Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rel" data-source="post: 1540137" data-attributes="member: 99">As has been maintained on many an occasion, ENWorld is not a meaningful cross-section of gamerdom.  And I also don't have a lot of faith that the responses in this thread who say "I may download it illegally but only to preview and then I buy it or delete it" are representative of illegal downloaders in general.  In other words, I think incidences of people who would say, "Yep, I download everything illegally, never pay for any of it and it doesn't bother me a bit" go vastly under-reported because that's a great way to get ripped a new one on a forum like this where the people who they are stealing from visit the site and are friends with many other posters.Many people keep pointing to the instances where folks wouldn't have paid full price anyway so them downloading the file for free is not a loss of revenue on the part of the vendor.  I think that this ignores the fact that, while if there were no illegal avenue to obtain the PDF for free the person might be willing to pay $5 instead of the $10 listed price, given the option to purchase it for $5 or download it illegally for free, they'll take the free option.  I guess I'm saying that once you've opened the door and begun to download stuff illegally then you're probably going to ask yourself at some point, "Why should I ever pay for another PDF when I can just get it for free?"I have a hard time not believing that a significant portion, if not a majority of the pirates out there just decide that there is absolutely no reason for them to pay for any of the stuff they can obtain for free.  While they may have the money and may genuinely enjoy many of the products they steal, enough to be willing to pay full price for them, there is no incentive to do so and there is no meaningful deterrent not to do so.  So, at that point, they have artificially lowered what they consider to be a reasonable price for a product to almost nothing because they KNOW they can just go steal it for free.  And since they have artificially lowered that price then they can claim, in one of the flimsiest of rationalizations I've ever heard, that they wouldn't have been willing to pay full price anyway so no loss of revenue is attributable to the vendor.</blockquote>

Verification