I feel this black/white scenario of "pay us for content or its illegal" ignores the reality of the market. There are plenty of social dynamics in play that are

I feel this black/white scenario of "pay us for content or its illegal" ignores the reality of the market. There are plenty of social dynamics in play that are conveniently ignored. Music pirates in particular tend to buy more music than non-pirates. I would wager this holds true in any media-field of pirating (but perhaps not software pirating). [0] There is a reason for this! Pirates are enthusiasts. They love the content they consume and are likely to pay/buy things they really enjoy/enjoyed. Due to not having an unlimited income they pirate some things. For music pirates - there is a good chance that the music they are purchasing is from the same music label as the music they are pirating. Pirates are also likely to tell their friends about a show they enjoyed. Pirates are also likely to buy merchandise from shows they enjoy. For example - an extremely large portion of the American market for Japanese Anime-related goods is because of pirated fan-subbed anime. Shows that would have never been released or heard of in America and thus led to 0% revenue from America are pirated and their merchandise purchased. The number of figurines from おれいも for example. Or the number of だきまくら purchased from American-fans. This simply can't be denied for the anime market in particular - and many fansubbers eventually get hired by the studios. Some studios try to shut down the fansubbers but most allow it to happen because fansub groups largely do not sub anime slated for an English release. It's an unspoken code of sorts of "Support the official release" - and since many anime fans don't necessarily speak Japanese, if someone isn't translating it for them they can't/won't watch it. Pirating is beneficial for the anime scene. It's likely more beneficial than harmful for music for similar reasons. I'll concede that for Movies/TV Shows it gets a little iffy (do enough people buy merchandise who wouldn't if they hadn't pirated the show to see it?) Then we can also look at video games. Amnesia: The Dark Descent or Minecraft. Games that were heavily pirated and the creators even went so far as to say "If you can't afford to play our game. Pirate it." Why? Free marketing and free publicity means more sales. It made economic sense to let your game go viral that way. What might be $20 in a lost sale to a pirate might win you $80 in 4 new sales from his friends (even if another 6 of his friends just pirated the game) If you don't let him pirate the game you just lost $80 in sales and free marketing/publiclity from 7 people which likely lost you even more in sales. Which brings me to the important part: Pirating doesn't mean a lost sale. It means free marketing and free publicity from someone who wouldn't have been a customer. If you can convert a "non-sale" to a "promotional consumer", why wouldn't you? The economic spin usually given to pirates is it is "costing sales" which is, frankly, bullshit. They make more money off suing mass pirates than any "lost sales", so it's beneficial for them to keep pirating illegal. [0] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/22/music-pirates-study_n_2526417.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/22/music-pirates-study...