> When I had no income, I never would have bought, and while I did pirate, no sales were lost. Did you go back and pay for everything you pirated once you had

> When I had no income, I never would have bought, and while I did pirate, no sales were lost. Did you go back and pay for everything you pirated once you had income? If piracy weren't an option, maybe your demand for the products would have persisted and you would have bought them when you could. If so, sales were lost. > But if buying is sufficiently more cumbersome, I do sometimes go back to piracy. I'd love to see a proper market study on this. As far as I can tell, all of this is based on ego and executives' knee-jerk reactions. Interesting that you use the word "ego." You decided that your desire for content delivered on your own turns outweighed the interests of the content creators (or their agents) to determine how their work would be distributed. That strikes me as egotistical. If you believe that all information should be free and that creators/owners of information should have no say in how it's distributed, none of these arguments apply. Tangentially, if this is the case, you might find your philosophy uncomfortably close to that of the NSA.