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Well, your first suggestion is as equally impossible to carry out as the actual law. I think you have to prove that the sales are lost, if you're making the ca
by mquander 16y ago
Well, your first suggestion is as equally impossible to carry out as the actual law.
I think you have to prove that the sales are lost, if you're making the case that someone is being harmed by piracy. Based on my experience with a ton of friends stealing media left and right, piracy seems somewhat orthogonal to sales. Folks seem to mostly steal things that are either very hard to get otherwise (old, out-of-print, not yet released) or that they would never be willing to pay for. A lot of pirates end up amassing a tremendous amount of media, more than they could ever afford if they were to buy it all. Often they spend a lot of money buying what they can afford.
To complete this rehashed discussion with a repetitive anecdote, I can say with total certainty that I have spent literally thousands of dollars more on music than I would have ever spent if I did not steal any. Like the girl in the article, I was a teenager with no capacity to pay for music for years as I discovered and stole from all the artists from whom I have been buying since.
- loewenskind 16y agoI think you're confusing some issues here. In the case of copyright infringement it is clear that sales were lost. The question is just how many and that is what can't be proven. It's true that numbers the media industry claims are ridiculous when compared against their projected growth before file-sharing took up widespread use but that doesn't mean their loss was $0 either.