[HarryT]

Originally Posted by wgrimm

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Does piracy really cost us as much as publishers claim? Everyone is quick to pint out that there are pirated materials out there, but few question whether or not a pirate download is actually costing a publisher money. If the downloader would not have bought the book/cd/movie, then that download hasn't cost anyone a dime.

But sooner or later the item is going to end up in the hands of someone who would otherwise have bought the product. That's inevitable. There's also the fundamental fact that it's just plain wrong to download musc, books, movies, or whatever, that you haven't paid for. Leaving the law aside, it's just plain morally wrong. Surely you agree with that, don't you?

So what's different in the library scenario?

Two things, at least:

• If 1000 libraries have a book available for loan, that's 1000 book sales for the author. If 1000 people download a book from the internet, that's ZERO sales for the author.
• In the UK at least, there's a pot of government money which gets distributed each year to authors, on the basis of the number of loans of their books from libraries, nationally. It's not a vast payout, but if you're a reasonably popular author, you get a few thousand $ from it, which isn't to be sneezed at.

I get so tired of hearing whining about piracy. M$ had a crappy windowed OS with nowhere near market share- until this OS was pirated in great numbers and put the company on top of market share.

No, the reason Microsoft succeeded was because IBM licenced their o/s for the IBM PC, which sold in vast numbers to businesses. Before that, Microsoft's primary business had been selling ROM BASIC for personal computers.

Piracy is out there- deal with it. And realize that sometimes, it may help sales, and that the risk of having your material pirated is greatly reduced if it is reasonably priced. And also that every pirated download does NOT mean a lost sale- the sale is only lost if a customer that would otherwise have BOUGHT your product does not buy.

Sorry, but the fact that it happens doesn't make it "right" or "acceptable". Using someone else's intellectual property without paying for it is just plain WRONG. Perhaps you'd feel differently if that's how you made your living.