LuckyTrouble said:
Logic:
People assume piracy is some huge detriment to the entertainment industry as a whole. They picture millions of dollars being lost to those pesky pirates who chose to duplicate the product freely rather than pay for the original legitimately. They say that pirates are stealing and are taking sales away from developers. Of course, all of this ignores some pretty basic concepts.
1) Piracy is not theft. Theft is taking the original so that nobody else can use it any longer. Piracy is duplicating a product, maintaining the original, and taking a copy. Nothing is ultimately lost because nothing is actually taken except copied code. With that in mind, we're at the first level of why piracy is not lost sales.
2) People tend to assume that every pirated copy means one lost sale. What this doesn't acknowledge is that somebody who commonly pirates likely had no intention of buying the product to begin with. It isn't a lost sale if there was never intent to purchase. That's logic used to justify harsh DRM policies that people seem to think deter pirates. Having been a part of a couple of game system piracy scenes, I can safely say that a dedicated pirate will wait months for any anti-piracy efforts to be broken just so that they won't have to spend the money if they need to. In the end, all DRM really hurts is the people who legitimately purchase a game, being forced into an always online state or otherwise.
3) Piracy accounts for an exceptionally small percent of people. Such a small amount that even if every person who pirated a game purchased a physical copy instead, it would hardly impact sales. It would be hard to argue that anybody would notice the boost. Piracy is an insiginifcant part of the game and software industry that people are just really desperate to act as if it's something bigger because there is a lot of legal money in treating it that way.
In the end, piracy is blown way out of proportion and is used to justify terrible DRM policies by those that don't understand that it is completely and utterly pointless. |
Legally speaking, piracy is theft in pretty much every juristiction worldwide. While, as you explained, it doesn't exactly fit into the classic scheme of a theft, it could be still considered as one since you're taking something from the owner unaware, in this case the data of the software. And while they are not losing any data in the process, you're still getting something which you haven't paid or worked for or been given as a gift, which is another definition of a theft.
While not every pirated copy translates in an otherwise bought copy lost, the ratio is around 90%, in some cases even above 95%. Worst case being probably World of Goo, which has been downloaded over 16 million times yet not even broke the 500k sales. The Witcher games, which get released DRM-free on PC, also have piracy rates above 80%, meaning for every bought copy there are over 4 pirated copies. Which also proves that your third point is totally wrong to begin with. What's true about it is that piracy on current gen consoles is almost unexistent - but that's more because cracking their anti-piracy measures has become extremly difficult
Also, while the companies which made the games might be very rich, I still feel that pirating software is a big slap in the face to every programmer/artist/IT worker involved into making that game or program. The company might not be worthy of our respect, but their basic employes certainly do.
