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Is it true that no one is deprived of anything in digital piracy? There is surely a group who would not pay anyway, but isn't there another group who would begr

Is it true that no one is deprived of anything in digital piracy? There is surely a group who would not pay anyway, but isn't there another group who would begrudgingly pay but pirates if possible? Does this not deprive the software makers of a bit of sales? Is this a marginal bit or a huge amount of the sales? And does the piracy potentially lead to popularization and more sales? It sounds very tricky to measure these phenomena in software. In music, I think the majority of musicians themselves live off of their fans coming to shows or a small percentage buying the albums, and side-gigs haha. There are probably only dozens lucky enough to get huge payoffs from digital sales.

foxfluff 5y ago
> Does this not deprive the software makers of a bit of sales? I'd welcome a more neutral phrasing for this though. Yes, it may change people's behavior. But depriving someone of something sounds like something they had is taken away from them; but these are not sales or property they had, rather it's something they perhaps would have had if the world were different. Now, a lot of things can "deprive" me of things that I'd like to have but never did.. As you say, it's very difficult to measure. Actually, it's not something that can be measured, because it's a world of hypotheticals. It's like measuring how tall you would be if you had lived in the 1500s. You don't measure that. If piracy isn't a choice, then I might look for an alternative.. and if I find an alternative that pleases me, then I'm less likely to deal with the author of the original un-pirateable software, thus "depriving" them of something they perhaps could have had if they had first gained me as a user somehow.