[Worldwalker]

In the case of piracy, the question is not "how many downloads of X have there been?"; the question is "how many downloads of X that would otherwise have been sales have there been?"

For example, let's say that someone downloads a bundle of ebooks. It has 1000 books in it (from my brief examination of a torrent site a few months back, that seems typical). That person downloaded it in order to read a couple of books, and reads in total 10 out of those 1000 books. Does that count as 10 or 1000? For publishers (and Kali), of course, that would be 1000; after all, that's how many books there were. But if you're looking at it in terms of lost sales, the maximum possible number would be 10, because the person didn't read the other 990 books, and who buys ebooks they don't read?

Let's say our hypothetical illicit downloader reads 1 book per week, missing a couple of weeks for holidays to make the math easier. So, with that same ratio, they would need 5000 books (5 downloads) to find the 50 books they want to read. According to the publishers, that's 5000 lost sales at $15 apiece (the price we need to be "taught" to pay for ebooks), for a total of $75,000; they actually think that this person with an income of $25,000 would be buying $75,000 worth of ebooks a year if they weren't downloading them. But look at the numbers: 5000 ebooks are, at one book a week, 100 years worth of reading. A lifetime's reading. The publishing companies try to argue that this person would read that every year (and someone who does read 5000 books a year, in turn, actually reads thousands and thousands more of them!).

Or, my favorite example: teenage warez d00ds and Photoshop. As it happens, I just bought Photoshop CS5 a few days ago, so I know the prices. Your standalone copy of CS5 is $699, plus tax, and shipping if you want the disc. According to the Business Software Alliance, everyone who downloads a cracked copy of Photoshop is stealing $699 from Adobe. Now, look at your typical warez d00d: he's a teenager who uses his illicit copy of Photoshop to put stupid captions on his Facebook photos. Would he, in fact, have spend $700 on software to do this if he hadn't collected Photoshop from some torrent? Or would he, instead, have used MS-Paint? Do I need to answer that? Your typical teenager has a hard time saving up seven hundred bucks towards a car; he's not going to spend it on unnecessary software. Actual Adobe sales lost: $0.

I've been in the position of making my money off the sales of intellectual property. Of particular interest in this discussion, I had software available in both demo and full versions in the early/mid-90's, before the Internet was easily available to most people. People who were going to buy the software generally liked the demo; I don't think I heard from anyone who disliked the demo but liked the full product. The price was quite affordable; not free, of course, but not a barrier to purchase (and much cheaper, even then, than Photoshop). Comparing CompuServe demo downloads to full sales (I tracked where sales came from), I had a conversion rate of 7%. That was, by the way, considered good. This means that 93% of the people who tried the demo decided it wasn't for them. In terms of sales, 93% of the demo downloaders weren't going to buy it (because of time, place, and conditions, I can assume few if any were pirating it). 93% of the people who were interested enough to actively download the demo, which was by the way not a part of any bundle, decided they didn't want the software. So, had it been pirated at the time, out of 100 copies, only 7 would have been actual lost sales; 93, like those demos, were never sales at all.

You can't solve a problem unless you're addressing the correct problem. This is not rocket science. I'm reasonably sure the multi-million-a-year CEOs know that; they wouldn't be where they are if they didn't. When they go on about the "problem" as including the 93% (or greater, often much greater) that were never sales in the first place, you have to wonder what problem they're going after. I can tell you this, though: it's not the one they're telling us they're trying to solve.

The only sales that count are sales you're going to make in the first place. If it's not a sale, then let it go because man, it's gone.