Having done this blogging thing for over a year now I'd like to think I've gotten better at it.  When I first started I hadn't written an essay (which are what blog posts essentially are) since college.  So the going was a little rough.

And while I still have a ways to go in restoring my writing skills I think the average post on this blog is better now than it was a few months back.

That said, occasionally, I just blow it.  Such was the case with my last post.  But the point is so important I'm going to take another shot at it. 

The Theory

There is a group of people who think it's mathematically proven that music should be free.  They base this on the economic principle that says the price of goods will fall as the cost to produce them goes down. 

This group extrapolates that theory to digital music and claims it proves music should be free.  Since you can make an infinite number of digital copies and it costs nothing.  So they believe that music should be free since the cost to create digital files is $0. 

The Problem With That Theory

1.  You can't make an Infinite Number of Copies: When trying to prove things using math you have to play by the rules of mathematics.  One of those rules is that "infinite" is defined as "a number so large there is no limit to it".  Since there is a limit to how many digital copies of a song you can create (eventually you'd run out of hard drive space) you can't say that an infinite number of copies could be made.

The counter argument to that would be the cost of making digital copies is still $0 so the price should be zero even if you can't make an infinite number of copies.  But that ignores...

2.  Production Costs: The people who use this theory as justification like to disregard the cost of producing a song.  But the truth is it costs a lot to make every song (artist, producer, technician, etc...) so every digital copy you make takes on a part of that cost to produce it. 

3.  Processing Power: Making digital copies does cost money in processor power, hard drive space, Bandwidth, etc...  Put a popular song on Amazon's S3 service and make it downloadable for free and you'll see just how expensive making digital copies can be. 

4.  No one said cost and price fall equally: No economic theory says that price falls in exact proportion to cost.   Again, drug companies can make a bottle of pills for $.10 and then charge $80 for it.  So why can't a digital copy that costs $.00000001 be sold for $.99?

Conclusion

So in the end this theory has no basis in fact.  Every part of the equation they are using is flawed and even the equation itself doesn't work in the way they claim it does. 

And that...was my original point (hopefully much clearer now)

Hopefully some of these people will see this post (and not the last one) and come to their senses.