And would they? Why are you assuming that pirate is a non-buyer? And have you read what I wrote? Are you really can’t see the problem in your logic, or are you intentionally ignorant because my statements are not to your liking, or because you have too much ego to admit that you are wrong? Just wondering.

Yeah, all your assertions are being disproven by the simple fact that a pirate could still buy the product. And a good pirate will buy the product if everything is to his liking.

Moreover, pirating is a more aggressive competing environment. What does it mean? Art evolution. If you are happened to be a pirate, you try products, and then finance them how ever you would like. It’s almost like a selection in agriculture. You like the sweet apples, but want them to be even sweetier? Select the sweetest of them, plant them, grow them, reiterate until you’re happy. Because now what y’all are planting are all the seeds you have, in a futile hope that the next time you will get lucky.

About all that “lost income” racket. To me it almost seems like a thoughtcrime: how can you detect if I thought something wrong, and in our case, how could you detect if I have copied your art? Is there a growing debt on your bank account? Because the key, the character feature of stealing, essential thing on why we call it a bad thing to do is that you, as the creator, lose a copy of your product. You don’t loose anything if someone pirating your product, quite the opposite — you get more recognition. And the more recognition you get, the more valuable your products are.

And back to the purchasing after pirating, even if the pirate won’t pay, even if we take the worst case scenario, where my point is all wrong, and pirating is stealing, who will be the income stolen from? The creator? Three times ha! It would be the corporation. Corporation has already paid the creators for their job, and the corps won’t dense their financing of the creator if his work made a huge success. Well, they could do it, but just a little compared to their income. And if the creator goes, they still have the income. So even now the creator won’t be harmed.

And once again about the social contract, because as far as I can see, you didn’t read my comment properly. Let’s check the more or less common definition of it, and put it in simple words: social contract is a consentive agreement on what you should do and what you shouldn’t. If there’s no penalty mentioned on what if someone don’t follow a rule, the only measure against them will be public disapproval, where banishment is the highest measure of one. In my social environment there is no penalty (judicial or by the crowd) nor public disapproval for piracy. I ask you once again, which social contract am I violating, my dear enlightened monarch? What is in social contract and what isn’t is defined by the current society you’re in. There’s nothing about piracy in mine.

I could also mention that most paid digital products have a free alternatives, and therefore their nominal value falls in the bottomless pit by the rules of economics. I could’ve again repeat about end user’s freedom to copy the product he paid for, and your inability to distinct whether he copied it for himself, or to share it with someone. I won’t cover the problematics of your logic in case if someone “illegally” uses legally obtained software by borrowing someone’s hardware on which the software is stored. My comment is already huge enough, and you haven’t shown any will to understand other one’s point. Just as it was in my analogy earlier, I plant this apple tree in a futile hope that this time it will grow. Why am I doing this? Maybe I just enjoy the gardening, lol.