On Brian's Thing On Piracy

[Krylo]

Originally Posted by rpgdemon

My problem is with the analogy used, and that a lot of the time it doesn't end with demoing. In the analogy, the "pirates" were all a group of paying customers already, and the piracy showed a good product to a large group of people who were known to pay for literature already. It's not at all surprising then, that when the book became available bound together instead of in a bunch of periodicals, the group of people who pay for literature did their thing and paid for literature.

And if they hadn't been a group of people known for paying for literature, chances are they wouldn't have bought the book anyway, and, thus, no customers lost.

There's a good chance a lot of the people pirating your friend's applications wouldn't have ever bought it even if they hadn't pirated it. They just would have gone without, or found some free/cheaper equivalent.

Not every pirate who doesn't then buy the game is equal to a lost sale.

Like Fifth said, you have to look at how much profit is made off these things vs what they expect to make, etc. as opposed to just how many people pirated it, because there's probably a pretty big chunk of those people that would never have bought it anyway.

AND Piracy as a method of advertisement DOES work. See Steve Lieber.

There's a pretty good chance that if we were to compare, somehow, the amount of pirates who paid vs those who didn't we'd still have a lot more that didn't, but that doesn't change the fact that BECAUSE it was pirated he got a lot more sales.

Which really just validates that even if it's not most pirates, or all pirates, there are plenty of pirates who would be willing to pay for things if it weren't such a pain in the ass.