the cost of piracy is vastly overrated

[Giggleton]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

Who cares how much money is actually lost? People should just stop taking what doesn't belong to them.

But seriously, you bring up a good point, With so much of present creation dependent on prior creation, who can say that anything belongs to anyone??

[sbroome]

Originally Posted by jhempel24

And they also generate more sales based on that...just ask Scott Sigler...he made the new york times bestseller list by giving his stuff away and communicating with his fan base.

And some authors realize that having an extra 10,000 people get it for free is not worth it for the extra ____ that buy it, and it's not their wishes for it to be taken for free.

[Ekaros]

Originally Posted by Ninjalawyer

In any debate on the costs of piracy, the only thing you'll be able to conclude is that it's somewhere between 0 and infinity dollars.

Actually in some cases it might even be negative infinity...

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by Giggleton

But seriously, you bring up a good point, With so much of present creation dependent on prior creation, who can say that anything belongs to anyone??

Well, when you read Das Kapital every day you will get the idea there is nothing new under the sun. I can feel for you!

[apbschmitz]

A twist on this — I lived in Bolivia a few years ago and routinely walked through the market, where copies of Adobe's Creative Suite, a $1300 package, were sold for 80 Bolivianos, or about $8. I have no idea where in Bolivia you could have bought a legit version. Same for movies, music, you name it. It was all bootlegged. And that was just one small, poor country in South America. Think about in terms of the fraction of the world that pays the original producer for information, and the huge amount of the world that doesn't, and there's a staggering differential. Whether you can say that the money is lost to producers such as Adobe is another matter. I think the average Bolivian income at the time was about $300, while a well-paid middle manager at a utility made about $10,000. Not much of anybody was going to be paying $1300 for an application suite.

[sgraffwriter]

Piracy is an issue, I'm sure, but Corporate America seems to be bent on both directly and indirectly cementing their control over Washington and, as a result, over our democracy. That's why the grassroots responses that are sprouting up are so gratifying.

[crossi]

There is also the point that while you MAY lose some sales money from a pirated download you absolutely WILL lose money from each copy of a DRM'd book for the DRM fee. Over thousands of sales that adds up to more than pocket change.

[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by CyGuy

Selling counterfeit goods and downloading copyrighted material are two very different things.

Yes - selling counterfeit goods is more like selling copyrighted material; buying counterfeit goods is more like downloading copyrighted material. But I don't think there's too much other difference between them.