Editorial: "How piracy changed my life"

"Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."

-- Bill Gates during speech at University of Washington

http://articles.latimes.com/2006/apr/09/business/fi-micropir...

And with this regional pricing crap, the same companies are petitioning Congress and SCOTUS to ban first-sale doctrine on "stuff" coming in from abroad.

"Sorry bub, you bought that X from the company who makes them, in another country. And because they sell stuff cheaper in THAT country, you have no rights to what you buy past yourself. Even if I did sell to you."

Regardless that companies use price arbitrage on everything under the sun, including the workers and the WHOLE company (to get away from higher tax regimes). We peons aren't allowed to use the same tools the big guys use.

This, exactly this.

Moreover, I think that piracy mostly happens because either it's the only way or because it's way too cheap.

The first case is similar to how I was as a kid: I pirated all my games and software and copied all my music, and then bought the best games and the best albums that I could afford. I owned the games and cds that I considered the best, and worth owning. I paid for them so that I could own them: not because I would've wanted to make sure the authors could make a living. No amount of piracy laws and copyright enforcement would've added anything to the funds I had at my disposal. I already spent whatever I had.

The second case is why some people hoard files. They download full discographies and filmographies of nearly everything there is because copying is so cheap it's practically gratis, copying can be fun, and just to make sure that if the world comes to an end they'll still have years of entertainment in their hands. They probably watch and listen one percent of what they're downloaded, and they probably actually buy one percent of that one percent.

There's a third case of "piracy" which is just casual copying, to sample the products. People first download music and torrent movies and sample what they've got. If they find a good director or a good band, they buy a collection or a set of albums. I don't really consider these people a problem since they're consumers at heart and they use downloading mostly to find stuff to buy. If they couldn't download, they wouldn't find much music or games or movies, and they would subsequently buy less.

iirc, Microsoft originally uploaded Office to places it could be easily pirated to help it spread and take over the market.

It worked.

I say the same thing about audiobooks / lectures. In high school, I spent most of my part-time job listening to lectures about economics, game theory, linguistics, all sorts of topics. This was enabled 100% by piracy. Some of these lectures are worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars, which I obviously could not have afforded as a high schooler. Still, the fact that I got all of that content and learning for basically free is in some sense, in my mind, a good outcome of piracy, even though I don't advocate for piracy (in fact, I think it's a large problem).

For the record, now that I have money, I purchase the lectures that I listen to. Maybe if I become wealthy, I will go back and buy the ones I listened to.