Comment by lectrick | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lectrick | Hacker News Reader

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My only rational objection to this is that I don't think we've figured out how to predict actual losses to piracy.

In other words, it is extremely naive (and quite unfair to infringers) to assume that EVERY pirated copy of something is a lost sale. The folks I've known who pirate are more like... data hoarders than payment evaders... Oftentimes they never even bothered consuming the media, it was all about collecting things first for them, and they would have never paid for said media to begin with, so it really becomes nebulous to start swinging around accusations of theft, because... what was "stolen"? Some unknown percentage of the copies surely ARE lost sales, but how can we determine that percentage? Would it vary based on attributes of the media?

In any event, I think the entire state of China would probably be the worst copyright offender, if they're looking for someone to go after...

And even in the case of the "payment evaders", I'm willing to be that a large percentage is made up of people who would opt to not consume rather than pay the full price. This is especially true in countries with less fortunate economic situations. Multiple downloads and situations where one would actually prefer a cracked, DRM-free copy are also probably counted as "lost sales". The list goes on, and I'm pretty sure the percentage of lost sales is a lot lower than what the industry would like to believe.

That's not to say that blatant piracy is a good thing either. I just don't think the industry has figured out a very good response to it. Rather, convenience features and price point could be adjusted to make piracy a less attractive option.

And let's not even talk about new movies having record box office revenue... That's how much piracy affects them, sending more people to the cinema, on every new movie that comes out.

That's because the losses are theoretical, meaning they don't exist in reality. You can't lose what you don't already have.

There is a difference between copy/paste and stealing. When stealing, scarcity is implicitly assumed and one party physically loses something they had. With copy/paste nothing is physically lost from either party and there is no scarcity.

At least for games, there might actually be a way to approximate this - PS3 could not be cracked to run pirates games for quite a while. And had a comparable rival console - comparing sales/piracy amount could give us a clue about the numbers, though it would be limited to this particular media type. Anecdotally the friends who had PS3s tended to actually buy those games, ending up 2-4, while the ones with chipped/cracked consoles had an order of magnitude more...

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