[89520] in Cypherpunks
Re: Copyright commerce and the street musician protocol
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Eric Young)
Wed Nov 5 14:49:50 1997
Date: Thu, 6 Nov 1997 04:51:17 +1000 (EST)
From: Eric Young <eay@cryptsoft.com>
To: Marc Horowitz <marc@cygnus.com>
cc: John Kelsey <kelsey@plnet.net>,
"Perry's Crypto List" <cryptography@c2.net>,
cypherpunks <cypherpunks@algebra.com>
In-Reply-To: <t53yb35r8pl.fsf@rover.cygnus.com>
Reply-To: Eric Young <eay@cryptsoft.com>
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
