Well, my friend, he’s kinda poor he can’t afford some books and some streaming services, so he pirates. He pirate books, audiobook and videos and other stuff. Sometimes he buys books he likes a lot out of loyalty to the author (yeah, I don’t understand it either), he likes to read physical books, but yeah, if he hates the author or just wants to skim through it, he will download the book.
He usually doesn’t like to pirate from small companies or professors who are trying to make a living by selling books, but from millionaires & plenty of mega corps which already have loads of money, he feels like it’s the right move to pirate
Also, have you ever noticed that you have felt that the value of a product has decreased just because you didn’t pay for it, thus you are less interested to read it? i.e., had you paid for the book, you would have more likely read that book.
He says he will buy stuff when his time is more valuable than money, let’s all hope that day is soon.
What are your piracy habits?
I had to write a research report in university about whether or not piracy hurt or helped the recording industry.
From the research, I found multiple studies that compared brain activity of shoplifters compared to those of pirates. The area of the brain that lit up when stealing physical objects did NOT light up for those who pirated.
Digital piracy is not theft. No one is hurt except for unrealized revenue. But if someone pirates, was that even potential revenue to begin with?
It was also found that piracy allowed for greater reach of content which statistically resulted in more people attending live concerts (think of piracy as free advertisement). Concert attendance led to increase in ticket and merchandise sales.
So overall? Piracy is good. It is only bad if you ignore multiple factors and only focus on short term bottom lines. A net positive.
This holds true for music, but what about other forms of media like books, games, and movies which don’t tend to see the same kind of revenue streams resulting from free advertising?
If I pirate a movie, for example, it might be because I didn’t want to go to the theater and now my wife and I can both not buy a ticket and watch from home. I guess I could see how some big studio games could benefit through merchandising in the long run but if your game doesn’t have merch or any other revenue streams then what?
For books, if I torrent something and find I really like the author, I’m more inclined to pay for another book in the series of another book by the same author. Same concept as music. Physically having a book in your library is worth a cost.
For games, one may buy a sequel or another in the series or recommend the game to a friend who would then go and buy it. Steam and other game services make it much less attractive to torrent than to buy it at a discount. Achievements, social network aspect, and such make buying a game come with other intangible benefits.
For movies, same concept applies. If the movie is in a series and the new one comes out, one may be more inclined to pay for it or see it in theatres or recommend it to someone else who will pay for it.
Of course in these scenarios, it’s totally possible that none of this happens and the content is acquired for free and that’s it. But when you scale these possibilities up by larger numbers of people, the chances are much higher that additional revenue will be made in the long term as a result.
We also need to keep in mind that piracy has its own high barrier for entry. The majority of the population do not have the technical skills to be able to successfully pirate content so we need to remember that when we think about all of this, we’re looking at a relatively small subset of the population.
For games, there’s a tendency that if a game is truely good and the developer is not being a greedy little shit, that people may buy the game. People talk about it doing it all the time, and on rare occasion small devs will play this for visibility.
I found some if my favorites by pirateing it and then buying it later because I loved the game.