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.

>The idea in industry that pirated copies represent "lost sales" is wishful thinking.

The idea that _all_ pirated copies represent "lost sales" is wishful thinking.

But the idea that without piracy sales would be greater, sometimes substantially, because some pirated copies do represent "lost sales" is much more realistic though.

The idea that piracy helps audiences find and then buy the stuff they like, is also, for the most part, wishful thinking. Even for stuff one likes, once they have it in pirated form, they have little to no incentive to buy it (except a small niche wanting to "own the physical product" like a collector, which can sometimes be the case for music and games, but not software in general).

EU paid for report that concluded piracy isn’t harmful, tried to hide findings (thenextweb.com)

280 points by tchalla on Sept 21, 2017 | 59 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15305476

A few months ago there was a rather funny article in a French film magazine (cahier du cinéma). The director of a film school was complaining that his students obviously didn't know how to pirate films any more, so they couldn't get hold of classic films. So he found himself with a population of film students who had practically only seen blockbusters from the last ten years. They had tried to set up a media library with DVDs and Blu-ray discs, but with the disappearance of physical media and disc players, it was no longer working.

The director was quite bitter. The fight against piracy has therefore rendered auteur movies invisible and has only benefited Hollywood.