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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rel" data-source="post: 1550141" data-attributes="member: 99">I disagree that it is "oversimplistic" to say that "yes" the vendor is harmed.  The vendor is unquestionably harmed because every person who downloads a product illegally, places some value on that product but that money never reaches the person legally selling the product.  Many people throughout this thread have said that lots of these products are worth nothing to them.  This is untrue because, at very least, it was worth the time it took for them to locate and download the product and was worth the space that it takes up on their computer and the time they spent viewing the product.  That time and effort must necessarily be valued at greater than $0.Here's "the thing" folks (and you can feel free to disagree if you like but I haven't seen anything in this thread that has convinced me that this isn't "the thing"):  This issue cannot be looked at from an economic standpoint.In a rational market, the buyer will always seek the lowest price he can get for a product, all other factors being equal.  The only "unequal factors" in this case are the ethical infraction of taking the fruits of someone else's labor without paying for them and the theory that, if everybody illegally downloads the product, then the producer will stop producing because there is no profit in it.  Those are the only two reasons that I can see that prevent people from simply downloading everything they want for free.The conclusion that I draw from this (and here's where opinions will probably differ the most) is that since I don't want the supply of product to go away, I cannot and will not condone the erosion of the moral argument against illegal filesharing.</blockquote>

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