Since we're quoting the anecdotes of others to support our personal opinions, here's a quote from O'Reily talking about how infringement benefits him in the long wrong. In his opinion, obscurity is a bigger issue than piracy:
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In my experience at O'Reilly, the losses due to piracy are far outweighed by the benefits of the free flow of information, which makes the world richer, and develops new markets for legitimate content. Most of the people who are downloading unauthorized copies of O'Reilly books would never have paid us for them anyway; meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of others are buying content from us, many of them in countries that we were never able to do business with when our products were not available in digital form.
History shows us, again and again, that frontiers are lawless places, but that as they get richer and more settled, they join in the rule of law. American publishing, now the largest publishing industry in the world, began with piracy.
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Do people have a sense of entitlement and does that lead to piracy? Absolutely, but you combat that by giving them what they want when the want it. I recently read a review for the book "In the Mouth of the Whale" and tried to find a place selling the ebook; the only store that had it was Amazon's U.S. store (I'm not American and their DRM turns me off), with other digital retailers getting it a month from then. My disappointment made me sorely tempted to grab it from a torrent site and just pay when it came out - how easy would it be for someone to be disappointed, torrent it and then skip the last step?
Here's one last quote from EMI’s VP of Urban Promotions, Craig Davis:
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I do believe that a person should be compensated for their work. I feel that piracy is a big issue, and things like Spotify will assist in combating this problem...
Gabe Newell is correct, it’s a service issue not an issue of money. Sales have gone up from sales concerts and merchandise, it’s obvious that our fans still love music. We’re just not giving them their music in an easier way...
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It's all well and good to say "people have a moral obligation to pay", but that doesn't get you more sales. If they don't feel that obligation, then you have to get them to pay by offering them a better service than the pirates.