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  3. Piracy is generally bad for business. It can undermine sales of legitimate products, deprive a company of its valuable intellect

Piracy is generally bad for business. It can undermine sales of legitimate products, deprive a company of its valuable intellect

admin2014-03-22  91
问题     Piracy is generally bad for business. It can undermine sales of legitimate products, deprive a company of its valuable intellectual property and tarnish its brand.
    That principle is worth defending. Yet companies have to deal with the real world — and, despite the best efforts of companies, piracy has proved very hard to stop. Given that a certain amount of stealing is going to happen anyway, some companies are turning it to their advantage.
    For example, around 20 times as many music tracks are exchanged over the Internet on "peer to peer" file-sharing networks as are legitimately sold online or in shops. Statistics about the traffic on file-sharing networks can be useful. They can reveal, for example, the countries where a new singer is most popular, even before his album has been released there.
    In other industries, piracy can help to open up new markets. Officially, the software giant has taken a firm line against piracy. But unofficially, it admits that tolerating piracy of its products has given it huge market share and will boost revenues in the long term, because users stick with Microsoft’s products when they go legit. "It’s easier for our software to compete with Linux when there’s piracy than when there’s not," Microsoft’s chairman Bill Gates told Fortune magazine last year.
    Piracy can also be a source of innovation, if someone takes a product and then modifies it in a popular way. In a recent book, The Pirate’s Dilemma, Matt Mason gives the example of Nigo, a Japanese designer who took Air Force 1 trainers made by Nike, removed the famous "swoosh" logo, applied his own designs and then sold the resulting shoes in limited editions at $300 a pair under his own label, A Bathing Ape. Instead of suing Nigo, Nike realised that he had spotted a gap in the market. It took a stake in his firm and also launched its own premium "remixes" of its trainers.
    That this silver lining exists should not obscure the cloud. Most of the time, companies will decide to combat piracy of their products by sending in the lawyers with all guns blazing. And most of the time that is the right thing to do. But before they rush into action companies should check to see if there is a way for them to turn piracy to their advantage.
Why does the author say statistics about the traffic on file-sharing can be useful?
选项 A、They can measure the popularity of a new singer.
B、They can be taken as evidence to reveal piracy.
C、They can promote the sales of a singer’s album.
D、They can help the public to know a singer better.
答案A
解析 根据题干中的the traffic on file-sharing将本题出处定位于第3段。该段第2句指出，关于网络资源共享的数据统计能够派上用场。接着举例说明：比如它们能显示新歌手在哪些国家受欢迎，哪怕唱片还没有在那里正式发行。也就是说这些数据可以显示出新歌手的受欢迎程度，故A)正确。B)、D)两项原文没有提到。网络资源共享应该是影响正版唱片，而不是促进其销量，C)错误。
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