alt Hacker NewsThe idea in industry that pirated copies represent "lost sales" is wishful thinking. The reality is, people who can afford to pay for media/apps/programs/books can and do; the people who pirate such digital goods overwhelmingly either cannot afford to purchase a legitimate copy, or simply wouldn't be interested in paying for it without knowing whether they'd like what they were getting, were a pirated copy not be available.
Additionally, not all pirates are the selfish monsters that MPAA, RIAA, and friends would have you believe: many pirates, including several I know personally, use pirated media as a preview, and go on to pay for the content they actually enjoyed, yet wouldn't have done so without the option to pirate to know whether or not the media is worth the asking price to begin with.
An MBA could be coaxed into admitting that in those cases, piracy actually creates sales that wouldn't have otherwise happened.
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For better or for worse, some people who can afford otherwise do piracy, out of protest. For example several people I know personally buy music exclusively on bandcamp. If it's not on there, they pirate it. No streaming, no iTunes etc.
Should Apple be the only ones allowed to make money? You can't pirate Apple News, iCloud Storage, all sorts of services and conventional media they provide. You can't pirate App Store IAP. You don't have to make a single value judgement to see that the status quo - the only permissible action to take against piracy is to make unassailable DRM - is really just conceding that the fully vertically integrated platforms ought to own anything. Surely it's not good that only Apple is allowed to make money.
>The idea in industry that pirated copies represent "lost sales" is wishful thinking.
The idea that _all_ pirated copies represent "lost sales" is wishful thinking.
But the idea that without piracy sales would be greater, sometimes substantially, because some pirated copies do represent "lost sales" is much more realistic though.
The idea that piracy helps audiences find and then buy the stuff they like, is also, for the most part, wishful thinking. Even for stuff one likes, once they have it in pirated form, they have little to no incentive to buy it (except a small niche wanting to "own the physical product" like a collector, which can sometimes be the case for music and games, but not software in general).