[0x49]

You are correct, it's not theft. It's counterfeiting, which is worse. If you steal a TV, it can be counted as a loss and the TV manufacturer can still sell TVs with little to no problems.

If enough people pirate, it changes the perceived value of a digital good to $0 or near $0 and will eventually put the person out of business. The big businesses can handle it just fine. The small companies are the ones you are hurting.

The app store, while not pirating, is a good example of this. Apps are no 99 cents. If you try to make an app more expensive than this, people generally will complain or not buy it at all. Why? Because the perceived value of an app is 99 cents.

It's very similar to the principals of currency.

[vezzy-fnord]

"Piracy" isn't counterfeit because pirates have no intention of defrauding or deceiving anyone (you're confusing them with bootleggers). Nor is the media they offer in any way a forgery. It's the authentic product, perhaps undergoing augmentation (i.e. to disable copy protection) or some lossy compression when transcoding video or audio. These are not equivalent to forgery.

[ge0rg]

> Apps are no 99 cents.

Anecdotal evidence here, but I have a successful app on Google Play (which is commonly viewed as a less-willing-to-pay audience) at 5$+, despite the fact that the app is FOSS and you can download the binary from the home page: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.aprsdroid....