You might be glad to learn a number of studies (mostly commissioked by the European Union) agree on the fact that piracy doesn't hurt sales.

The main consensus is that people who illegally access content wouldn't have bought it otherwise, and that they still advertise it (thus, still driving up sales).

These studies have then been systematically strong-armed into silence by the EU and constituent countries' anti-piracy organisms.

This is probably because the war on piracy, too, is a billion-dollar industry. I'd be glad to blow it all up and give it all to the starving artists and their families.

Piracy does not hurt sales because it has a lot of friction. There have been zero studies on piracy in a low friction environment, because there was no need. Such as in countries where pirated Video CDs where endemic and not policed, it was completely obvious and distributors didn't even bother putting product onto the market. Or back in the days where mp3 music sharing apps became mainstream and got integrated with music players. Or when Popcorn Time looked likely to replace every streaming service in existence. If something like the Internet Archive Library became low friction (click the button and you are reading on your e-reader), and declared legal (avoiding social stigma), do you honestly believe this would not become the default and normalized way of 'buying' books?

> piracy doesn't hurt sales

Funny enough, an academic department I know has cut back on its purchase requests to the university library, on the assumption that everyone, students and staff alike, is just going to download the books from shadow libraries. Individuals were never going to purchase a 400€ book from a scholarly press anyway, but if now institutions are on the piracy bandwagon, that’s a new development.

If hypothetically the study had said that piracy does hurt sales, would you change your position on piracy? Because what I'm seeing in this thread is just a bunch of people pointing to studies when they support their priors, or to limitations of studies when it doesn't...

Piracy might not hurt sales, but 1000 publishers putting out their own copies of your book/game/song/poster/miniature once it hits the market will.

That's why I can accept copyright even thought it's not perfect.

Why do companies attempt to prevent piracy if it doesn't hurt sales?

As someone actually living in the third world country, I agree to this message so much.

Yes I advertise the games and actually want to buy the games once I feel like the money would start mattering less than it does right now to me.

Its also about sending a message though.

As an example, I have never bought any online subscription or any online game and yet I wanted to buy silksong purely because of the sheer dedication and respect for him

The only reason I didn't were that partially it may be that silksong isn't my usual gaming although I rarely do that nowadays and secondly, that, I wanted to buy but my brother said that he would have to buy it seperately on his PS5 and I wanted to split the money for the first time

You might call me a hypocrite for having a brother with PS5 and not buying games but its his money and he has given me enough and I am not taking any money from him out of pure respect. He earned it. I have also earned some money online from coding related stuff and I was actually going to buy it from my own money but I didn't feel like it after he stopped me.

I really recommended hollow knight to everybody I could for days lol.

Also, there are some other pressing concerns as well.

So recently, I was backing up my linux whole night and literally the next day I borked it via gnome-disk accidentally format partition, I don't drink coffee so that might explain it after an all nighter-ish saving linux

Then, everybody on discord etc. said its over. I then tried testdisk utility for so goddamn long trying out literally everything in it untill it finally worked (I may have had some skill issues in the process but I learned a lot)

In that moment, I felt like I can do anything thanks to linux/open source. I immediately opened up my mail to thank the creator of the tool and making it actually free instead of people on discord saying me to pay either 15-20$ or pay thousands of $ for recovery.

I asked grenier@cgsecurity.org regarding the whole situation expressing gratitude and I wanted to donate to him but I felt like what if he had some donation site he wanted to give to like red cross or something. I wanted to donate 10$ of my own savings lol to him or any donation list he recommended or wanted to send money to.

Mainly, it was a way to say thanks though but I will honor his wishes if he ever does read the mail and I wouldn't touch that money or I would donate that money later if he doesn't respond to something like food security either way (I personally feel like although open source is really great, I just can't live if someone is sleeping hungry, that shouldn't be there in this world)

And now you or these companies expect me to pay 70$ to play either retro games or to play unoptimized games etc.

hell no.

I will tell you the games I really love as a means to promote them, if someone's interested in hearing out my suggestions on games.

I really loved baba is you, inscryption a lot. They are both indie games which I really liked

The portal series was also a really nice game that I enjoyed a lot as well.

I have played a lot of binding of isaac even though I feel like I am a noob but I can secondly recommend that as well

I also played some other games but that company is notorious for lawsuits and I am even scared that they might sue me for just mentioning the game's name lol

I even once made a friend after first being an enemy (he said he knew karate so he did it on me and I just hold his leg mid air and he was barely balancing and I think my cousin sister had to stop me) of some person and then helping them pirate a game and walking them through it and talking about it lol.

Good times.

What isn't good is when people try to mention how its extremely unethical and how I am the bad guy and I try to explain it and they think its extremely black and white.

I feel like I would give money to companies if I feel like they deserve it and I can earn it. I will genuinely buy every single one of these games that I had mentioned just to support the devs. I wish there was a better way to support them even more directly since steam takes a 30% cut when I don't want it to.

Should any corporation be able to gate-keep me out of the ability to make me enjoy my time of what I have during my childhood simply because we can't afford it and then when I actually get the money, I would be losing out on time (which is what is happening to my brother as I had mentioned, he said that he barely uses ps5 because of his work)

Everything is connected and I think a big issue people do is try to approach things in isolated manner and to form black or white opinions but I don't really blame it either.