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Comment by greyman | Hacker News Reader

"and when downloading hundreds of songs from PirateBay, that's several hundreds of dollars versus free."

No, it isn't several hundreds of dollars, since many people who are downloading from PirateBay would not buy the songs even if the free option wouldn't be available.

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That's his point. The choice for a consumer (who knows about BitTorrent) is between paying hundreds of dollars, or paying nothing. Given that, most people will choose to pay nothing.

But I wanted to say something else. Many people how don't know about BitTorrent would still not pay.

"Many people how don't know about BitTorrent would still not pay."

And some would. So where does that leave the overall argument?

It leaves that "it isn't several hundreds of dollars, since many people who are downloading from PirateBay would not buy the songs even if the free option wouldn't be available." The average person who casually downloads a huge torrent with hundreds of songs would not realistically download all of those songs if they paid $1 each for them. That's not a matter of personality but basic economics -- there's far more demand for a song when the "price" is $0 than when it's $1. For $0, many people will download a given song even if they have no real intention of listening to it, simply because the interface to delete lots of files from your computer is easier than the one to exclude lots of individual items from a torrent download. And hey, you can listen to one or two of them for 15 seconds each, maybe you'll find a new song that you like. The first benefit goes away when you're sticking individual songs in your cart, and the second is not worth very much money at all. Take the option of torrenting away and those people would download only a few of those songs for a much more reasonable amount of money.

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