Every argument needs evidence.
You say piracy is bad then you have to prove it.
A pirate who speaks of evidence and research? I'm impressed. Maybe you
can engage in an intellectual argument unlike most wannabe 13yo kids who don't give a damn to copyright infringements (a federal crime punishable by <5 year of jail time and <$250,000, under Title 17, United States Code, Sections 501 and 506) and just want free stuffz.
Very well, I shall entertain the idea of debating with a pirate with research-based evidence this time. Hopefully I'm not wasting my time, although I am well aware of who I am dealing with.
First off, Smith and Telang's
Assessing the Academic Literature Regarding the Impact of Media Piracy on Sales paper concludes that the vast majority of the literature, particularly published in top peer reviewed journals,
finds evidence that piracy harms media sales.
Their main focus was on music and motion picture piracy, but this is germane to video games since they also have both visual and auditory elements. Their correlation method and regression formula found that digital piracy results in a decrease in sales of motion picture content.
Second, BSA's
Global Piracy 2008 study estimated that "
losses [...] reach $53 billion worldwide in 2008. For every $100 of legitimate software sold, another $69 was pirated," and the data they looked into included PC games.
You may argue that BSA is a software alliance group and their research was biased, and that's fine. GAO (non-partisan Government Accountability Office) agrees that the numbers are a little bit overestimated. But in
GAO's report, while they found it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to quantify how bad piracy has an impact on sales and US economy,
there is still a negative impact. It is merely just hard to quantify an estimated number.
I have presented three published, peer reviewed research paper, one from the US government.
Your turn, Pirate, to present concrete evidence that piracy doesn't hurt the copyright holders, but it has to fulfill these three requirements:
- 1. Your evidence needs to include research papers from top-recognized journals.
- 2. Your evidence may not come from some shady pro-piracy websites. Those are not research but self-proclaimed statements that says fallacious, bullcrap things pirates love to hear. I am not interested in those.
- 3. You may not just throw me some sales number and claim that "the most successful consoles had rampant piracy". That is not how a scientific research conclusion is reached.
For example, larger cities have more crimes than smaller cities. Do we then conclude that crime is a good thing since it helps cities grow? No. It's as ridiculous as your claim and I am not interested if your counter-argument is like that. (A logical conclusion is simply that the higher the population, the number of human to human interactions/encounters/conflicts also rises, and thus higher chances for crimes to occur. Basically, large denominator, large numerator.)
Finally, piracy, by definition, is stealing. Just like SquareFingers said.