Quote:
Originally Posted by Shaggy
You have no way of knowing one way or the other. It's not fair game to assume it's lost income. That's the trap that the RIAA uses when they make up quotes about losing billions because of piracy.
At best you can regard it as a potential sale. Nobody knows how much real income there would have been.
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No body knows how much of it is real income lost, but some of it is.
While, I don't their draconian methods, I actually am with the RIAA on this one; downloading and listening, or viewing or reading files that one did not pay for is a clear violation of copyright. As I have stated above, I think copyright law needs to be amended, but that being said, there is still a need for copyright. Each illegally downloaded work, represents a potential lost sale. How many of those would be actual sales? We can never know... but we do know that some of them would have been. As it becomes more acceptable to download, more and more and more people do download and thus the actual loss of sales will also increase. Ultimately creators loose a significant percentage of their income.
Further, it flies in the very face of what copyright is about. Fair use maybe fuzzy, but it is well understood. Downloading copies of a work you did not pay for is not covered under fair use. Reading a work that you downloaded without the author's permission without paying for it is stealing (even if you would never have bought the book). Yes, I know you are going to start spitting out legal crap, but it doesn't change the fact morally that you have used something you have no right to use (kind of like borrowing someone's car without their permission) and thus eroded the potential value of what you have used. It may not meet your narrow definition of stealing, but it does mine.
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Bill