That's a ridiculous argument. If he was priced out of the market, he could have lowered his price to encourage sales (discounting). But once his product was free, he could not price-match with "free". So priced out of the market only applies if there is an effective price. "Free" is not an effective price.
Think of it this way: Sony makes a great WEGA 60" screen. Best Buy wants to sell it for $2,100. So does everyone in town. But Joe, out of the back of his white van, will sell it to you for $210. Sure, it's probably stolen, but it's the same damn TV. So, did Sony just price itself out of the market? No. They were undercut by someone who stole the product and priced it below cost. That's not competition, it's just thievery. The same is true with cut DVDs, etc. it's just easier to forgive because, hey, it's all "digital" and you don't see any "hard product" being stolen. But if Joe went into blockbuster, shoved a bunch of discs under his coat and brought them out to you for free.. you'd know for sure it's stealing. But if he goes to his house and uploads them via bittorrent or Grokster or whatever, suddenly, everyone is OK with it. CW -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Thane Sherrington Sent: Wednesday, July 06, 2005 2:13 PM To: The Hardware List Subject: Re: [H] Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. et al. v. Grokster,Ltd., et al. At 03:59 PM 06/07/2005, Hayes Elkins wrote: >So a man who spends $50,000 to create an instructional video to sell on >his website all of the sudden has his video is put on p2p and completely >kills his sales (as evidenced by downloads from various BT trackers and >the sales of prior video releases), forcing him to mortgage his house to >make ends meet - this is not injustice? Here's another thought on this: Did he really lose $50,000 due to P2P, or was he priced out of the market and never would have sold enough to cover costs to begin with? People blame business failures on all sorts of things - sometimes they're right, and sometimes it's just a scapegoat. I'm not sure which it is in this case. T
