[Commons-Law] Re: Variable Pricing/variable royalty

[Bodo Balazs]

Hi,

I have been following this list for the last year, and I have found many
interesting topics discussed here. Thank You, or congratulations, or both
for this... :))

I would like to add some thoughts to the variable pricing topic. One option
for selling digital goods (music, pictures, etc) is an 'all you can eat'
flat rate model: as you cannot really control the alternative (black)
markets for the same goods, the producers might be interested in a tax-like
solution, where the price of copyrighted materiels is included in the isp
subscription fee and distributed among the producers based on  the measured
consumption. This of course means different amount of royalties for the
authors.

The other model might be finding each consumer's reservation price: the
highest amount of money he or she is willing to pay for a certain good. On
the net this is also possible: magnatune does this on a voluntary basis, but
one can easily imagine an amazon.com like service to offer different prices
to different consumers based on age (youth has less income to spend),
purchase history, etc. (reverse) auctioning is also a mechanism to find
customers' reservation price.
This second model presumes that tha consumers do not always prefer free
downloads to pay services, which in my view is a plausible assumption.

This leads me to my question to this list: i am collecting data on parallel
offline and online sales/downloads of cultural goods. How does a book sell
in a bookstroe when it is accessible freely on the internet as well? How
does online music stores' sales vary according to the price they offer? I
have some very nice articles from the US market, but I am a Hungarian, and I
am more interested in how these things work in small, secluded languages and
cultures rather than doing just another research on english cultural
markets. 
So if anyone here has some data on parallel sales and downloads of
non-english cultural goods, please mail me!

Yours,

b.-

---------------------------------
Balazs Bodo
assistant lecturer

Budapest University of Technology, 
Department of Sociology and Communications
Center for Media Research and Education 

http://www.bme.hu/
http://mokk.bme.hu/
 
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