[dale_glass]

> I wouldn't buy (and probably wouldn't afford) a 30-day stay at the most luxurious spa in my country, should I insist that they let me enter anyway?

That's tangible. You consume space, resources, people time, water, energy, etc. People have to clean after you.

For comparison, take the scenario of a 10 year old from a poor family pirating Solidworks, which costs $5000-ish a license. The family doesn't have $5000 in their bank account.

So there exist two possible outcomes of this situation:

A. Kid pirates Solidworks. Company makes $0.

B. Kid doesn't pirate Solidworks. Company makes $0, because it's impossible for them to buy it.

That's precisely why many such companies have huge educational discounts, and offer software for free to students sometimes, and sometimes ignore piracy in some areas. If you could eliminate piracy by non-engineering companies you wouldn't make much of a difference, because pretty much no hobbyist out there spends $5000 on software they might use just a bit. Rather than buying it, they'll make do with alternatives instead.

[curtisblaine]

> Kid doesn't pirate Solidworks. Company makes $0, because it's impossible for them to buy it.

I have this impression that "poor kid" vs "incredibly expensive software" is used as a strawman here, since we're talking of $30 books that anyone who's not incredibly poor can buy just by saving for a couple of months and anyone who's that poor can probably access using a public library anyway, versus the enormous amount of people that could afford those books, but see no incentive paying since they can pirate them for free without even going out of their house.

[dale_glass]

Obviously I'm using an exaggerated and artificial example to illustrate my point. Which is that it doesn't really work like actual theft. First, no cost is imposed on the producer of the software, because somebody torrenting an installer doesn't cost the company any money. And second, there are plenty situations where they never going to make any money no matter what.

Eg, back when I was 12 I did pirate software, and I didn't have the money to buy it if I wanted to. There was just no scenario under which those companies could have gotten paid. The alternative would be I'd just get my hands on something else, or mess around with the stuff I already had.

This even goes for things like $30 books. I grabbed a whole bunch of stuff just to take a look at what's it like. When pirating stuff a kid might grab an university book on biology out of curiosity to see how it compares to their high school lessons, but pretty much nobody actually buys books for reasons like that. The alternative reality is that it either doesn't happen or they check it out at a library instead, and again the publisher doesn't get any money.