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Explain this to me.

I'm a huge fan of Garbage, including their obscure b-sides, which can ONLY be obtained from the web. One of their b-sides is "Candy Says", a cover from The Velvet Underground. As such, I got interested in The Velvet Underground.

Consequently, I decided to check them out. I downloaded a few of their albums (legal in The Netherlands), and was thoroughly impressed. Since I always buy my music, I went to my local record store, and bought three Velvet Underground albums.

Without me "pirating" these albums to try them out, I would've never spent the money to buy the actual albums. How have I deprived anyone of income here? Hasn't my "piracy" actually earned them money?

If I would not have liked their albums as much, I would've simply deleted the downloaded mp3s, and be done with it. They won a customer through what you call "piracy".

Weird, huh, how the world works?

You think that's how the world, aka the world of piracy works?
Sure anyone can do that, but most really don't.

Weird, huh, how the world works?

Explain how piracy denies revenue?

Certain types of software cannot be localized in parts of Asia because the piracy rates are too high. There aren't enough paying customers to cover the costs. Too many people download or buy the $2 pirated version on the street and deny the producer revenue.

This is not simply a problem in poor areas either. South Korea is a middle income country but has a culture of piracy which disrupts the software market.

Whether you call it denying revenue, cutting revenue or taking revenue the effect is the same. You're reducing revenue by allowing people to use a $0 clone instead of compensating the producer. 100% piracy completely eliminates revenue for the producer and 0% completely prevents losses from piracy.

Call it whatever you want but piracy can be just as destructive as breaking into a business and stealing the cash register. Whether or not you call it theft or denial of revenue is just semantics.

If you go this way, organisms like SonyMusic and the RIAA
a/Steal most of an author's revenue (leaving him less than 3% off a CD's price while the author made most of the material present on said CD)
b/Make you pay a tax on recordable supports as a compensation of private copy right AND now prevent you from making a private copy of your legally-bought CDs. (DADVSI in france, I think in the US it's called DMCA)
c/Claim that those against full monitoring of the web "were the same that sold butter to Germans during the war" (sigh)

In the best interest of authors, we should get rid of those parasites and adopt another economic model where authors freely distribute their records on the web and as a compensation get rewarded through a tax on internet access price, just like we pay in order to listen to music on the radio.

That is not debatable either. Sounds out of fashion, though.

Edited 2010-09-01 08:17 UTC

Theft denies revenue and so does piracy. To the producer who loses an investment to piracy it might as well have been theft. The effect is the same.

It just simply isn't all that clear-cut, you know.

First of all, a person who downloads pirated stuff would not necessarily buy anything even if there was no pirated copies available. As such, not all pirates can be counted as lost sales.

Secondly, many times people sample stuff by getting pirated copies and then make the decision to by more and authentic copies. Such pirates would actually count as gained sales.

Thirdly, not all pirated downloads are for unauthorized uses. For example, if a person has already bought a music CD, but the CD has copy-protection which prohibits said person from copying the songs to a mobile music player: in many countries it is legal to bypass the copy-protection in such cases, and often it's just easier to download copies where the protection has already been bypassed and then use those in the said mobile device; the outcome is exactly the same. Of course the industry would want it to be illegal everywhere to bypass such and would want to force people to have to buy copies of those songs for every device they wish to use but it doesn't work like that. Again, these cases can be counted as "lost sales" only, and I mean only, in countries where backups and fair use of legally obtained material is illegal.

Tell that to my 400+ movie collection of which most was bought because I saw the downloaded version first. Or to my PS2 and PS3 which was bought because GTA SA and GTA4 came out on those first and I had become a fan of the series playing illegal copies on my PC.

Illegal copying is not the same as theft no matter how many times people like you spread the lie.

I could use the lie "This is not up for debate" but that would be dumb, since we are clearly having it.