fraserhutch said:
This argument never fails to annoy me - the artists you mention are in the top what, 5% of the industry? The vast majority of artists get hurt, and bad.
The same is true of the software industry.
Actually, in both cases, that's not really true.
The best way to get a lesser-known band into the spotlight is to give away music to anybody who will listen. For every person who pirates those songs, that's one person who probably had never heard of them before.
The same thing tends to happen with software, though most of this "piracy" is really just people abusing demo licenses. Eventually, many of these people buy the software. Most of those people are people who might never have heard of the software had they not found some link to "cool free software"....
The real question, then, is whether the gains from piracy outweigh the losses. Hard to say, really.
The other question that must be asked is whether those people would have bought the software had they not been able to pirate it. If the answer is "no", then you haven't lost a sale. You've just gained mindshare. The real question then becomes why the answer is "no".
If the answer is "no" because the software doesn't work well enough... well, you know what you need to to. If the answer is "no" because the software costs too much for what it does... again, the answer is obvious.
Most often, though, the reason that the answer is "no" is that your software costs too much in general (even if it seems reasonable given the complexity of the software). There are certain absolute maximum prices that most people are willing to pay for software. These vary according to the target audience. Most music software costs much more than those limits for that particular audience, so most software is pirated. Frankly, it's the fault of the corporate execs who are oblivious to the realities of the music market....
This brings me to two conclusions in these cases:
1. The software costs too much. If most of your market is saturated with pirated copies, you probably would have made much more money with a lower price. Try cutting the price in half.
2. Eventually, when those people find themselves able to afford the software (whether by fnding a better price or by finding a better source of revenue), most of them will come clean and buy it. For most people who aren't making money with the software, this never happens, and therein lies the problem. See solution for #1.
Just my $0.02.