"Piracy"

Piracy -- The Greatest Evil Ever!!

Or so the MPAA, RIAA and the BSA would have you believe.

However, there might be some good things that come out of piracy. A non-ordered, non-exhaustive list:

• Hardware Sales

If it wasn't for the MP3 music format, Napster and widespread music piracy, there would not be a market for MP3 players, DVD players, media-player enabled mobile phones.

• Reading habits
  

Pirated paperback copies of books are available for less than one-fifth the cost of the original, (pirated) e-books are available for free.

• Merchandise & Concert tickets
  

Ok the 'merchandise' part is dicey, but surely, a live concert experience can't be pirated!

• Skill building, and future sales

Photoshop! AutoCAD! A large number of Photoshop and AutoCAD professionals acquire their skills on pirated copies of the software. When these same users of pirated software reach corporate decision-making (or at least decision-influencing) positions, they usually choose what they are familiar with. Thus, piracy leads to legitimate sales. Microsoft too, understands and embraces this principle for its Windows and Office software.

• Spreading Culture
  

Check out this great video on how piracy helps spread culture!

(Author reserves the right to extend this post into something more coherent and organized at some point in the future. He was forced to post this post half-baked as it was holding back all the other super-awesome post ideas he had, because he accidentally and stupidly clicked "Publish" instead of "Save" when he first created a draft of this post, causing the title to show up in the "meta-feed" section. He then subsequently deleted the post but the link still existed and 404'd. (Well, not any more it won't.))

(Edit -- The link still 404s. Apparently I was supposed to post this in May. Well screw that.)