Reply To: Piracy good or bad

@Jeremy: It's true that home taping didn't kill music, but pirate downloading has crashed the income of many recording artists. I have friends in the music business, touring musicians with well-known artists, who have had to take fairly deep salary cuts and loss of other benefits over the years because the artist's royalties from recording sales plummetted with the original Napster, and have only gone down since then. This isn't because the artists in question aren't popular (they still sell out concerts across the world), it's because for every album they sell, four or five copies are downloaded “free” or are “shared.” Nobody can take an 80% loss of income and carry on as if nothing's changed.

Perhaps because I have this kind of direct, personal experience, I don't think of piracy in terms of “big companies.” I think of it in terms of people who can't be employed by those companies, or who end up losing their jobs, whose families depend on that income. Less income from sales translates straight through to fewer employees and/or fewer employee benefits, not least because salaries are by far the single biggest expense on a company's books.

In much the same way, as Theun pointed out, too many people with bootleg software undercutting legitimate businesses translates into missing job openings for designers, or depressed salaries, or both. This is especially true in small businesses, where business owners quite often pay themselves less than minimum wage.

Piracy issues are easy enough to justify when they're cast in philosophic, abstract terms. But there are always real people involved, and real consequences.