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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MerakSpielman" data-source="post: 1538674" data-attributes="member: 7464">I suspect you and I are in some ways just different creatures, then. I have tons of things on my "I would never buy it, but if somebody gifted me with it I'd use it and keep it" list.  I hinted at this earlier, but this paradigm breaks down pretty easily. I personally know people who have multiple thousands of dollars worth of pirated material on their computers. This can't all be counted as "loss of sale" because the people in question would never have been able to afford to purchase such an incredible quantity of stuff. At least some percentage of their downloads, then, qualifies as stuff they wouldn't have legally purchased had they been unable to download it.  This is hard to measure. I can only assume that when a store publishes X number of coupons, they expect to have X number of customers use the coupons to get a discount. The loss of profit due to this discount should be expected. However, not all coupons are used. The vast majority of coupons published in the Sunday paper are just thrown away, since the person who purchased the paper, even if they are a coupon-clipper, will only find a handful of coupons for products they personally buy. At this point in my thought process I'm leaning towards counterfeit coupons being no big deal, since they probably don't come close to making up for the number of coupons thrown away. Then my train of thought continues. Marketing people are pretty savvy. They probably know what to expect from publishing X number of coupons. The know the number of coupons from X that can be expected to be redeemed, and plan their marketing strategies around this. They do not expect or intend for all of the coupons they publish to be redeemed - this might in fact be very bad for business. Now my thought process is leaning against counterfeiting coupons. I guess I'm undecided, and don't know enough about the industry to make an informed opinion.</blockquote>

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