robison@eosp1.UUCP (Tobias D. Robison) (04/25/84)
References: There is an important difference between copying software and copying books. It is almost always cheaper to copy floppy software than to buy it. But it is often MORE expensive to copy a book (or the manual accompanying the software) than to buy it. The kicker is that people often choose between: - I buy the book, I pay for it - I copy the book, my department's general budget pays for it. So people xerox illegally at a financial loss, since they do not eat the loss directly. This strange state of affairs has driven publishers to distraction. They cannot, in many cases, try to discourage xeroxing by pricing low. But in the case of illegal xeroxing, there are sometimes actually two thefts: (1) from the publisher (2) from the gneral operating budget of some department - Toby Robison (not Robinson!) allegra!eosp1!robison decvax!ittvax!eosp1!robison princeton!eosp1!robison
dgary@ecsvax.UUCP (04/26/84)
There is actually one more important difference between copying books and
copying software. A photocopy of a book is itself hard to copy and a copy of
a copy is well on the way to unreadable. Also, copying a book is very time
consuming for the copier. Obviously, software is quick to copy and (thanks
to the wonders of digital systems) a copy is generally just a good as the
original, so that it is in principal possible to generate an infinite number of
copies with each copy being copied only once!
And the point about people ripping off departmental budgets is well taken.
- D Gary Grady, Duke University Computation Center
Durham, NC (mcnc!ecsvax!dgary)