Need people to fill out my survey

Haha lol. Didn't think of that!

Ah, this will come in handy for my project. thanks for the article!

Thanks for the link, interesting.

Besides the legal precedent this might (and should) set, see my post above here about why piracy isn't theft. I find it pretty damn ridiculous that people ever call it theft to begin with. If I walk up the driveway of your house, (and let's pretend we have magical super powers) and clone a copy of your car, then drive away in that copy, it's not damn theft, now is it? :P

From my post:

• There's no loss of tangible goods when you're copying binary data. Nothing of value is being taken from or removed from the company who's product gets pirated.

• The real problem is lost potential sales. So, if someone's too poor to buy a game (or CD, movie, whatever) anyway, or wouldn't have bought the game to begin with due to any other reason (such as shitty DRM that can ruin your Windows install or nestle deeply in your system, harvesting personal data) and pirates it, there's no lost sale, thus no loss to the producer of the product. You're not using their bandwidth / network or doing anything else that costs them money - only not buying their product.

better version ;D

go ahead and post some examples from both sides!

Yes, please post some examples.

Of course it does. Ask Sony.

Their PSX and PS2 consoles out sold the PS3 by quite a wide margin. The Main Difference, Piracy. Both the PSX and PS2 sold over 102Million "copies" the PS3 about 55Million. Both The PSX and PS2 was Mod chip capable, thus more likely to run pirated games. the PS3 can't really run Pirated Games. Thus Pirates didn't buy the PS3, they went and bought the Wii, since it's able to run pirated games.

Thus yes piracy does influence Business, Sony lost business to Nintendo

Read my posts on the first page here, then read the rest of my reply to you.

Piracy is not theft of any sort. As far as how much it influences / affects the market, there's studies that show that companies whining about how much potential profit they're losing due to piracy is grossly overstated, and often relies on deliberately misinterpreted data. Aside from that, there's no real way to assess lost potential sales reliably, anyway. Especially not when talking about binary data that has many different variables (of the kind I mentioned in my post, sich as DRM etc.) influencing the potential sale thereof, such as games, rather than physical goods.

Then there's the idea that someone pirating your game has a far higher chance of eventually buying your product, even if its' on a sale a year, maybe two, later. Maybe they like it so much, they end up buying its' sequels. It's the best form of free marketing / promotion. By the way, however much later than release this person pirating your game purchases it, is really a moot point anyway, as again - binary data. You can make as many copies of a game as you please as a dev, with no extra cost to you (when talking about PC games nowadays, most of which are digitally distributed / downloaded). Any profit after the initial return on investment is almost pure profit. All you've got to pay is a cut of the profit to the distribution platform you've used.

So, your patronising and moral do-good comment means nothing. "..doesn't mean you can deny what you're doing". No, indeed. But what are you doing? Copying data, and using it, at no cost to whoever made it. You're only doing something immoral / wrong when you A) have the cash, B) like the product, and C) the product is of good quality (so no bad DRM, no hugely buggy game etc) and you still choose to never buy it. If the game has bad features such as bad DRM, or is a rough and unfinished game rife with bugs, you owe it to the games industry to NOT buy it, and send a message back to the developers that any product they release will fail, if they choose to release it as such.