I've never seen a torrent site which wouldn't let torrents because "oh, it's individual developer's program, we don't allow those". I would say that overwhelming majority of people who created pirate sites (or created/sold illegal compact discs before that) didn't care about who to pirate from. And practically all shareware developers felt it.

> Something being pirated 1M times never means 1M lost sales. It could mean 2K lost sales or it could mean 200K lost sales.

I've never said it did, and of course it doesn't. And I think pretty much everyone here understands it. I don't know why you've put this sentence in your reply.

> The book your writer wrote, did it build on a genre, area of expertise, setting that inherently draws inspiration from earlier works? Where do we draw the line on what you can borrow?

I think it's ridiculous to compare outright pirating and "borrowing from genre", everyone sees the difference. If we put that arbitrary line at absurd 90% (less than that "borrowed" is ok), than everything on the torrent sites is still crossing that line, because everything there is full copy... And there's a lot of areas where it's hard to pin point the exact place for some dividing line, but everyone can see the difference between entities: like where you put exact line between colors on a rainbow? But you know that green isn't yellow and red isn't blue, you don't need to know where that line is exactly.

> If copyright law was as established and enforced 400 years ago as it is today, Shakespeare wouldn't exist (in our knowledge)

I don't how that would make Shakespeare read less, since he couldn't download a book on his phone anyway, and he probably read many books which weren't owned by him, since they were pricey and that price was mostly behind materials of the book and work to create this physical object. But he might or he might not exist, it's hard to say. It's not certain that writing would be less developed, if there were more effects of copyright. Being able to benefit from writing more could motivate more people to write, so it's hard to say what would have happen. Would we will be on the same level of technical progress if there were not patents (yes, there's a lot of ridiculous and bogus things about it now, but I'm talking about history) in previous 200-300 years, when inventors were motivated to create new things by legal protection of the right to benefit from it? Hard to say with certainty (though I incline to the "less advanced" answer).