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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Psionicist" data-source="post: 2720182" data-attributes="member: 1874">As always, everyone's focusing on the wrong question (the only thing people in these threads care about is that the pirated copy is free, they completely disregard the other aspects unfortunately).Where I live we had a book store. It has now gone out of business. The same with the record store, and the movie store. Do you want to know why? Because people buy these items on the Internet now. In Sweden where I live (disregard my avatar) nearly 90% of the population has internet access. The owners of the internet bookstores and internet record stores and internet movie stores are _freaking wealthy_ by now. This sucks for the local stores. I'd guess small stores being replaced by Wal-Marts is the same thing.Physical stores are not needed in smaller cities. In my really small town, we used to have a supermarket. It too has disappeared, because everyone drives to the larger cities to buy their food nowadays. It's cheaper, and better. Many many decades ago we had a manufacturer of shoes here, in this small town of 3 500. It is now gone, replaced by large factories in china. Hundreds of years ago our small little towns had their own farmers. Now gone. You can feel pity for your small FLGS all you want, but sooner or later they will die anyway because when enough people have internet access these items will be bought on the internet.What does this have to do with piracy? When the available stores on the internet doesn't have the product, you have to get it the illegal way if you want to get the item through the internet, which lots of people over the world are very used too. Sure, some people are cheap and download because its free (and only because it's free), but most people (according to a study done by a university over here) download illegally because they cannot get the product legally, and the illegal copy is better than the legal version (because it exists, for instance).Pirating won't stop until there are real, working legal alternatives on the Internet, that have all the items you wan't, and where the legal alternatives can compete with the pirated copies. Currently there are none, which is a shame. Why? In the new era the current players will disappear exactly like our shoe manufacturer did, and they don't want that.</blockquote>

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