| Kasz216 said: See Ali... your problem is you can't distinguish the law vs the actual economic effects of piracy. Is piracy anything I would do or someone should do? No. At the end of the day does it cause problems economically? No. There are added costs but also a number of added benefits believe it or not. |
At the end of the day it most certainly does cause economic problems. Companies pay alot of money to stop piracy of their products. The most pirated industry is the music industry. http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/18/technology/music.php They are still seeing declines in revenue and profits from the illegal MP3 sites. Initially what happened is college students were going crazy downloading songs. So revenue from CDs continued to stay constant and even increase as is typical in a growing market. But the problem is demand and use increased greatly while revenue/profits increased slightly. Then as college consumers gained excess income they never joined the market of paying for their downloads. They were used to getting thousands of songs a year for free and they could not justify spending hundreds or thousands of dollars a year for what they were already getting. So the market started to decline. As college kids joined the workforce and developed networks they spread their songs and information to millions of other people that would not have found out about free music on their own and they started downloading. So just because the music industry did not show initial signs of issues does not mean their isn't a cost. 30 billion illegal downloads? 40% of teenagers not paying for music? The music industry has tough times coming if they can't find a way to curb piracy.
There is one added benefit to piracy. If the user was not going to purchase your product but used the download as a trial period, then decided purchase the product from you. The problem is that once you rationalize getting things illegally as a try out period, you'll likely end up rationalizing not paying for the product because your market value is less than the actual price of the product. It's a self defeating benefit over time. So while the cost of piracy may be overblown, you are clearly overblowing the benefits of piracy.
