Kasz216 on 15 March 2008
| Sky Render said: There's an entire branch of economics devoted to this subject, you realize. It's part of advanced supply and demand theory, in fact. The basic model of supply and demand is that a certain number of goods are demanded at a given price level, while producers are willing to supply a certain amount of good at a given price level, and the ideal is for supply to match demand. The effects of piracy on this are borderline minimalist, though. For the most part, consumers are trained to want to pay for the things they receive, as long as the price is reasonable to them. When the price is above what a consumer is willing to pay, and there is a means to obtain it that is not as expensive or free, the odds of them doing so go up as the price of the item in question exceeds the price they're willing to pay for it. Piracy is essentially a component of the substitute good factor, and has much the same caveats. Those who resort to it are unwilling to pay the asking price of the good in question. Ergo, technically the only sales lost are those that are lost by the product in question being above the ideal price point for those consumers. |
Thanks for putting this way better then I could have by the way. It really bugs me when people just point to numbers of pirated copies and say "See!" without a greater understanding of the complexity of the matter.
People using numbers without having the knowledge to know what those numbers actually mean in the correct context is one of the few things that breaks my usually mellow attitude.
