If you're someone who makes copyable content for profit, it's best to think of purchase rate instead of piracy rate. You make as much money from someone who pirates your Cocoa app as from someone who uses Linux. But the Linux users aren't "stealing" your revenue.
Anyway, I wrote a book. It ended up on Scribd, Google Books, and the Pirate Bay. I still made plenty of money. Could I have made more? Maybe, maybe not. I certainly don't know what percentage of the pirates would have bought it had it not been available on TPB. My estimate is zero, which means piracy cost me nothing.
Piracy, in my opinion, is just a scapegoat for "nobody wants my crap anymore". Yeah, piracy happens. But even in the absence of piracy, it's possible that nobody wanted to pay $50 for a season of a TV show anyway.
What's interesting is that iTunes would never have existed if not for MP3 downloads, but also because of Napster-style ease-of-access to a large catalogue of music.
This popularity seems to have been the big catalyst for trolls trying to make a buck, which means the whole blasted thing is deeply mired in a lot of people's long-term interests.
To me, this means the whole thing is going to be completely lacking a sensible view for decades -- both POV's that support "in the public good" (e.g. being able to use excerpts of copyrighted material for publication/research/etc, make digital backups of your property) as well as being compensated for the service (e.g. selling copies of your music to pay the bills so you can write more songs).
How can you call bullshit on the notion of people paying when they can pirate instead? Everybody's aware of file sharing at this point, and nearly everybody has internet access. Somehow, the content control industry keeps getting money, mostly from sales of their content. What is your explanation, if it isn't that people pay for stuff they like despite free options?
You are drastically overestimating the technical acumen of the average buyer of online music. Most of the people buying music from iTunes are the same people writing 'patio11 support emails complaining that his bingo card generator broke their internet.
Even among those of us _with_ the technical acumen, piracy is just too much of a pain. $36/year for Pandora is far worth the dozens of hours I'd save, and I have accounts on a few private trackers.
A non-negligible percentage will, no? 70-75% of downloaders paid $1 before or after downloading Stephen King's "free" book The Plant. Radiohead had success with In Rainbows too.
There's a large group who consider paying for things to be a moral issue, paying even when they're not being monitored and the content is easily copied.
Anyway, I wrote a book. It ended up on Scribd, Google Books, and the Pirate Bay. I still made plenty of money. Could I have made more? Maybe, maybe not. I certainly don't know what percentage of the pirates would have bought it had it not been available on TPB. My estimate is zero, which means piracy cost me nothing.
Piracy, in my opinion, is just a scapegoat for "nobody wants my crap anymore". Yeah, piracy happens. But even in the absence of piracy, it's possible that nobody wanted to pay $50 for a season of a TV show anyway.