> Something that was pirated does NOT equal a lost sale. This is a common argument, but I think it's more complicated than a blanket yes or no. If I sell 1000

> Something that was pirated does NOT equal a lost sale. This is a common argument, but I think it's more complicated than a blanket yes or no. If I sell 1000 copies of a novel (or a CD or a movie or whatever), then strictly speaking, my revenue isn't affected by how many pirated copies exist. I get paid for 1000 copies whether there are zero pirated copies or a million. However, that doesn't mean pirated copies aren't lost revenue in a real sense; it just means it's effectively impossible to measure that lost revenue. Some of those people would never have paid for their copy at all; some might not have even been able to find it legally. Some, though, undoubtedly did have the money and did enjoy the work, they just decided it was cheaper not to pay for it. If enough people take that route, it does affect my revenue, in that I am making less than I would if those people were paying. And it's easy to talk ourselves into believing that's always okay, with what you called self-serving rhetoric: "really, this just hurts big companies, not little ones or individual creators"; "oh, there are enough other people paying for it, we can afford it"; "I enjoy this, just not enough to pay for it." When we're talking specifically about Charlie Chaplin, that latter seems like a pretty easy call, since the vast majority of his filmography is over 70 years old and much of it is in the public domain. If, however, we say "I might enjoy Robert Downey Jr. films, but I would never pay for the ability to watch them," this may not seem so cut and tried. I wish we had a better term than "intellectual property", because I genuinely think "property" makes people focus on physical representation as the thing they are paying for: shoplifting a DVD and pirating a movie are obviously different, and many people who've done the latter would never think of doing the former. But in both cases, what you're really interested in, what you're actually paying for, is the content. I get that there's lots of gray areas: the content may not be available legally in your area; it may not legally be available at all; you may already own the movie on Blu-Ray and find it easier to download a torrent of it to make a good digital copy than to go through the hassle of ripping it. But any argument which, at the end of the day, reduces to "I wanna have this content, I just don't wanna pay for it" is, well... pretty weak.