> Combating piracy requires enormous resources on the part of the IP owners, which is taken from budgets that could be otherwise allocated to creating more art.

> Combating piracy requires enormous resources on the part of the IP owners, which is taken from budgets that could be otherwise allocated to creating more art. When you pirate, you are stealing not just from the rightful owner, you are stealing from all of society by depriving us of art that would have been created if money didn't have to be spent fighting piracy! That's a very bad excuse for an argument. To make the case that any damage is being done by piracy two things need to be true: (1) that people who pirate would have paid if piracy wasn't an option/harder; (2) that piracy doesn't have other positive externalities for that outweigh the first point. The publisher paying to fight piracy is purely out of spite if it doesn't have a meaningful impact on (1) or if (2) is true, which it might be: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/09/eu-study-finds-piracy-doesnt-hurt-game-sales-may-actually-help/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/09/eu-study-finds-piracy...