digitani opened this issue on Jul 11, 2014 · 24 posts
wolf359 posted Mon, 14 July 2014 at 10:04 AM
As a merchant selling Digital products here at Renderosity
I have long since accepted the reality that
This is not a viable way(IMHO) to make a primary living which is why I still rely on custom character animation,3D motion graphics and good old fashioned 2D graphic design for print.
I recently read a very interesting book
on my Kindle called "The second Machine Age"
This book was very blunt in clarifying the reality of selling "Data sets" (ie digital products) as a business model.
In Short our business model CANNOT be compared to a craftsman selling, Maintaining an inventory of and shipping&delivering of even the most generic physical product that he created/manufactured because our only real cost is the purchase price of whatever development software we used and our own subjective opinion of what our expert labor costs to produce ONE original copy.
After that, the "shelf life" & dollar value of your product is severely limited by many factors
,not the least of which, is the ability by you, ( and others),to instantly "manufacture" store and distribute unlimited copies at a cost of ZERO dollars.
Our "loss" thus is not literal as in the case of the literal open sea "pirate" stealing a shipping container of Ipads at gun point,that Apple Paid to manufacture, and yet can NEVER be sold (By Apple) for a profit as they have been "Pirated"or physically removed from apple's inventory in a Zero Sum Fashion.
Our "loss"can only be a theoretical estimate of what all those unlimited copies would have sold forat our retail price.
But alas our scenario then becomes a sort of "Schrödinger's cat" paradox wrapped in endlessly debatable semantics.
whereby I am enjoying the benefit of being able to "manufacture" one million copies of my $10 dollar python script at a cost of Zero while simultaneously asserting I have suffered a $10 Million Dollar "loss" when disparate users worldwide collectively create one million copies of this same script via unauthorized digital downloads.
"The Gov could shut pirates sites down in a day or two easy.
not like they half to go threw a foreign jungle looking."
Actually a "foreign jungle" ,or more accurately a "global jungle" is exactly where on has to look due to Bittorent.
Once the cooperative global network of torrent users collectively "seed" your product file
The person downloading it only needs a tiny hash coded,numbered text or .torrent file
and a freely available torrent client application and he begins the process of downloading Maxon Cinema4D R15 Studio in tiny "bits" from far flung personal hard drives all over the terran surface.
The only way U.S. government to stop bittorrent is to literally segregate the continental United States from the rest of mankind via some Ultra Draconian, Faraday Cage, type of firewall that would defeat even satelite communications.
...not a likely scenario.