Media Piracy: Good Economics?

Is "piracy" unethical or imoral? Only, and only if you downloaded, kept and made use of something you would have otherwise bought, had it not been possible for you to download it. A very big part of my CD, DVD and videogame collections a made up of items that I have only discovered after first having downloaded them. And that I would never have found otherwise.

And the fact that "piracy" is illegal (in most countries) says nothing, really. It's even illegal to lend a CD or DVD for christ sake. However, this is as much a reason not to buy a CD a downloading is. "I don't need to buy that. I'll just borrow it from ___ instead". Same goes for the second-hand market.

I think if there was more of a debate going on about "piracy", record companies could probably get a better idea about why people download music from the internet. As it is now, all you ever hear is "Record sales are declining. Must be that damned internet "piracy" buisness!!!1, etc".

But still, it's a very complicated issue and I doubt "piracy" would ever be made legal again even if it could be proven that in the end it didn't hurt sales.

Originally Posted by Night Phoenix

As an underground hip-hop artist, I've come to understand one thing - Anyone who is going to pirate your music is someone who wasn't going to buy your shit in the first place.

Quoted because I've found this to be largely true as well.

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