Originally Posted by
Cat
It's actually quite a lot different from suggesting you should go and rob a liquor store. There's a huge difference between infringement and theft. It's the difference between stealing your neighbor's car, and going out, looking at your neighbor's car, and building an exact replica in your garage.
Personally - and I say this as someone who makes a living in software development - I think piracy is an overblown worry. While the number of pirated copies of a program may be very high, you need to remember it's a smaller number of people who download extremely high numbers of programs. Take gaming, for example - assume the average person buys 10 games a year, and the average pirate downloads 300. If that pirate were to go legitimate, they wouldn't BUY 300 games a year, they'd probably buy close to the 10. So even if you had a million copies of your game pirated, the actual number of lost sales is far, far less.
Plus, there's always the fact that people can be pleasantly surprised and decide to buy a program they wouldn't otherwise have done because they tried it first and liked it. So while piracy may lose some sales, it may gain other sales too.
Lastly, while it's true I'd always rather someone buy my product than pirate it, I'd rather they pirate it than not have it at all. Though I don't have any concrete numbers to back it up, I'd wager market exposure and word-of-mouth advertising generate more revenue than piracy costs in most cases, especially for the smaller companies that can't afford expensive ad campaigns to generate awareness. In fact I'd wager that if you have a truly good product, the word-of-mouth advertising from piracy could be a bigger ROI than a traditional ad campaign.
Of course, it's all a matter of how large you are, and a matter of how much piracy there is. Certainly, if everyone pirated we'd all be out of jobs. But some level of piracy is probably a net benefit to the company, not a harm.