Originally Posted by ScratchMonkey

"Possible income" is an interesting term. Every time one of you breathe, you're "depriving [me] of possible income".

Every time you make a copy for private use, you're "depriving [the author] of possible income", because that's a copy I could have forced you to buy. I'm being magnanimous by not forcing you to come over and buy a fresh copy every time you want to play.

This is exactly the idea I've seen floated by companies and things like the RIAA to defend their lawsuits. In their mind, you should always return to them to buy a fresh copy, there is no ifs, ands, or buts, anything else is IP/copyright infringement and "piracy". The very act of you copying your disk for a backup had deprived them of the revenue gained by selling you additional copies when your disk becomes unplayable. Similarly, every time you rip your music, they have lost the right to recoup that by selling you a DRM-laden MP3 from itunes/walmart.com/amazon.

An example of the latter was one of the things that started bringing down MP3.COM back in the day before iTunes, and when Napster was starting out. MP3.com was a website for artists to upload select songs from thier repertoire, as well as links to where you could buy thier music, etc. It was kind of like what Myspace has become to the music industry today, only 10 years or so ago. They had a service called MyMp3.com, where you could upload your own, bought-and-payed-for music to thier online servers, and could then stream them anywhere (at work, at home, etc) for free.

Keep in mind, this was using your own legally aquired music, only shifted so you could listen to it anywhere, instead of toting your CDs with you. The RIAA came down hard on them, claiming it was equivalent to unauthorized duplication and copyright infringement. "Here, although defendant recites that MyMP3.com provides a transformative 'space shift' by which subscribers can enjoy sound recordings contained on their CDs without lugging around the physical discs themselves, this is simply another way of saying that the unauthorized copies are being retransmitted in another medium - an insufficient basis for any legitimate claim of transformation."

This is how they generate those numbers like 50.1 Billion dollars lost to software piracy. Or, for example, how 1 out of every 5 computer programs is pirated and it costs the US industry 9 billion annually. They may go to a torrent site, for example, and sit there looking at the number of downloads for the torrent, or the number of users, and calculate that each user/download = one lost sale (or in some cases, each download is 2 sales lost.) That is, every single download is something that would have been bought. As mentioned previously, that is usually not the case.

There was a study recently where they said 7 million people in the UK were pirates. They came up with this number by doing a survey of 1000 households, took a fudged report, and extropolated that data to the entire UK of 60-odd million residents.

Furthermore, I know a lot of people that will pirate to see how the game/etc is, before making the decision to buy (I've done this before as well, especially with games that have offered no betas or demos like most of them as of late). They consider a game that I downloaded, played for 2 hours, and deleted, lost potential income, even though I would never have bought the game any way because of how crap it was. (An example of this is Spore)

IMO, the key is like what the GalCiv devs stated. Piracy is eventual and inevitable. The key is not to see what you can do to "stop" piracy, but how you can increase sales above the piracy. Make your customers WANT TO BUY your products (and do it in a way that is non-strongarming them.) I haven't bought a single Activision game on the market since W@W, and none of the current crop of Ubisoft games since thier strongarming DRM that DOESN'T WORK half the time in the first place (and screws you out of playing the game legitly.. while pirates have free access to the game you payed 60 dollars for).

It's a shame, because I broke my Ubi boycott before when they actually listened to the community and thier bottom line and dropped StarForce way back.