> A copy has zero marginal cost. That makes it special and different than anything that came before.
I disagree that this is news. Thought experiment: You steal a car from the local dealer, but you leave enough money behind to pay for all the materials, transportation and manpower that went into building this one car (the marginal cost). Would this be morally okay? Why, why not? If everyone does this, who will pay for R&D?
Exactly the same is happening with digital copies. You are taking something with a marginal cost of 0, but the producer has no way to pay for one-time costs. Distributing them onto the unit price is not a new monkey-patch at all.
This will be an interesting question as 3D printing advances.
> but that's its natural state.
"Natural" is always a great word to turn an intuition into a fact. ;) There are certainly many products that are sold at arbitrary prices that have little to do with the marginal cost, it didn't take computers to get there.
This thought experiment is flawed. When you steal a car from the local dealer, he doesn't have the car any more.
The correct thought experiment is: having bought a car from Ford, you examine it carefully then purchase all the raw materials yourself and assemble an identical duplicate for your wife.
In doing so you save whatever markup Ford places above and beyond their marginal cost.
Asking whether this is morally okay is the true issue.
I agree that the local dealer should be kept out of it. I am not sure if it makes a difference that Ford wouldn't have the car anymore, they have the marginal cost. Asking for more than the marginal cost seems to be immoral to some.
But I agree that your experiment boils down to the problem I am pointing to, and it is better because it is a very real problem that we see every day (e.g. in China).
> I am not sure if it makes a difference that Ford wouldn't have the car anymore, they have the marginal cost. Asking for more than the marginal cost seems to be immoral to some.
It does, and the cases are not comparable. Leaving an empty space (plus marginal cost) where the car used to be requires the original owner to expend time and effort to replace it, and they have opportunity cost as well. None of that is true of the digital example. To be a fair comparison you'd have to leave an atom-for-atom identical replacement for the car (or more accurately, take an identical copy and leave the original) and I doubt as many people would judge that unethical.
When I use "natural", I don't mean it to express an opinion that I believe that is moral to copy that Disney movie just because I can(1). Natural in this case refers to the economic description of 'free'. An unfettered digital file has unlimited supply at no cost. Therefore supply will be sufficient to meet demand, even at a price point of zero. Things can be sold at arbitrary prices, even given away, but with physical things, the supply will not always be sufficient to meet the demand. A unit with a marginal cost that is given away is not free. This is why using cars or other physical goods produces leaky analogies; there can never be an unlimited supply of any physical good.
You are taking something with a marginal cost of 0, but the producer has no way to pay for one-time costs. Distributing them onto the unit price is not a new monkey-patch at all.
This is actually a very good observation. We've reached the point where the entire cost of the good is the one time production cost and we've discovered that we've got no good way to collect it. DRM is the best we've got right now, and its awful. You are more than correct in pointing out that 3D printing (and localized digital micro-manufacture in general) is about to make this problem acute.
As we stumble into our Star Trek future, we should be expending as much innovative energy as we can into finding a way to solve this issue.
(1) At this point in history, with the operation of the market as it currently stands, I lean towards no, it is not moral to bootleg that Disney flick.
> we've got no good way to collect it. DRM is the best we've got right now
While DRM is awful, I think we should keep in mind what advantages we (arguably?) enjoy from this monkey-patch (distributing one-time costs onto an arbitrary unit price). With Kickstarter and other one-time funding, there is no incentive to absolutely excel and make a huge profit from unit prices. There is also little risk in delivering a terrible product because one-time costs have already been covered.
> As we stumble into our Star Trek future, we should be expending as much innovative energy as we can into finding a way to solve this issue.
If this Star Trek future is anything like an utopia, then I don't see anything wrong with agreeing to keep the monkey-patch in place, even if it is not natural in the economic sense, or even enforcable. (Very much like privacy - it's not really enforcable, but I really hope that society starts to respect it anyway.)
First of all everyone is not going to do this - they haven't in the past. A few points...
If you like the car and you tell others they will most likely buy it at full cost or a least with a profit still on it.
Servicing the car will most likely depend on the manufacturer's own part on which they make a profit.
In terms of sales there is one more on the road, which will contribute to the quarterly reports for the company causing the share price to rise.
If the dealer has had it on the forecourt for several months they actually want to get rid of it now and they will be bring the price down towards, or even below, what they paid for it. You may even end up paying more than they were going to sell it for.
I disagree that this is news. Thought experiment: You steal a car from the local dealer, but you leave enough money behind to pay for all the materials, transportation and manpower that went into building this one car (the marginal cost). Would this be morally okay? Why, why not? If everyone does this, who will pay for R&D?
Exactly the same is happening with digital copies. You are taking something with a marginal cost of 0, but the producer has no way to pay for one-time costs. Distributing them onto the unit price is not a new monkey-patch at all.
This will be an interesting question as 3D printing advances.
> but that's its natural state.
"Natural" is always a great word to turn an intuition into a fact. ;) There are certainly many products that are sold at arbitrary prices that have little to do with the marginal cost, it didn't take computers to get there.