Week 1 Readings

This is my first post on readings, so I would like to say that I am just a toddler in economics field. I didn’t even have the slightest idea about demand and supply until I read the textbook, so I apologize in advance for my lack of basics in economics. If I say anything that doesn’t make any sense, please go easy on me!

Fortunately, I was able to understand the general concepts and laws of economics, thanks to the real-life and specific examples from the textbook. Those examples seems to help even the readers like me chew down the basics easily.

Anyway, of the three chapters, I found chapter 2 to be the most interesting since it covered the basics about demand and supply in detail. Reading page 19, where the authors talk about piracy, kind of sucked me into the readings. It was interesting to see this problem from economics perspective such as how piracy completely ignores the Law of Demand.

I’ve always known that piracy have seriously injured music businesses, movie industries and artists. Most people who use these pirate products probably know it’s wrong. But I have to admit. It could be hard to thrust temptation away especially when you can get a lot cheaper products in nearly good quality. Acquiring other people’s efforts illegally and reproducing it are both illegal, and most people know it. What I see is the problem here is that people don't see this as a serious crime. I just don’t think the law enforcement isn’t strong enough to prevent this from happening. With this kind of fast development of technology in today’s society, I guess even the law needs some adjustment time.


This small section about piracy reminded me of something that recently became a big part of my daily life: Youtube. I know that Youtube has its own censorship to exclude any copyrighted materials, but it just seems like too much burden especially when there are numerous new videos posted in every minute. At least famous American TV shows and movies seem to be protected from free-viewing on Youtube, but many of international shows, dramas and movies are still left for an infringement of copyright on the Web site. I am not here to propose any solutions to this, but I was just wondering if there were any laws regarding copyright materials from other countries. If anyone knows about this, please inform me!


Also, the authors mentioned that it is nearly impossible to measure how much value or profit is lost because of piracy. This is because pirate products are sold at much cheaper price. Therefore, the traditional way of calculating loses due to piracy, which is total number of copies + actual price of a legitimate product, doesn’t lead to the right amount anymore. This dilemma made me want to find out about the right way or the most accurate way to calculate the losses. The authors say the economists still haven’t found a way to get the right amount, but if we can calculate this, maybe we are one step closer to understand the seriousness of piracy.


Sorry for rambling on such a small part from the readings, but I couldn’t help thinking about the issue of piracy while I was reading chapter 2. To me, this issue feels like a potential threat to destroy economics if this problem isn’t solved in near future.