Copyright commerce and the street musician protocol

[Eric Young]

On 3 Nov 1997, Marc Horowitz wrote:
> Someone recently told me that game manufacturers have stopped worrying
> about piracy.  Why?  Because most new games come on CD-ROM, and
> copying a CD-ROM is an expensive, time-consuming operation.  Bulk
> duplication of CD's is substantially cheaper than one-off duplication,
> and since games are cheap, people will usually buy them rather than
> copy them.

hmm... Besides the initial cost of a CD writer (which is coming down alot),
blank CDs cost $8AU (or about $5US).  I would not call that expensive relative
to the game cost (about $90AU).  On a double speed drive it takes about 30
minutes to duplicate a 600meg game, lots less for those that don't fill the
CD :-).

I think this is starting to become a real problem.

> I'm unconvinced that there really is an Internet copyright problem,
> outside of traditional media publishers inventing it.

Having visited some friends recently that had most of the recent interesting
games written onto a few CDs (multiple games on single CDs) I don't agree.

eric