Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemurion
I am sure that piracy leads to lost sales and lost revenue.
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That's a widely held belief, but I'm not at all sure that it's true. I think it is an assumption not based upon evidence.
I have frequently seen another proposal that I don't think is based upon evidence: that the biggest pirates are also the biggest customers.
Consider music. The fact that the most popular (sold) songs are also the most pirated doesn't prove to me that the pirates would have spent money on it.
Perhaps there are two markets - people with money and people without. Pirating allows those without money to enjoy what they have not paid for. But it is not clear to me that the artists have lost anything because the poor never had the money to give them in the first place.
I saw record exec Tommy Mottola interviewed on Fox Business about a month ago, and he said that music used to be a 50 billion dollar industry and it is now a 25 billion dollar industry. My opinion is that the decline is based upon the fact that they are making records nobody wants to buy. The popular touring acts are for the most part the older acts, not those with current hits.