Actually, I think he understood the post perfectly well. The problem in this thread so far is the extreme disconnected arguments between what the OP article claims and is titled in comparison to what has since been argued throughout the thread. The goalposts have been shifted from a doubling in revenue from piracy to merely saying that piracy affects sales in some theoretical way. Nobody in this thread has ever argued against the latter, but again, the goalposts are shifting from the original ideas in the article.

I admit to not reading all 10 pages, but it seems that the one thing that doesn't seem to be taken into account is overlap.

What I mean is that there are those who pirate a game, decide they like it after playing it a bit, and buy it. This becomes a "non-piracy" statistic financially since the person bought the game, negating the "potential loss" of a sale.

Looks like we have quite a few people hellbend on justifying that piracy doesn't hurt the industry, wonder what that could mean. ;)

There are many people in developing countries that either don't have access to these games any other way or just really don't have the disposable income to pay for them and it would seem logical that those people would not purchase the games legally if they couldn't pirate them anymore. But there's also a huge amount of piracy in the US and western Europe and you can't tell me that there isn't a noticable number of people that wouldn't at least buy more games than they are buying now if they couldn't pirate them at all. I know one of these people personally and for him it has nothing to do with disposable income or it not being easy enough to buy games or wanting to test the games before buying them because he will buy the good games (though he loves to say that), he has to this day not bought Skyrim, a game he played for ages, but the moment GTAV came out on console (he's a PC gamer) he went out and even bought a PS3 for the game because he couldn't pirate it on PC.

Also I'd love to know what the biggest piracy category is if it isn't movies, tv shows, music or porn.

while it has been mentioned that not every pirated copy would result in a sale (far from it), there is no money "lost". Sure the gaming industry isn't getting it, but others do. Manufacturers of HDDs and DVDs being the most obvious ones. Not as obvious are those who aren't even part of said eco system.

I just want to say that; I think there are 2 types of pirates:


I believe the biggest pirates are also the ones that spend the most on legit games as well.
These guys have huge gameing demands, but refuse to spend every penny they make on games, and thus resort to piracy for some of their needs, and/or buy products if they enjoyed them afterwards.
(punishing these guys could lower overall sales in some cases)

I believe theres also alot of pirates that just cant afford to enjoy gameing, these guys pirate as well.
However these are not lost sales, because they most likely could use very little or nothing on it, if they didnt have this option.
(punishing these guys could probably do little to nothing for gameing)

The "it doesn't equal loss of revenue" is not a legitimate counter to the problem of piracy. Because piracy isn't "theft," its illegality is not based on an unlawful seizing of goods on the part of the perpetrator or loss by the victim. It is copyright infringement. What matters is that tens of billions of dollars worth of copyrighted material have been distributed without the copyright holders knowledge or consent. Copyright laws protect the creators and/or owners right to exclusively permit the copy and distribution of their intellectual property. Whether pirating a copy can be proven to prevent a sale is entirely irrelevant to the illegality of the act; loss of sale can merely make matters even worse in a case. The act of piracy itself is q violation of copyright and that is all there is to it. The use of the term "theft" does not originate in law books but rather the belief people can't understand the concept of copyright infringement otherwise. That and calling it theft scares some people off. So this article and the discussions surrounding it are just a bunch of noise without meaning because at the end of the day it's a red herring and irrelevant to the legal issue at hand.

Well, our internet is actually very cheap with unlimited downloads (€25 per month, umlimited, 50 Mbps), so it's not like we are hurting that one guy somewhere that has a morality issue. Also, the tax is actually very low, less than 1%, it's better that those copyright holders get something than absolutely nothing. I download probably about 50-100GB per month, so it's absolutely worth it to me not to pay anything for it.

Piracy does effect the industry, not everyone that pirates "wouldnt have bought the game anyway" thats utter nonsense, while many would indeed never have bought the game to begin with, there are plenty of opportunists that were on the brink of buying and ended up just pirating it.

"its not an issue because they wouldnt have bought it anyway" is such a copout, someone not being willing to pay for something does not entitle them to take it anyway.

The whole approach to anti piracy does really need to be addressed and updated, but lets call a spade a spade here, when presented with the option of spending money or taking something for free with minimum risk, a large number of people will take it for free, that doesnt mean they wouldnt pay if that tempting "free" option wasnt on the table.

There sure are people that would buy some of te stuff they copy. But no matter if games, movies, music, most people tend to downloading much more then they could pay and often even more then they can consume.

The typical Amiga/PS1... with 500+ games story. Or the hundreds of movies downloaded. Most people who copy/download would likely buy a very small amount of the stuff they pirate.

So the question is how big is the factor of higher sales without pirating. The basic industry calculation says something like we're loosing half of the money. If someone really thinks about it that is obviously wrong.

That's arguable, most of the pirated games as far as I know are retro games (intended as 5 year old or older) and most of them by now can be found at ridicolous prices