Art, 2 items
Item #1:
You said:
If you buy only the selections you want, rather than the total number that would be on a CD, it's going to cost less in terms of copyrighted material, and the publisher can eliminate the cost of the CD
This is beautiful in theory. I've seen 0 evidence that the recording industry has a serious interest in allowing this. After all, following from your own logic, if only 1 or 2 selections per CD are desirable, then 85% of what the industry is charging for is crap (yet clearly they cannot forego 85% of their revenues). Ultimately and at the margin, their costs would be much lower, but it's going to cost them a lot to set up the electronic systems, and they haven't figured out how to develop pirate-proof digital recordings anyway.
Item #2:
I'm unclear as to what the exact royalty situation with SNDK is, but isn't it at least reassuring to see a royalty run-rate of around $80 million dollars? If SNDK's products have become 'commodities,' then I sure as hell don't know where these royalties are coming from. I don't believe they're all one-time licensing fees.
Looked at another way, this royalty stream, in terms of revenues, is already well above $1/share - and as the product becomes cheaper, SNDK's cut of each sale (assuming their patents DO matter going forward) gets bigger and bigger.
Andre |
