40% profit margins do not exist for long in properly functioning competitive markets. Deeply entrenched companies typically run at 10%. Monopolies (example: drug companies) run at 20% (arguably in the case of drug companies this is ok because they operate with much higher risk).
If you find a 40% margin that can't be ascribed to transient behavior, you have found a market that has entered one of the (many) modes of market failure, in which the usual arguments for markets being a force for good (or least evil) go out the window. We use markets precisely because they tend to avoid situations like this; it baffles me how frequently the "market did it so it must be good" argument rears its head every time there's an exception. It's circular reasoning, at least for those of us who don't take the moral infallibility of the free-market as an article of faith.
Specifically, they are not "automatically bad" because they make money using copyright. They are bad because they've found a loophole that lets them monopolize a critical distribution channel for taxpayer-funded research, and they're milking the shit out of it at enormous cost to taxpayers and students. Broke startup founders do not get to appropriate tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded work and hold it hostage from those who have paid for it, and if they did it would not be OK.
If you find a 40% margin that can't be ascribed to transient behavior, you have found a market that has entered one of the (many) modes of market failure, in which the usual arguments for markets being a force for good (or least evil) go out the window. We use markets precisely because they tend to avoid situations like this; it baffles me how frequently the "market did it so it must be good" argument rears its head every time there's an exception. It's circular reasoning, at least for those of us who don't take the moral infallibility of the free-market as an article of faith.
Specifically, they are not "automatically bad" because they make money using copyright. They are bad because they've found a loophole that lets them monopolize a critical distribution channel for taxpayer-funded research, and they're milking the shit out of it at enormous cost to taxpayers and students. Broke startup founders do not get to appropriate tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded work and hold it hostage from those who have paid for it, and if they did it would not be OK.