Another Look At Piracy

[Ail]

Lord N said:

The issue that this thread is trying to address is not the morality, but whether or not the financial effects are anywhere near what the industry would have people believe.

I don't think there's any question. Most of the people by far who download or otherwise obtain unauthorized copies of games, music, video games, and software and then don't buy them never would have bought them anyway. The people who go out and buy bootleg CD's, movies, video games, etc usually live in poor countries where they barely have enough income to buy a bag of rice for their family to eat every night. People who obtain it through P2P(Bittorent and the like) are mostly teenagers and poor college students who couldn't afford it either.

There are also other factors to take into account, such as people who download just for the sake of it. There are tons of people who download movies and tv shows that they aren't going to watch, games that they'll never play, and music they'll never listen to just to add to their collection or just to say that they have the whole set. There's also stuff that's out of print/discontinued or otherwise not available for purchase. There's also stuff that's available, but very cost-prohibitive. I live in Philadelphia and i listen to a lot of electronic music and J-pop, a great deal of which a) isn't available here, b) is available here, but I'd have to pay ridiculous import prices(I'm talking $30-$40 per CD). As far singles go, a lot of trance/techno/house etc is only released on vinyl, and vinyl can cost $9-$15 a piece just to get 2 or 3 songs, and only a fraction of the stuff is available via iTunes or other download services.

So you see, every download does not equal a lost sale, and if the industry were suffering anywhere near the damage they claim, then the record labels would have long ago gone out of business considering that it's been possible for years to download an artist's entire discography in less than an hour.

 

Then how the heck you explain the fact that DS software sales started to go down the shitter in Europe this year, at the same time as it became easier to pirate DS games ?
 
It's not like the quality of the DS games released this year was any worse than the quality of the games released the previous years...