Quote:
Originally Posted by Fat Abe
Though flawed, and in some ways overreaching in its conclusions, it indicates that there was and still is a sizable loss in "potential" revenues. I place the figure in the hundreds of millions of dollars, while MPAA estimates billions. Why is this of concern to me, and how does the study apply to the book publishing industry? I stated in another post that history is repeating itself. The offshore component of the pirates is costing western democratic countries millions of dollars. This affects our trade balance with China, one the most egregious copyright violators. How would they feel if we began copying their currency, and distributed it freely throughout the world?
If I chop a tree down in the forest, and the landowner does not hear me do it, is this stealing or not? The specious argument reads as follows: If I had to pay for it, I would not have stolen it. Therefore, I am not costing the owner anything!
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You argument there is valid for physical goods. I will use shoes and an example. You can steal a pair of shoes from a shoeshop. This means the shoe shop owner now has lost money because the pair of shoes that cost X dollars to him to resell have now gone. This is different to the digital media which we are talking. If said shoeshop owner had a .jpeg of a pair of shoes and you took a copy without permission because he refused to sell it to you, has the shoeshop owner lost anything? Well no he still has his picture of a pair of shoes. What he has potentially lost is future revenue, because now you have a copy you aren't likely going to buy a copy from him in the future (and given that he refused in the first place you are likely to never buy from him at all) Now with digital media whether you sell 1 or 10,000 copies it still costs you the same to produce the initial digital file.
Now the "Honest Pirate". These people are everywhere. These are the ones who buy an album on iTunes only to have iTunes at some point give an error and find they have lost the entire album out of their collection, with the only option on the iTunes store is to buy it again (hang on, I bought it with your software from you which the software failed and now you want me to pay for it again?), so they pirate.
These are the ones who as I described earlier are given the runaround by TV stations. These are the people who suffer incredible pain in using digital media that is DRM encrypted, only to find because what they bought is a licence and not a product they can't return it. These are the ones who buy a computer with Windows on it only to have it, despite being registered, pop up notifications and shutdown because Microsoft feels the OS isn't registered - so they pirate a copy without that functionality.
Piracy is piracy, but what distinguishes Honest Pirates are their motivation for pirating. Their motivation is never because of greed or lack of ethical considerations.