wise. Even if they sole mantra is "bring down big cable", they can't *say* that.
That said, Hulu will surely remain limited to protect big cable's interests. However, that this is a fatal flaw is debatable. True, the limitation detriments their ability to push the service to where it should be, but at the same time, no one else can either. The relationships Hulu has with content producers is extremely hard to come by, and having them as de facto partners actually prevents any sort of true competition to Hulu.
The moral of the story: Hulu will be just fine; consumers, as usual, get the shaft.
The real problem with pay-for-access is that it has to be access that people *continually* want. Going to the example of internet access, paying for access is palatable because you want a continuous line to the internet.
News, however, is not the same. People can get news from a million different sources. The only reason to go to one particular source is if they have something exclusive or at least an original take on the subject matter. People might also prefer the format of a particular source. Ultimately, however, the meat, the content, the news itself can always be obtained far, far away from a paywall.
As a result, there might be a particular article from time to time that you would want to see from a particular new source, but you do not require constant access to everything coming from that news source. Inevitably if they try to charge for the latter, rather than the former, it will not be cost effective for the user, and they'll simply go elsewhere.
I'm normally right with TechDirt on issues of copyright, but I think you've gone a little overboard here.
Salinger didn't just write a book, he created characters, characters such as Holden Caulfield which have become world-reknown. For someone to appropriate those creations and use it in another unauthorized work seems to be the exact kind of violation copyrights were always meant to protect.
As an author, Salinger deserves the right to protect the integrity of the characters he's created. Simple as that. To draw a more obvious parallel, would this article be here if it involved Disney suing someone for creating a cartoon with Mickey Mouse in it? Of course not. And, this is no different.
This is moral masturbation -- over-simplified and hyperactive conviction. Fighting DRM is great, but more important is distribution. In a truly open society, content is not just available but available widely.
Netflix is DRM by default because the vast majority of their catalog is copyrighted. It would be unreasonable for the company to develop DRM and non-DRMed versions of it's streaming system simply to satisfy the handful of over-principled film-makers. Their player imposes no real burden on subscribers. In fact the only burden that is imposed on subscribers in this scenario is that of having to hunt down this film-makers movie instead of having it readily available to them in the Netflix catalog.
I hate DRM as much as the next, but give me the content first, then worry about giving it to me DRM-free.
This is moral masturbation -- over-simplified and hyperactive conviction. Fighting DRM is great, but more important is distribution. In a truly open society, content is not just available but available widely.
Netflix is DRM by default because the vast majority of their catalog is copyrighted. It would be unreasonable for the company to develop DRM and non-DRMed versions of it's streaming system simply to satisfy the handful of over-principled film-makers. Their player imposes no real burden on subscribers. In fact the only burden that is imposed on subscribers in this scenario is that of having to hunt down this film-makers movie instead of having it readily available to them in the Netflix catalog.
I hate DRM as much as the next, but give me the content first, then worry about giving it to me DRM-free.
I very, very rarely ever go to a theater anymore. 99% of movies simply don't benefit from the big screen, and the price of tickets is ridiculous. That said, there are certain movies that just should be seen on a big screen. I went to theaters for Avatar, for instance.
Are you on crack? Bush took us from a $5 trillion surplus to a $12 trillion deficit. He broke the debt clock in Time Square, even. And, you're trying to claim that Obama has spent more money??? Your assertion is more ridiculous than something out of Glenn Beck's mouth, and that's saying something.
In this day and age, I don't think there's really that much left to "invent" - hasn't been really for a while. Innovation, as you mention, is far more common, where existing things are simply combined in unique ways. Patent law has just gotten completely out of hand because more patents are so damn general that they end up covering a multitude of things that the company owning the patent is not directly developing. I also thinks it stinks a little of sour grapes. They're just upset that they aren't innovative enough themselves to be making money hand-over-fist like Apple is, so they're just going to latch on and try to suck Apple dry.
I think they're going to end up shooting themselves in the foot with this. People aren't buying CDs not because they're too expensive (at least not only because). They're not buying them because they're inconvenient. Digital music is the standard now; even you buy a CD, you're just going to go home and rip it to your computer.
However, places like iTunes are going to have a hard time justifying $12.99 for a digital album when you can purchase the same thing for $6-10 bucks in a brick-and-mortar. I think the end result will be that the music industry will drive down the price of music across the board.
I personally don't understand the pricing of most digital content. A digital album will run you $12.99 (compared to $15-16 for a CD), a digital movie costs $14.99 (compared to $15-20 for a DVD), and an eBook costs roughly the price of its hardback equivalent. At least music and movie downloads fall a few dollars under their physical counterparts. Charging the same price as the most expensive physical version for an eBook, though, is nothing but profiteering and gluttonous.
I can only surmise that most consumers don't sit down and think about what they're actually paying for. If I buy a CD, DVD or physical book, I understand that there's materials costs, manufacturing costs and transportation costs that go into that price. Additionally, there's overhead costs for the retailer involved in stocking physical goods. There's also hidden costs such as the little tax that gets passed on to each consumer to cover the overall theft of physical goods such as CDs and DVDs and the cost of anti-theft devices. That's a lot of cost to get a CD, DVD or book on a shelf in your local retail store.
Digital goods, however, eliminate the vast majority of those costs. There's no materials costs because the product is ethereal. There's no manufacturing costs, unless you count the initial one-time cost of production, but music, movies and even books are produced in digital form. The most that needs to be done is some sort of conversion process, and the cost of that process is virtually negligible when spread out across the entire consumer-base. There's no physical transportation costs, but you could include the cost of bandwidth here. Again, though, cost of bandwidth is extremely low compared to paying for fuel, vehicles, drivers, vehicle maintenance, etc. involved in physical transportation. Retail overhead for digital goods is confined to storage costs. Storage itself is dirt cheap, roughly $1/GB. That's fractions of pennies for each digital good, and unlike in physical retail, it's a purely incidental cost: you only need to store one copy of that song, movie or book. Of course, you need infrastructure around the storage, so there's still some ongoing cost. Piracy could be considered equivalent to physical theft, but there's no inherent "loss" in digital theft. Stealing a physical good means that the store is out of pocket for all those material, manufacture and transport costs mentioned previously. Downloading a digital good off a torrent does not explicitly impact the seller; it only implicitly impacts in the form of a "lost sale". (We'll discount entirely here that a number of studies have shown that the majority of "pirates" go on to actually purchase the item at a later day.)
The point is that, yes, there are costs involved with digital goods, but those costs are far, far less than costs associated with physical goods. The notion that consumers should pay the same price for digital or physical as if they're remotely the same is ludicrous.
Worth mentioning...
All in all Google is actually handling this pretty well. They're not shutting off Works with Nest, merely deprecating it. Existing functionality will continue until, to paraphrase Google's press release, the majority of skills and devices under that program have of been migrated to Google Assistant. In particular, they're working directly with Alexa to migrate over support, and have similar partnerships with other companies. It's hardly an apocalyptic event. While the danger the article points out is a valid concern, in general, it doesn't have much applicability to this particular situation.
This is actually very simole
The handwringers don't seem to realize two very important things. First, GitHub was bleeding cash. The only choices were acquisition or a new round of VC funding. However, opening the books for that would have not only raised doubt for new investors, but potentially chased current ones off, as well. Regardless, without one of or the other there would not even be a GitHub for much longer. Second, Microsoft is GitHub's single largest user.They have systematically moved all of their development platforms there: .NET Framework, .NET Core, ASP.NET Core, issue tracking, even things like VS Code and their developer documentation.
What this boiled down to was that GitHub was in trouble, and Microsoft is now hugely dependent on GitHub. They could either buy it and control their own future or sit back, let it be acquired by someone else, and potentially be beholden to some other company, likely a competitor.
Now, they will surely push it on Enterprise customers and try to make it profitable or at least self-sustaining, but they have a vested interest in keeping it the robust community it is. Microsoft is indeed a different company now than in the past. Open-source is hugely important to them, and in many ways they can't survive without it. The work the GitHub community has committed to it's developer tools and platforms is measureless and most would not exist without them. The Microsoft of today is fully aware of this.
I routinely see ebook prices exceeding those of the paperback and sometimes even the hardcover versions of the same book. I'd imagine the average older affluent person can easily recognize that the ebook version cuts a great many distribution costs: printing and publishing, shipping, warehousing, brick and mortar retailing, etc. Instead, there's only the initial cost of digital production, which is inherent regardless of the ultimate format the book may take, and that of storage and bandwidth. The latter of which are so cheap as to be almost inconsequential 8n the equation. So, yes, ebooks should still cost something, but no where near what publishers think they should be able to charge. Until they correct this dissonance, piracy will remain an issue.
Few problems here
First, until recently I was a long term iPhone user. So long term in fact that I remember before iMessage came out and all the bubbles were green. Green has always been the SMS bubble color. When Apple released iMessage they needed something to differentiate between an iMessage and an SMS message, and decided on blue for whatever reason. You're free to assume I suppose that they chose blue because it was more serene, but this is then merely a positive spin on a new technology rather than a negative spin on an old.
Second, this is hardly Apple vs Google. While perhaps Android has the most marketshare of any source of those green bubbles, it's just SMS, so any phone, Android, Windows, etc. would display the same. Even iPhones can generate a green bubble when iMessage is unavailable or turned off.
Third, using an Android phone hardly means you took the cheap way out. My current Android device retails for more than most iPhone models.
Missing the point entirely...
If anyone actually believes that Apple is suing Samsung because their sales were legitimately hurt by Samsung's copying or this is otherwise about money in any way, I've got a bridge I'd like to sell you. Apple is just fine with out-innovating. It's what they do, have always done, and continue to do. Their beef is not that Samsung created a successful line of products; it's that Samsung blatantly and unabashedly copied Apple down to the dock connector and even the packaging it comes in. Apple licensed a ton of their IP to Microsoft for the Surface, and if you have more than a withering fragment of a brain you can see that Apple has made zero moves, overtly or covertly to attack Microsoft. Now, the naysayers will naysay that Microsoft's mobile footprint is so small as to not even present a challenge to Apple, but the truth is that Apple is 100% OK with a truly competing line of products. They are not however okay with a competing line of products that is simply a mirror of their own products with a different brand slapped on it.
Re: The iPhone is the Real Rip Off
Seriously? Going to go with that, huh? The iPhone was revolutionary. No one contends that point (except apparently you). Whether or not you believe Android copied it or not is one thing, but saying that the iPhone is a rip-off of Android or anything else is nothing short of pure psychosis.
Totally missing the point...
It's not about "inspiration". Android pre-existed the iPhone, but it looked *nothing* like it does today until after the iPhone. In fact Android was more a facsimile of BlackBerry at the time. Jobs was pissed because Android saw the success of the iPhone and made itself more iPhone-like to then compete against the iPhone, and rightly so.
Windows Phone 7, while not hugely successful yet, proves that you can make a good phone UI that doesn't just copy everything the iPhone does. Pretty sure that Jobs didn't have a problem with WP7. Microsoft did what Apple did: they took an existing idea and made it their own. Google took an existing idea and nothing more.
Seriously?
I'm the last to defend Google. While I use Google search religiously, get my email through Gmail, etc., Google has been making some damn boneheaded moves lately: it's two-steps-back alliance with Adobe, booting h.264 support, etc. However, this is a clear-cut case of flat-out theft. Google does search. Their data from search is work-product that improves their product, adds competitive edge, and overall increases their valuation as a company. For a competitor to come along, and use that data to create a competing search product is unsavory at best and actionable at worst. And, we're not even talking about some independent little company just trying to make it into the game; I might actually understand that, though the approach is still wrong. We're talking about Microsoft -- a huge hulking behemoth of a company with more revenue and greater valuation. Sure, their search product is crap and is probably only mildly successful because of ripping off Google's data, but the correct response to invest in R&D, in strategic hiring, etc., NOT ripping off another companies data. I hope Google sues them and takes their lunch money.
Ridiculous...
I'm convinced the people who make these decisions are all addicted to crack. Why in name of everything that is good and holy in this world would you pay $20-$30 to watch a movie once in your home when you could just wait 30 days and get rent it for $5 at Blockbuster or even cheaper from Netflix if you're willing to wait 30 days more. OR you could just wait 30 days and BUY the movie for $15-$20 and have a physical hard copy that you could watch over and over again until the end of time.
I've never understood these outrageous pricing schemes for disposable digital media anyways. Why would I pay the same price for a digital copy of something as a physical hard copy? Not that I want another DVD on my shelf collecting dust, but at least I know that there's some inherent value in that item since it's an actual manufactured good.
Sounds poorly thought out in the first place...
The IE team may have thought they had a novel idea, but it wouldn't have worked out nearly as well as they planned. Seems they forgot about certain APIs online that have tons of installed users. Google's AJAX API, Yahoo's YUI, and things like Facebook Connect would have all been "caught" by this rather short-sighted plan. There's also a good chance it would even catch things like calls to Google Maps API scripts, since they're so prevalent around the web.
Sounds pretty typical of IE, though. Jump head first into the water with the first idea that comes to mind, no matter how ill-thought.
Party Lines
Now, I'm sure there will be a good deal of strain on Hulu walking the fine line it has to walk, but ultimately the CEO's statement hear is pretty meaningless. It's like when CNBC interviewed all those CEOs whose companies plummeted like rocks later in 2008. They all said their companies were in great shape, profits were up, etc. ad infinitum. The truth is that they couldn't say anything else, because had they come out and told the truth, their stocks would tank for that reason alone - a type of self-fulling prophecy.
It's virtually the same here. Hulu's hands are tied publicity-wise. Even if they sole mantra is "bring down big cable", they can't *say* that.
That said, Hulu will surely remain limited to protect big cable's interests. However, that this is a fatal flaw is debatable. True, the limitation detriments their ability to push the service to where it should be, but at the same time, no one else can either. The relationships Hulu has with content producers is extremely hard to come by, and having them as de facto partners actually prevents any sort of true competition to Hulu.
The moral of the story: Hulu will be just fine; consumers, as usual, get the shaft.
The Real Problem with Pay-for-Access...
The real problem with pay-for-access is that it has to be access that people *continually* want. Going to the example of internet access, paying for access is palatable because you want a continuous line to the internet.
News, however, is not the same. People can get news from a million different sources. The only reason to go to one particular source is if they have something exclusive or at least an original take on the subject matter. People might also prefer the format of a particular source. Ultimately, however, the meat, the content, the news itself can always be obtained far, far away from a paywall.
As a result, there might be a particular article from time to time that you would want to see from a particular new source, but you do not require constant access to everything coming from that news source. Inevitably if they try to charge for the latter, rather than the former, it will not be cost effective for the user, and they'll simply go elsewhere.
Sounds like copyright infringment to me
I'm normally right with TechDirt on issues of copyright, but I think you've gone a little overboard here.
Salinger didn't just write a book, he created characters, characters such as Holden Caulfield which have become world-reknown. For someone to appropriate those creations and use it in another unauthorized work seems to be the exact kind of violation copyrights were always meant to protect.
As an author, Salinger deserves the right to protect the integrity of the characters he's created. Simple as that. To draw a more obvious parallel, would this article be here if it involved Disney suing someone for creating a cartoon with Mickey Mouse in it? Of course not. And, this is no different.
I don't get it...
This is moral masturbation -- over-simplified and hyperactive conviction. Fighting DRM is great, but more important is distribution. In a truly open society, content is not just available but available widely.
Netflix is DRM by default because the vast majority of their catalog is copyrighted. It would be unreasonable for the company to develop DRM and non-DRMed versions of it's streaming system simply to satisfy the handful of over-principled film-makers. Their player imposes no real burden on subscribers. In fact the only burden that is imposed on subscribers in this scenario is that of having to hunt down this film-makers movie instead of having it readily available to them in the Netflix catalog.
I hate DRM as much as the next, but give me the content first, then worry about giving it to me DRM-free.
I don't get it...
This is moral masturbation -- over-simplified and hyperactive conviction. Fighting DRM is great, but more important is distribution. In a truly open society, content is not just available but available widely.
Netflix is DRM by default because the vast majority of their catalog is copyrighted. It would be unreasonable for the company to develop DRM and non-DRMed versions of it's streaming system simply to satisfy the handful of over-principled film-makers. Their player imposes no real burden on subscribers. In fact the only burden that is imposed on subscribers in this scenario is that of having to hunt down this film-makers movie instead of having it readily available to them in the Netflix catalog.
I hate DRM as much as the next, but give me the content first, then worry about giving it to me DRM-free.
I very, very rarely ever go to a theater anymore. 99% of movies simply don't benefit from the big screen, and the price of tickets is ridiculous. That said, there are certain movies that just should be seen on a big screen. I went to theaters for Avatar, for instance.
Re: incredible spending
Are you on crack? Bush took us from a $5 trillion surplus to a $12 trillion deficit. He broke the debt clock in Time Square, even. And, you're trying to claim that Obama has spent more money??? Your assertion is more ridiculous than something out of Glenn Beck's mouth, and that's saying something.
Nothing new under the sun
In this day and age, I don't think there's really that much left to "invent" - hasn't been really for a while. Innovation, as you mention, is far more common, where existing things are simply combined in unique ways. Patent law has just gotten completely out of hand because more patents are so damn general that they end up covering a multitude of things that the company owning the patent is not directly developing. I also thinks it stinks a little of sour grapes. They're just upset that they aren't innovative enough themselves to be making money hand-over-fist like Apple is, so they're just going to latch on and try to suck Apple dry.
Good for us, bad for music industry
I think they're going to end up shooting themselves in the foot with this. People aren't buying CDs not because they're too expensive (at least not only because). They're not buying them because they're inconvenient. Digital music is the standard now; even you buy a CD, you're just going to go home and rip it to your computer.
However, places like iTunes are going to have a hard time justifying $12.99 for a digital album when you can purchase the same thing for $6-10 bucks in a brick-and-mortar. I think the end result will be that the music industry will drive down the price of music across the board.
I personally don't understand the pricing of most digital content. A digital album will run you $12.99 (compared to $15-16 for a CD), a digital movie costs $14.99 (compared to $15-20 for a DVD), and an eBook costs roughly the price of its hardback equivalent. At least music and movie downloads fall a few dollars under their physical counterparts. Charging the same price as the most expensive physical version for an eBook, though, is nothing but profiteering and gluttonous.
I can only surmise that most consumers don't sit down and think about what they're actually paying for. If I buy a CD, DVD or physical book, I understand that there's materials costs, manufacturing costs and transportation costs that go into that price. Additionally, there's overhead costs for the retailer involved in stocking physical goods. There's also hidden costs such as the little tax that gets passed on to each consumer to cover the overall theft of physical goods such as CDs and DVDs and the cost of anti-theft devices. That's a lot of cost to get a CD, DVD or book on a shelf in your local retail store.
Digital goods, however, eliminate the vast majority of those costs. There's no materials costs because the product is ethereal. There's no manufacturing costs, unless you count the initial one-time cost of production, but music, movies and even books are produced in digital form. The most that needs to be done is some sort of conversion process, and the cost of that process is virtually negligible when spread out across the entire consumer-base. There's no physical transportation costs, but you could include the cost of bandwidth here. Again, though, cost of bandwidth is extremely low compared to paying for fuel, vehicles, drivers, vehicle maintenance, etc. involved in physical transportation. Retail overhead for digital goods is confined to storage costs. Storage itself is dirt cheap, roughly $1/GB. That's fractions of pennies for each digital good, and unlike in physical retail, it's a purely incidental cost: you only need to store one copy of that song, movie or book. Of course, you need infrastructure around the storage, so there's still some ongoing cost. Piracy could be considered equivalent to physical theft, but there's no inherent "loss" in digital theft. Stealing a physical good means that the store is out of pocket for all those material, manufacture and transport costs mentioned previously. Downloading a digital good off a torrent does not explicitly impact the seller; it only implicitly impacts in the form of a "lost sale". (We'll discount entirely here that a number of studies have shown that the majority of "pirates" go on to actually purchase the item at a later day.)
The point is that, yes, there are costs involved with digital goods, but those costs are far, far less than costs associated with physical goods. The notion that consumers should pay the same price for digital or physical as if they're remotely the same is ludicrous.