this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2025
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At one point you could get swaths of ebooks on pirate bay. Probably still could. With seeders. Soo…we know that’s not true.
piracy is not the same as stealing. You having a copy of a bible as a PDF is fundamentally physically different from having a physical book.
Publishers have perverted the concept of ownership by hiding the fact that there is no scarcity of digital items compared to physcial ones.
I'm tired of people pretending like piracy does no harm.
If 100% of readers pirate an authors book, they get 0% income. It really is that simple.
Pirate your shit if the publishing sucks, but also support the author.
Donate, buy their merch, buy the ebook of their site directly.
Don't be a cunt.
People who pirate in my experience typically do so because they would never have bought the thing otherwise. Pirates are enabled by technology to have things they wouldn’t otherwise get to have. There isn’t often any “lost sale.” Only free advertisement.
For 99% of piracy cases if piracy wasn't an option people would simply not get the product.
piracy causes harm to the concept of projected profits and "lost sales" which are neither rooted in reality nor coming from a well grounded expectation of success.
Being greedy causes all this entitlement to things that "could have happened"
It's absolutely not that fucking simple. There are so much of economics you are glossing over, and why basically all creators don't oppose piracy, just the labels, publishers, owners.. The meatheads..
You disagree that 0 purchases result in 0 revenue?
Please show your math on this
Yep I make games for instance, 0 revenue for my studio, publisher and owner and steam and yadda takes everything. Zero point zero dinaros for me.
What does your example studio being bad at making deals have to do with piracy exactly?
It just doesn't work like that. In any creative endeavours almost all income is investors that then own the product. Your salaries are speculation and if you get a commission you are very lucky and in the 1%
Its OK to admit you know nothing about it instead of bicker and gnab because you always know better as a professional guesser
The fact that you keep diverting from the question rather than answering says everything.
Please apply this concept to a self-published book and tell me again how piracy has no impact.
Right but it’s still not stealing any more than those little library boxes people put outside their residence
Depends. They certainly lose a potential sale from some people, but many people who pirate books never would have read it if they needed to pay for it. Be that because of a lack of money or a lack of interest. Same with games and shows. So no lost sales there.
You could even argue that pirating helps with sales by causing people who never would have read the book otherwise to discuss it with friends or strangers online. I personally think that argument is a big stretch, but it's not entirely wrong.
But yeah, more pirates should be willing to support authors of books they like. If you think they deserve it, buy the ebook even if you've already read the whole thing.
HBO knows the benefits of pirating. For many of their shows, they tend to be very lax about allowing trackers and streams for the first episode of a season, but then militantly take down everything for the second episode. Of course you can still find episode 2 if you know where to look, but the point is it's harder. They want people to view the first episode and get hooked, and then pay for a subscription when they can't find the next one.
OK, but there are barriers of entry to piracy. You have to be tech literate enough to know what to do, and you have to be on top of the latest developments to know where to even go to get the files... and you must have heard about the book from somewhere, presumably some people had to buy and read it first.
There will never be a text published with 100% piracy rate. It's a fantastical scenario.
Both points are true. Honestly, I pirate stuff wildly, but donate to the authors or buy their stuff and donate it to my local library if I like it enough.