Z-Library Helps Students to Overcome Academic Poverty, Study Finds

At my first company out of University, we found our app was being distributed on "piracy" versions of the Play Store, with all the IAPs bypassed and given for free. We spent months cracking down on it, and the end result was bugs in our detection system negatively affected our users, and I believe we also introduced a crash which hurt our Play Store ranking.

I still remember having a meeting about it with the CEO, as we all collectively realized that blocking the free version of our app made no positive impact whatsoever.

The idea in industry that pirated copies represent "lost sales" is wishful thinking. The reality is, people who can afford to pay for media/apps/programs/books can and do; the people who pirate such digital goods overwhelmingly either cannot afford to purchase a legitimate copy, or simply wouldn't be interested in paying for it without knowing whether they'd like what they were getting, were a pirated copy not be available.

Additionally, not all pirates are the selfish monsters that MPAA, RIAA, and friends would have you believe: many pirates, including several I know personally, use pirated media as a preview, and go on to pay for the content they actually enjoyed, yet wouldn't have done so without the option to pirate to know whether or not the media is worth the asking price to begin with.

An MBA could be coaxed into admitting that in those cases, piracy actually creates sales that wouldn't have otherwise happened.

Should Apple be the only ones allowed to make money? You can't pirate Apple News, iCloud Storage, all sorts of services and conventional media they provide. You can't pirate App Store IAP. You don't have to make a single value judgement to see that the status quo - the only permissible action to take against piracy is to make unassailable DRM - is really just conceding that the fully vertically integrated platforms ought to own anything. Surely it's not good that only Apple is allowed to make money.

That's certainly the status quo. One remedy that comes immediately to mind is to simply ban vertically integrated platforms like that and forcibly break them up.