NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="N0Man" data-source="post: 4915038" data-attributes="member: 64066">In some cases, what you say is valid.  It may not be fair, and it is infringement, but it's not a loss, which absolutely the only argument I'm trying to make.  I'm not arguing the ethics of pirating, merely arguing that equating downloads to lost sales is faulty presumptuous thinking.However, you still are ignoring the several scenarios mentioned where they *do* get paid for the work, and not only is there not a loss, there is an actual gain for them.I realize that sharing personal experience has limited value, however I will also mention that of all the players I've shared a gaming table with since 4E, more than half of them don't buy or pirate the books, they just mooch ganders at all my books. I've played with 5 Players who have had pirated digital copies of the books:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> 3 out of 5 of them also bought the books, but had a digital version for ease of use (because 4E indices suck, and "Find..." doesn't).  2 out of those 3 probably wouldn't have bought the hardcopies if they hadn't of checked out the PDF first.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> 1 out of the 5 was unemployed and couldn't afford to buy the book anyway, and was lukewarm and unsure about 4E.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> The final person of these 5 pirates had the money to buy at least a couple books, but pirated all of them (which I don't approve of, but even in this case, he only caused an actual loss on a fraction of those).</li> </ul>   As I said, this is strictly my personal experience and by no means necessarily indicative of the erst of the world, and is an extremely small sample size.  In my games, it's been pretty much a break even between sales that were lost due to piracy and sales that were unaffected or made by piracy.I should also mention, that I've considered many times of banning pirated copies of materials at my games, unless they have a legit copy too.</blockquote>

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