On Piracy

Average subscription fan vs. average piracy enjoyer.

Research shows for the millionth, billionth, trillionth, quadrillionth, whateverillionth time that piracy doesn't equal a lost sale, and it's actually the opposite; cracking down on piracy is exactly what results in undesired outcomes. Yet despite all the efforts to wake them up to this reality, people against piracy (because it's "unethical") continue singlehandedly destroying the internet even harder than all governments combined have ever been able to do. Digital piracy isn't "theft," all one needs to do is compare it to the physical level; it's like buying a book and making multiple copies of it to redistribute it for free. Let's say you got a copy for free, is the book still there? Of course it is, you're not claiming ownership of it. "Downloading a car" will never be the equivalent of stealing it, and the copyright and DMCA laws are hurting consumers, pirates, creators, and sale revenue all alike while bringing benefit to the government elites (which is why you will never see pro-piracy laws).

First off, let's discuss why people even resort to piracy in the first place. The most common reason is that a creator's product (be it a game, book, manga, etc.) might be so good that fans can't wait to get their hands on it, but the problem is that they're unable to buy it (either poor or too young for a job). Pirating the content can be seen as a way to get an unofficial trial version so you get to see whether it's worth the support or not without being restricted, and thus the sale revenue would increase if the product is worth buying. Creators implementing anti-piracy measures (such as DRM, a literal malware) against these people won't magically make money needed to buy the product appear in their wallets, and it's better if left as is (DRM-free) so when (most of) those people get the money needed to buy the product at a later time, they'd happily buy it weeks, months, or years after having pirated it; even creators are waking up to that fact. For example, an indie game developer back in the good old days of The Pirate Bay uploaded a pirated copy of his game there, and from the next day onward his sales skyrocketed by 400% and that's because he knew full well that he made something awesome, and he understands that if you give people a way to try the full game out for free, they will give you money out of support:

Notch, the creator of Minecraft, giving someone on Twitter the green light to pirate his game then buy later.

Another reason people resort to piracy is that a shit product can be smelled from the very first public announcement, and the only people willing to buy your product (for archival purposes at least) will be the pirates since they do need to buy a copy in order to obtain it. Not a single consumer will otherwise want your product, so all your profit will come from the very people you're chasing away with pitchforks and burning sticks.

Yet another reason is that people pirate exactly because creators put so much effort into anti-piracy and installing malware into their devices (in order to make sure you didn't get the copy from 133x, RuTracker, or Nyaa), which at one point becomes such a pain the ass that people would naturally resort to piracy in order to get a DRM-free version that's easier to use, because nobody seriously pays for a product embedded with DRM spyware that would then wrongfully accuse him of piracy, locks him behind a serial code that might or might not even work because a keygen executable on someone else's computer might have guessed that code before he bought it (this happens a lot).

The final reason is censorship. For example, many people never expect or accept an increasingly exaggerated level of censorship (by the government) inside any game, so they may pirate uncensored versions for that reason and that's out of the question. A worse kind of censorship that only applies to software is that the product is limited to proprietary operating systems such as Windows and macOS (and even Android, iOS and consoles at some extent), and this is where the Linux/BSD people get mad and resort to emulation (WINE/Proton) instead of playing natively. However, DRM is the cancer that always gets in the way, and sometimes we see other measures being made to lock out users who have paid the full price for the game in question, so even though the Linux minority are the most willing to pay for software and donate to their developers in all of the operating system demographic, they're forced to resort to piracy because corporations apparently don't want money from people who care about their privacy.

At the end of the day, nobody can be stopped from running your products, and nobody likes restrictions. Real fans of your products are ready to pay, but once you get too hostile to them, they'll go away and find some other creator that's much nicer to them instead. Therefore (and aside from making actual content rather than quick cashgrab), if a creator really wants to make profit, then he needs to resort to these solutions:

1. Making the product free and open-source yet still providing a way to support the developers for profit.
2. Calming down on DRM and anti-piracy efforts just to catch a few pirates sailing amidst the seven seas of legit customers.
3. Supporting alternative operating systems (Linux/BSD) rather than blanket banning entire audiences.

Even though my position on piracy is extremely positive regarding media means through which entertainment and acquirement of knowledge is achieved (such as games, books, manga, anime, visual novels, etc.), I think that pirating means of productivity (i.e., software) should always be a last resort, because paid software is almost always proprietary, so that requires infesting one's computer with corporate proprietary crapware. There's always many free and open-source software alternatives on the other side of the coin (or even re-implementations of popular games) that, regardless that they may seem lacking in features to some people, are much more deserving of support.