> If the 12 yr old pirates $17,000 (retail price) of music, this does not mean the record companies are out $17,000... 12 yr olds don't have $17,000 to spend even if they are prevented from pirating.
Right, but it does not mean that the record companies are out $0 either. They are probably missing out on at least several hundred dollars worth of revenue for that particular person.
I might concede that this is the case, but only if we first agree that this doesn't mean you get to choose some arbitrary number in the middle and pretend that this is the "average loss".
I know of no economic science that can provide a reasonable number, either. You'd be lying if you claimed you knew of one.
> They are probably missing out on at least several hundred dollars worth of revenue
This would be the very extreme edge of the maximum. They're probably missing out on several tens of dollars.
And for this, they've hijacked the criminal justice system with bribes to congresses and parliaments, extended copyright protection so much that it now lasts a duration best measured in centuries, bankrupted innocent people with million dollar judgements, and sent people to prison for what shouldn't even be misdemeanors.
They want us to all pay, through our tax funding of the criminal justice system, for these minor theoretical losses. Why should I have sympathy for that?
Games companies specifically have broken their own works so thoroughly that it's difficult or impossible to get games just a few decades old to run. This is stealing from the public domain. It'd be like burning down your apartment just before the lease runs out, to make sure the landlord doesn't get it back.
Fuck them.
I would guess it was at least $40, else why pay $40 for a flashcart? A new gateway (the only 3DS card I'm aware of) costs $80.
People who buy 3DS flash carts never buy a game again (in my experience), mainly because new non-pirated games require upgrading the firmware, which they can't do if they want their flash carts to keep working (this may have been improved, I haven't looked in a while). Also because they 'paid for piracy' (unlike on PC), they (I believe) feel happier not paying for games in future.
I will concede that this is reasonable for a lower boundary.
However, it's not that simple. Human psychology being what it is, if he couldn't buy the $40 flashcart it's not certain that he would buy say, two $20 games that he ended up putting on that flash cart. Maybe instead he orders pizza. Being blocked from the flashcart alters decision paths that don't always lead back to video games or even entertainment in general. But with that said, again, I'll accept $40 as a rough lower boundary.
> People who buy 3DS flash carts never buy a game again (in my experience),
Anecdotal, of course, but this seems reasonable. I don't dispute it.
In my own personal experience, people who start downloading movies never buy DVDs again. So not only do I agree, I think we can generalize it either to most entertainment, or all entertainment.
> Also because they 'paid for piracy' (unlike on PC), they (I believe) feel happier not paying for games in future.
Morally, they bought physical goods that employed other people and let those people earn a living. Additionally, those claiming to have been wronged here still earned millions and billions in profit.
Who can fault them for feeling as if no bad outcomes occurred?
And how is being unable to run games designed for a different system and different time stealing from public domain? Just because tape players are not common today doesn't mean that people who made tapes 20 years ago have somehow stolen from a public domain - you just have to get a tape player. If a game was written for Dos, then well, you have to get a dos system or an emulator. If a game was written for DirectX 7, how can you blame developers that it doesn't run on the latest DirectX 11 system, with the operating system 5 generations ahead? If you are a software developer - how could you predict and counteract this?
Yes, they went too far, but for fucks sake, it is really hard to imagine that these acts hurt a company?
You've never bought one from me.
Can I claim that you've hurt me? After all, you've never bought any. (I can show you my bank account balance, I really am hurting).
The sticking point, the part that will make it feel to you as if my statement above is non-sensical, is somehow you've managed to attach the idea that they're selling something to the idea that other people have a (very) similar something but haven't paid. So to you that feels like "theft". But it wasn't always this way.
The way you feel has been cultivated, just in the last few decades. And though they've cultivated it for music and movies and video games, I haven't (bothered, been able to, had enough influence) to cultivate the idea that if you haven't bought doodads from me that you've stolen from me.
For the vast majority of ordinary people, entertainment dollars are fixed. People have what they have to spend on entertainment, and when it's gone that month, it's gone.
What happens is the various content producers compete for their share of those dollars.
There just aren't billions out there for entertainment purposes. Wages being flat in the US speaks right to that. People don't have it.
In a perfect no piracy world, people would just consume much less, not spend billions more. Again, because they just don't have it. The money doesn't exist.
So that person pirating a lot of music might spend real dollars on video games instead, much more than they would just spend more on the music.
But even assuming it's true, piracy would still hurt individual companies or even entire industries. Industries you can't pirate so easily would see a disproportionate share of the spending.
DRM would still be very important. People would pirate the stuff that is easy to pirate, and buy the DRM stuff.
This varies some, but most people are locked in for most of their dollars. They may have savings, and can vary that budget some, but there just aren't the billions of dollars out there often cited.
There is a delta from what is being sold now. But it's not multiples. Perhaps additional fractions.
As for the hard to pirate industries, who says?
They must compete with easier, more flexible options. They might actually get less spending than they would otherwise with a more flexible and accessible scheme.
Apple showed this with iTunes and the removal of DRM actually drove more sales. Why? Sharing.
Even if it was a completely fixed budget, "entertainment" is a diverse category. Movies aren't just competing with other movies, or even just with TV and books and music, but also with things like cake and vodka. Even if the pie is fixed, is it unreasonable for a movie company to try to take some of vodka's pie?
The idea that piracy causes zero lost sales as is ridiculous as the idea that every act of piracy is a lost sale. At best you could make the argument that piracy is a net zero (or gain) because the advertising aspects of piracy match (or outweigh) the losses. But to just declare that piracy does nothing at all is crazy. It may be small, it may be negligible, but it's not zero unless your product is so unpopular that nobody was going to buy it anyway.
But there aren't the billions of dollars out there claimed as losses.
And yes, fixed maximum, though there are a lot of options, so people do hit that maximum fairly often.
A quick look through the majority of my peers shows this. They make trade-offs each month. The ones who are better off can flex their entertainment budget considerably. Those who are not, center in on a fairly modest amount, and when it's spent, it's spent. They do other things.
I agree with you about it being equally wrong. It's not zero lost sales, and it's not all lost sales.
However, one must also factor in the network effects of sharing. Mindshare is worth something, and those who have it sell more, and getting it happens through sharing and piracy as much as it does other efforts.
And the opportunity to sell continues to exist despite the piracy too. A few are out there working on that premise.
