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There is another ignorant assumption that people are making......That every pirated book, or book borrowed for free from a library, necessarily = lost revenue to the seller/author. This is simply not the case.
If I download 50 music albums and listen to 5 of them, that does not mean that I was almost going to spend $1000 on music, but the sale was lost thanks to piracy. Certainly you could argue that morally the money is owed, but its harder to prove actual financial losses in most cases. In fact, one music pirate was able to thwart a lawsuit, or most of it, by arguing that he would have no intention or ability to purchase the music if he had not downloaded them.....This does not indicate that he is morally entitled to have that music, but it does show that the amount of piracy does not necessarily correlate evenly with an amount of lost revenue. People who pirate generally cannot afford to spend that much money, so while they are getting something they didnt earn, they are NOT costing the industry much money. In some instances they actually help sales by making something more popular, but that is difficult to prove.
Also, as an example of the last point, Microsoft stated that piracy HELPS Microsofts bottom line. This might blow some peoples minds, but the reality is that without pirated and easily obtained copies of Windows XP for most of the third world to enjoy, people would NOT be spending 4 months pay on a desktop operating system but would probably switch to some kind of Linux which is 100% free of charge. Why is this a problem for Microsoft? If Linux became the operating system that the majority of the world used, outside of the wealthiest industrialized nations, it would quickly develop and outpace Microsoft, or at least become a serious competitor as global standards move to open source formats, because people never had any intention of buying what they cant afford so its not lost revenue for microsoft, and its better that the world pirates microsoft (for microsoft) than for the free alternative to gain more popularity, because the value of Windows XP is largely in how common it is, so the less common microsofts protected standards are the less valuable their software will be, and the more popular the alternative will become even in the industrialized nations.....Bill Gates said this, not some computer hacker like myself.
Is it the same with books? Maybe not with artists who already have millions in advertising, but probably with up and coming artists who need to get their name out there.
Sometimes artists will put SOME of their books out into the creative commons, but not all of their newer work, and these free copies get people hooked and they end up getting sales they never would have gotten.
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