Fantastic Anti-piracy Statement

[Bridge]

Translation:

Exactly. The ethical issues that arise from piracy are perfectly valid subjects for debate, which I encourage. But I despise conjecture being passed off as fact. Piracy is and never will be theft. If we are going to talk about piracy, let's talk about the ethical implications it has rather than the economic and legal implications, agreed?

I get that, but it's still not ok to pirate software, because the company will lose money that the pirated copy could have been sold instead, there's no two-way around that. "But hey! They don't lose just as much money as a real theft", no, but they still lose money.

Again, that is a fallacious statement. A sale has not occurred until one party receives a product in exchange for money. There is no way to prove that people who pirate something would have even bought the game in the first place. Moreover, a company is not entitled to the consumer's money. This is leading into an ethical debate, and there are certain laws about copyright infringement that state you cannot consume a commercial product without paying for it, but the general point is that a product is only bought after money has been paid for it. If it is not bought, and nothing irreplaceable has been taken, the company has technically not sold anything. How often do you hear companies moan about people not buying their products? It's a fact of life. From a marketing standpoint, the economic implications of piracy can be effectively ignored, because they do not offer any useful information. More useful is converting pirates into customers, which has nothing to do with any of that.