The pricing for something like adobe has become so far outside of reason that people will pay for the crack rather than the subscription as an example.Ġ.4% of Iphones are jailbroken. In my experience when I was younger I legitimately could not have gotten into graphic design and learned enough about it without the big name products.
Of course this can be broken, the same as DRM, but done right online features can become a core part of a software and make it so offline patches remove a significant enough amount of feature that it's not worth it. Instead of talking about DRM and how it is legitimately problematic I'd like to highlight that we can protect products without DRM and still sell them - it's why products have gone to online accounts for seemingly offline software. In my view we don't talk about product protection enough, and instead resort to dunking on DRM all the time. Piracy affects smaller companies far more than large ones, and that's where the discussion gets muddied. Many people pay for Office for their business because that is what they have used since their childhood- in a legal way or not.
Had Microsoft cracked down, then they would have lost tens of millions of future paying customers. Microsoft is fully aware of Windows piracy.
I believe that pirated content "converts" people into web series watchers, gamers, and more. I would have never even thought of paying for TV if I could not watch The Wire for free.
I turned into a subscriber after watching The Wire, The Sporanos, and Breaking Bad with a shared password (also a kind of piracy). They wouldn't have spent a dime on games if they hadn't played pirated GTA V. I have known a few people who spent their money for the first time on video games after playing the pirated version of GTA V. This opens individuals to newer media, newer niches, newer genres, and so on.
With piracy, people get to experience things for free that they otherwise wouldn't have. I think that piracy increases total spend in dollars. > My hypothesis is that piracy drops total spend in dollars The result would be that the amount a person spends on _total_ entertainment drops, but the drop would be in other categories than the category that is piratable. because piracy decreases the perceived value of an hour of entertainment, the person would be less willing to spend money in other categories as well and would rather fall back to cheaper options
instead of buying a book and reading it, they would watch a low-value movie they pirated, affecting book sales but not movie sales because piracy enables more consumption of some media than the person otherwise would have done, it means they have less leisure time available to spend on other media which they would have spent money on. This would fit and counter the oft-claimed "if I couldn't pirate this I wouldn't have bought it anyway, so it's not a lost sale". My hypothesis is that piracy drops total spend in dollars, but maybe not necessarily on the category that was pirated. I do wonder the effect it has on "total leisure time spend". The resulting equilibrium is thus frequently mis-understood as "failure" by armchair studio executives. If a copy protection lasts 3-4 months it's ideal, if it lasts a year it means they put too much effort into it and could have made more money by making a faster but weaker protection. After that it dwindles and after 6 months it's become long tail the studio has moved on unless it's an indie shop that plans to work on the same game for years. Most sales are within the first 3 months or so. They judge it by a standard of "it is never ever cracked" which games companies don't care about. That's why people outside the industry often think game copy protection doesn't work. For a large enough game with a stable and predictable enough sales curve, it's easy to work out lost sales, because the curves start high and rapidly decay to zero in any case. Piracy rates for PC games without DRM can approach 95% and they can see in their sales curves the huge drop that occurs when a working crack is released. Games companies have been reliably investing in DRM for 30 years and it's not because they're all idiots.