I have to be clear that I do not use unlicensed software. I also think that people should not use the software, if they can't afford it.

But I don't agree that all pirated copies are lost sales. Some of them might be of course, but you can't expect that each copy is a lost sale.

Let's use MS Office as an example. Here there is a free alternative (Open Office) that does most of what normal users needs. But the piracy level is very high. This is (originally) a product made for businesses, that most home users certainly don't need. You don't think that most homes would spend $399 on MS Office if MS made it more difficult to copy?

The reason why schools expects reports to be delivered as Word-documents is because it is implied that parents will have a copy of MS Office. This can only work because software can be pirated. If the parents had to spend $399, all schools would accept ODF documents, because there is usually at least one person connected to the school who knows that a free alternative is available.

BTW: "Piracy" is a word that the companies used (probably advised by a PR company), so that it will seem worse. It has worked out very well for them, even the "pirates" use that word. Perhaps I should use a similar strategy against the things I dislike... I will from this day forward interpret DRM as "Digital Rape Model" :-) Copying software is not stealing. It is not legal or (in most cases) ethical, it is it's own form of crime. It may be difficult to define, but calling it "stealing" is not right,

You might as well say that I will steal a potential sale, if I write a false negative fact about a product. It is wrong, but I doubt you can call it stealing.

Yea, I got what you meant and thought it was pretty obvious personally.

What some of these guys don't seem to get is when you buy something physical you pay for the whole thing, production costs and all, right in one go (or if it's too expensive for that you make payments). When you buy media of most any kind you don't because few could afford to pay what it cost to produce. Instead the total cost is kind shared between lots of people. We all sort of pay a percentage. So just like in brick & morter stores: when someone starts stealing product they push price up for everyone else.

> To replicate a computer game is trivial, but when buying a computer game, one is not so much paying for the replicated copy of the software as one is paying for the time and expenses that went into producing it in the first place.

Y'know, I always thought it would be interesting to sell the first X copies of software for a $Y, where $XY is cost of expenses and time you needed to put into it, plus a Z% profit. Any additional feature requests/etc. to that particular software would be developed and sold using the same model.