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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kenmarable" data-source="post: 4762262" data-attributes="member: 40359">I think it can also depend on the size and type of company.First off, PDF-only companies can be seriously harmed by pirated works. A legitimate purchase after previewing a pirated copy gains nothing but a clear conscience. As much faith as I have in humanity, I'm pretty positive that people are more willing to pay for a clear conscience and hardcover book than they are just a clear conscience.However, a balancing factor is company size. Someone like WotC may be negatively impacted by lost sales. The mentality of "my using a pirated copy rather than a legit one isn't going to hurt someone the size of WotC" is pretty easy justification to live with and gets multiplied out pretty quickly. Pirating from a big "faceless" corporation is much easier to stomach than pirating from, say Philip Reed's one man operation. Philip's a nice guy and on these boards, pirating from him is just mean.There's also the exposure issue. For a market leader like WotC, pirating probably has a minimal impact marketing-wise. Although I suppose leaks before a book is available can help, that window is rare and pretty small. I'd say the vast majority of pirating, especially after the initial 4e core books, is all done after the book is available. When you are the market leader, it's extremely difficult to have any impact from marketing within the current customer base. Your reputation and brand have FAR more weight than any ads, pirated copies, etc. That's why they probably focus a lot of their marketing efforts outward (like the Penny Arcade/PVP podcasts). Anyway, not to get too far off on a tangent, but "pirated PDFs as marketing" for the biggest company in the industry probably has an extremely small, if any, impact.However, for the very small company, I would say avoiding obscurity is probably more important than potential lost sales. The lost sales from not being known would FAR outweigh the lost sales from pirates, in my opinion. That being said, I still wouldn't approve of pirating no matter the benefits or legal status because it's just plain rude. If and when I become a small time publisher, my plan is to release products for free (even getting them out on the torrents), and then have people pay after the fact if they find them useful. That is my plan and has definite risks (but also some definite cost savings and potential to avoid the obscurity problem), but I would never force that on another publisher regardless of how useful I thought it would be. Like I said, pirating is rude. Distributing my own products for free is a business plan. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Bottom line - it's really complex and I'm positive the impact varies greatly from WotC to Paizo to Green Ronin to Ronin Arts.</blockquote>

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