To be clear, I’m not against piracy as a whole, but at its core if a potential buyer pirates something, then that is an opportunistic loss, and thus there exists a value to what was pirated (or rather the sale of it).
digital content pricing is skeuomorphic (sp?) at best and absolute bullshit at worst.
There are a number of ways to price digital content. You could price it based on cost of production split among an estimated number of sales plus a premium, or based on what others in the industry price it at. Regardless, to the creator of that digital content, each sale of that content has value, and while the copy itself might not, the transaction does.
Each instance of piracy does not mean one lost sale.
I “demoed” Minecraft before buying it, and you can bet I recommended it to others as well. There are plenty of instances where piracy can be a good thing, however I was never trying to state otherwise. In my original response, I had called out that piracy by people who would not otherwise purchase a product was less clear. There are also people who “pirate” content they’ve already purchased, and those who pirate like I did to demo a product before buying it later. In your case, you also have a justification for it when it comes to music. However, the point was that piracy can be harmful (as is shown by my extreme example of everyone pirating something), and therefore the sale of the content being pirated has value. They aren’t charging just because they feel like it, they’re charging because they’re selling a product, and the product had a cost to produce, even if it was mostly just an initial cost.
The debate around digital product ownership is an important one, and if you’re voting with your wallet by pirating the content, then by all means I won’t stop you. However, the idea that you aren’t “stealing” because you pirated digital content rather than purchasing a license to it is a distraction from the real problems of digital ownership that the article covers extremely well, most of which stem from lack of control over your copy of the product. Using piracy to try to effect change makes sense, but only because that piracy can harm the creators/distributors. If it didn’t harm them, then they wouldn’t care about the piracy and wouldn’t be interested in changing.
Anyway, if you got this far, I appreciate your time.