Intellectual products are very price sensitive
and highly elastic. Lower prices will be more than compensated
for by a much higher sales volume. There is no other way to
explain the pirate industries : evidently, at the right price
a lot of people are willing to buy these products. High prices
are an implicit trade-off favouring small, elite, select, rich
world clientele. This raises a moral issue : are the children
of Macedonia less worthy of education and access to the latest
in human knowledge and creation ?
Two developments threaten the future of intellectual property
rights. One is the Internet. Academics, fed up with the
monopolistic practices of professional publications - already
publish on the web in big numbers. I published a few book on
the Internet and they can be freely downloaded by anyone who
has a computer or a modem. The full text of electronic
magazines, trade journals, billboards, professional
publications, and thousands of books is available online.
Hackers even made sites available from which it is possible to
download whole software and multimedia products.
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