I think this notion of “I’d pay if you’d let me” is just hypocrisy at it’s best

If you'd been to enough internet discussion forums, you've most certainly heard people saying something to the effect of if they were given the opportunity to pay for music, they wouldn't bootleg.

... or, if the price for software is cheaper, or the quality of music is better, they wouldn't pirate

What a pile of crap.

While the general concenses is that people pay only the conceived value of the said product. This means if the user think the harddrive is worth $200, you really can't push $250. The problem with piracy is general public's willingness and enthuasium on getting things far below the perceived value, and that they do not factor in the value of owning genuine products.

This is especially true with pirated Video and Audio. While there isn't a whole lot of value-depreciation between genuine copy and their bootleged version, anyone who cares about the music, the artist, the movie or the overall product would (hopefully) stick with the original better produced version. Even though it's possible to create a one-on-one exact copy to be sold at a tenth of a cent, the material that you end up putting into your dvd drive or player is flicky at best. So anyone who cares should really stay away. That is the reason I bought the three Lord of the ring "extended edition DVD" at the price point. I'm going to be watching these over, and over and over again, and I really care about my superdrive on my ibook.

Let me give you an example: I bought the series "Seinfeld" seasons 1-4 from a shop in Shenzhen, China for around $12 USD. I came home, pop it into my drive, one out of four episodes my drive struggle to play it for me with no avail. I started worrying about the hardware and stopped watching.

It just happens that not a lot of people care.

So, the general public settle for bootleg version of their favorite music and movies, and the perceived value of these products drops rapidly. The saying goes: "I could get the entire album for $2, why should I pay $20 for it?". once the perceived value drops, it's extremely difficult to have it back to the previous level. And the new perceived value really is the meat of the problem in piracy, because this level is usually something that the record industry or movie studio can't match, at least not with the current profit model.

And came iTunes Music Store, along to compete with the whole P2P world. Generally speaking, the conceived value for downloading a song via BitTorrent or any P2P network is not money, but time. You have to know how to do it, you have to find what you're looking for, and it'd better not be a spoof, a fake upload. With iTunes your songs costs $0.99, and it suddenly became a tradeoff between time and money. You're paying for the convenience instead of the product, and you get the product more or less as a bonus, better packaged in your iTunes and iPod.

Let's continue with the discussion ...