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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Janx" data-source="post: 1534071" data-attributes="member: 8835">Zappo's on the right track.  There's contradictory info from the RIAA and other independent studies on whether piracy is hurting the music industry or actually helping it.Certainly, piracy isn't nice, in that it's basic concept is I took your stuff with out paying for it.  But that whole system has so many complexities to it that a blanket statement that piracy is hurting the music industry may not be accurate.Out of all the pirates of product A:Z% eventually buy the real product (honest samplers)Y% only wanted a small piece of the product (wouldn't have paid for it)X% refuses to pay for product (jerks)Z is obviously not a problem.  Y is a market you'll never be able to reach, because they could live without it.  These are the folks who only wanted one song, or just wanted to see the product before they bought it, then decided they didn't like it.  X are the guys who usually build all the pirating infrastructure in the first place.  They're the guys you should not like, and be working to stop.  Z & Y aren't a threat, and when you kill X, they'll come through normal channels.  The question is, if you could prevent piracy perfectly (the non-copyable book), would the pirates buy your product?  What percentage of them?  Is the sales from those pirates higher than the cost of the "uncopyable" product.The fact is, piracy happens.  It costs money to stop it. Pirates put a lot of energy into breaking protection schemes and they always break them.  If the cost of fighting piracy is higher than accepting the "lost" sales.  That's the hard part, is since the sale doesn't happen (ie the customers don't tell you they are NOT buying your book), you can't estimate it easily.Most real stores accept shrinkage (that's the industry term for shoplifting/loss of product).  They obviously take practical steps to prevent/reduce it, but the accounting department knows it happens, and it is budgetted.  And this is loss of actual product.  Meaning they paid for it, and it vanished.  The fact that there are businesses that take a real loss have learned to accept it and move on suggests that piracy targets also need to expect it and move on.It may be tricky for some people to see the difference between theft and piracy.  Theft means you paid money for something, and somebody else took it and you have nothing.  Piracy still has somebody "taking" it, but you are left with exactly what you had before the pirate did his work.  The instant before and the instant after are identical.  Now the victim of piracy doesn't feel that way, obviously, they are owed payment for the product that the pirate wouldn't have gotten, if not for their work.  But because the pirate has no relationship to you, if he pirates or just never buys, you'll never know.  And that's the difference that matters.Janx</blockquote>

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