Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="PetriWessman" data-source="post: 2723678" data-attributes="member: 20228">No, it is in no way equivalent. If you steal N copies of item X from WalMart, WalMart no longer has those items (and cannot sell them to anyone else). This is called &quot;stealing&quot;.If you copy N copies of item X from SomePdfPublisher, they still have those bits and can sell any number of more copies. This is called &quot;illegal copying&quot;, not &quot;stealing&quot;, because of this vital distinction.I'm not advocating piracy, and don't do it myself (except for downloaded episodes of TV which aren't available on local broadcast, but that's another issue). I personally don't think piracy has much effect on RPG sales, I suspect for every copy that is a real lost sale, there is another copy that generates a sale (which would not otherwise have occured). But that's just my semi-informed opinion, right now *nobody* knows the real effect. Not me, and not you, no matter what business you are in. It's just impossible to know &quot;what would have happened without piracy&quot;, without some bizarre scifi gadgets <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile&nbsp; &nbsp; :)"&nbsp; data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />John Nephew is saying piracy has caused the drop in RPG sales. I'd dispute that, I think the drop is caused by computers and the Internet. There is simply much more competition for peoples' time nowadays from that front. People who would have been pen-and-paper roleplayers earlier now play computer games.But again, I don't *know*. Nobody does. There are arguments in both directions.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="PetriWessman, post: 2723678, member: 20228"] No, it is in no way equivalent. If you steal N copies of item X from WalMart, WalMart no longer has those items (and cannot sell them to anyone else). This is called "stealing". If you copy N copies of item X from SomePdfPublisher, they still have those bits and can sell any number of more copies. This is called "illegal copying", not "stealing", because of this vital distinction. I'm not advocating piracy, and don't do it myself (except for downloaded episodes of TV which aren't available on local broadcast, but that's another issue). I personally don't think piracy has much effect on RPG sales, I suspect for every copy that is a real lost sale, there is another copy that generates a sale (which would not otherwise have occured). But that's just my semi-informed opinion, right now *nobody* knows the real effect. Not me, and not you, no matter what business you are in. It's just impossible to know "what would have happened without piracy", without some bizarre scifi gadgets :) John Nephew is saying piracy has caused the drop in RPG sales. I'd dispute that, I think the drop is caused by computers and the Internet. There is simply much more competition for peoples' time nowadays from that front. People who would have been pen-and-paper roleplayers earlier now play computer games. But again, I don't *know*. Nobody does. There are arguments in both directions. [/QUOTE]

Verification