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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Janx" data-source="post: 5891472" data-attributes="member: 8835">It seems i'm in the devil's advocate position.  Mind you, I do agree that piracy DOES hurt the people who's product is pirated.  I do challenge that SOME piracy instances are effectively victimless.  I'm also not a professional arguer, so not in the face!I of course don't know what the law calls it.  But logic says pants are tangible and made of tangible stuff that had to be purchased by other tangible resources (well cash is getting wierd now, but go with me).If you steal a pair of pants from my store and burn them, you cost me the money I spent to buy them wholesale to sell in my store and lost my opportunity to sell them to recoup my expense and hopefully make a profit.There is very real loss to me when you steal my tangible good, regardless of what you do with it (burn it, resell it, wear them, it's all the same harm to me).When you burn a copy of my CD, I still have my original files, my original inventory.  Tangibly, I have lost nothing.  Like the guy selling pants, I may have lost the OPPORTUNITY to make a profit.From my perspective, the Opportunity Loss is the only punishable offense.Which for pants, is reasonably obvious.  Assuming they are just like other pants on the rack that have been selling, it can be deduced that the stolen pants would have also sold, and that my Opportunity Loss is equal.  That's close enough for me anyway.With a copy of my CD now nestled safely in your MP3 library, your theft of my IP has not actually stopped anybody else from buying it (unlike pants theft).  The courts may rule otherwise, but economically, it is more complex on whether you would have ACTUALLY bought my CD if you didn't steal it.  It of course gets fuzzier still when you share it, because while you might be a cheap bastard and seldom buy CDs, the next guy who gets a copy from you might have been a potential sale, or not.Because of the "dubious loss" effect, what I see is situations where a million copies of St. Anger may exist, but that doesn't mean people would have bought that piece of crap in the absence of piracy.  Whereas some pirates off the coast of Somalia who capture and scuttle a freighter full of Levi's are definitely hurting some people's pocket books, at the minimum, the people who currently own and were about to deliver those pants to retail stores once they arrived at the harbor in America.With piracy, I smell more instances of "if I didn't pirate, I'd go without" which means there'd be no sale, and the artist would still be starving.  Which means from a certain perspective, the pirate is invisible to the artist's universe, which only involves people who did or WOULD buy his album.those are bad guys and they need a visit by Jack Bauer.  Who is currently not busy since he finished season 8.</blockquote>

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