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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MerakSpielman" data-source="post: 1536855" data-attributes="member: 7464">I agree with drakhe. Most pirates would not spend money on what they pirated in the first place. Statistics which measure the number of pirated copies of a work and then multiply that by the purchase price for the item in order to determine damage to a company are in error.  There are some people who know what they want, have the resources to purchase it, and instead make the decision to pirate it. This is pretty nasty behavior. But I believe quite strongly that these sorts of people are a tiny minority of people who pirate copyrighted material. And, as drakhe says, the worst pirates are the ones who attempt to mass-produce and resell the product at a bargain price, undercutting the original company. This, by the way, is a good way of getting the Feds after you, and is the most damaging form of piracy. There's also an increasing mentality among people who can't afford to purchase an item: "Why should I be denied the entertainment value of this item just because I lack the ability to pay for it? If I could pay for it I would, but I can't. My neighbor has more money and has this item, but I'm just as good a person as they are, so I deserve to enjoy this item too." People are measuring what entertainment they should have not on a basis of what they can afford, but on the basis of what they believe they deserve. Taken on a small scale this behavior is harmless - they couldn't afford the product in the first place, why does it matter to anybody if they get an illegal copy? But on a large scale it can become problematic. The reason we have low and high paying jobs is a matter of incentive. The basic concept is that people who work harder get payed more and deserve to have nicer stuff (arguing this point could quickly bring this thread into off-limits territory, so tread softly). If we can all have access to whatever luxuries we wish without paying for them, this particular incentive to work harder is removed. There is a population of people who use pdfs who cannot afford to pay for them who subscribe to the philosophy in the first half of the preceeding paragraph. To them I say: When you make enough money to afford the books you have acquired illegally, will you then purchase them legally? Most of them would say yes, but when it comes down to it, they generally don't do so. By the time they can afford the books, they've already read them, used what ideas they wanted, and moved on to other things. Paying for them now feels like paying for a movie they snuck into months ago. Why bother, it's in the past?</blockquote>

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