A new view of intellectual property and copyright
Let’s say Ms. A is a software developer in America and she has developed a very cool and useful software and is selling it for $500 a piece.
Mr. B is an engineer in Canada and he needs the software developed by Ms. A. Mr. B can afford the software by paying 10% of his monthly salary. Mr. B takes out his credit card, fills out an online form and buys the software over the internet, downloads it and starts using it right away. Everybody is happy.
Let’s imagine Ms. C who lives in Congo and she is running a small company. She also needs the software. The GDP per capita of Congo is only $300. There is no way that Ms. C could afford the software. There are two options: 1) Ms. C forgets about the software and sticks to pen and paper which is much less efficient. 2) Ms. C gets a pirated version of the software and uses it. In any case Ms. A is not going to see a dime from Ms. C and Ms. C has to either break the copyright laws or stay at a disadvantaged position. What do we do now? How can we bring Ms. A and Ms. C together, so that everybody is happy?
Let’s look at this from another angle: Ms. A was lucky to be born in America and enjoy the democracy and the prosperity that came with it. She should be thankful. Ms. C was born in Congo and she did not enjoy the things that Ms. A enjoyed. On one level, the software is the intellectual property of Ms. A and she is entitled to benefit from it. On another level, Ms. C is also a human being with real needs.
Here is my solution: Ms. A sells her software all over the world to everyone who needs it, but she adjusts the price tag according to the purchasing power of each consumer. One easy way of doing this is to adjust the price tag by the GDP per capita of every country. If she wants to get into more detail, she could have different pricings for business, education, government and home consumers. And here is why everyone would benefit from this scheme: this method would minimize piracy. If I can comfortably afford an authentic copy of the item that I want, I have much less incentive to turn into low-quality, iffy, pirated replicas. Moreover, Ms. A would actually profit from this scheme. It may not be much, perhaps a few dollars only, but it’s better than zero. Thirdly Ms. A would build a good reputation by doing something humane. And lastly, Ms. C would enjoy the benefits of using that software.
You might say: that sounds pretty complicated. What if Ms. A’s company is small and cannot reach those consumers? My response is that the company doesn’t have to be big. All you need is a legitimate distribution system, that takes the software from Ms. A, prices it and distributes it all over the world, sells it, takes a cut and gives Ms. A her share. You can actually create jobs, increase profits for the authors and gather real customer data which in my opinion is gold.
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May 16th, 2008 at 1:49 am
cool. one thing your plan would be susceptible to is “arbitrage”. you have to make sure it’s impossible (at least on a large scale) for someone to buy the software in the poor country at low price, import it to the rich country and sell it at a higher price. but presumably it can be done. basically you will have to fight this new kind of piracy in the rich country. actually i think there are companies who do this right now. like i’ve seen indian students that have cambridge press books that are not “pirate”, but they’d bought them for much cheaper than the normal price back in india. it’s probably some agreement within the british common-wealth countries. but still..