You miss my points,
The Value of an item is what someone else will PAY FOR IT, never what a seller thinks it's worth.
This applies whither it is plans for a model boat, a diamond ring or Mel Gibson's house.
If a seller insists on a price higher than most people are willing to pay, he doesn't sell his product and sooner or later closes up shop.
The other thing that may happen is, a competitor may come along and sell a similar product, or possibly even a copy of it, at a lower cost.
Normally this might be considered piracy, but if a large business with a large enough legal team does it, it's merely competition.
A number have included (unofficially) it as part of their business models. It might be national policy in a couple of cases.
Sell high, keep things physical and too large for easy scanning and when someone does go to the trouble of buying it, they won't' be in the mood to share it.
Having worked in the tech and in the imaging industries, I know this to be a fallacy. Even in the specific case of large drawings, there are plenty of ways to image them, most within the means of a home hobbyist with a bit of time on his hands and an itch to speared the cost out over there of four buddies.
Understand, I am not defending copyright or patent piracy, I have been the victim of infringers myself, I am just saying that it cannot be stopped, or at least not stopped at a price our societies would be willing to pay. Landing Strip One would be a utopia, not a dystopia if we went that route.
High prices, encourage bootlegging. Legal tariffs or prohibitions create opportunities for bootlegging.
It is also worth remembering that there are a number of members on this forum who earn at least a part of their living from designing plans, accessories, and/or products, including those for model boat
Very true, and those people need to be encouraged and supported as much as can we in what they do can by buying their products, but it still does not mean they are excused from following economic law. Like gravity, laws of value cannot be escaped.
Much of what we took for granted under the old economic model depended on the technology to duplicate an item or product being very large and very expensive or the process being too time consuming. "Tain't so any longer, and if you think it's been interesting up to this point, just wait until good, high resolution, 3D printers drop below $2000! Then the cat is truly out of the bag.
Model boating will probably become more and more the province of the part-time / living room hobbyist-merchant-craftsman or the very large conglomerate with offshore manufacturing.
And agreed we're cheap, except it's not that we're cheap, it's that, whither it is a dollar or a pound, the value of currency has been coming a lot tougher every year for the last 40 years or so and these days many of us have lost significant portions of our holdings. A lot of folks who might have payed £12.50 / $19.20us for a plan are sure not going to do it now, and may never again. Realities.
