Hacker News Reader

Comment by mouse_ | Hacker News Reader

There are studies that show piracy can only increase sales. Piracy is never a lost sale, because if someone were to pirate something, they were never a potential customer in the first place, so at worst, piracy is free marketing.

View on HN

When Metallica came to Serbia first time in 2004, James Hetfield (frontman) asked the public who has "Kill em all" album. Entire public chanted yeeaaah while 95% or probably even more of people there had only pirated version. Serbia just went through very tough decade with international isolation and there weren't any original CDs to buy even if you had the money. But guess what, 30-40k people paid the ticket for that concert. Who would be there if we didn't listened to pirated albums?

But I'm not sure pirating music is the same as for movies or software as there's no tour at the end to reap the effects of "free" advertising.

This is similar to the strategy adopted by Adobe and Microsoft for a long time upto mid/late 2000s. They acted oblivious to the widespread piracy of their popular software like Windows, Office, Photoshop etc., knowing well that they can capitalize on the userbase in other ways.

I don't accept that premise. I've certainly downloaded things that I also considered buying, but just didn't because of some small hurdle.

I think it is truer to say that a pirate will pirate stuff they wouldn't buy, because free is free. But they'll still pirate stuff they would buy too.

I dunno, it's certainly worked with Denuvo for me. If a single player game comes out and I really want it, I'll check torrent sites, then buy it if it isn't on there. Without Denuvo the stuff shows up like, 20 minutes after it gets released.

I'm the opposite. It has taught me a good life lesson: it's made me a lot less susceptible to hype. I've played quite some games after denuvo was removed, and came to the conclusion that once the hype died down most games are not worth €60+ to me. Some games do live up to the hype and end up a lot cheaper anyways, so I bought them.

> piracy is free marketing.

Windows and Adobe Products are clear examples of this IMO.

For productivity software, piracy might as well be "free trial for at-home use". Companies will (usually) fork over the cash for the software their employees use, regardless of how easy it would be to pirate.

You're saying media industry groups finance anti-piracy ads in an attempt to counter-intuitively increase piracy and also counter-intuitively indirectly increase sales?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com