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).

> The idea that piracy helps audiences find and then buy the stuff they like, is also, for the most part, wishful thinking.

You are thinking logically. Humans are NOT logical.

In some other countries, Politicians hold huge banquets right before election day. Lots of people eat at these banquets. They could go vote for someone else after eating the free food because it is a secret ballot. However, overwhelmingly those who got to eat the free food will vote for the people who reliably show up to feed them every election. Why? Because humans are not logical.

Same applies here. You'd think people have already gotten free books or music or whatever. But if they like something, they want to be a part of it. Even if they don't personally pay for it, If they really like it, they will share it with others. Who in turn will likely pay for it.

Also I remember something profound I read when I was younger. The opposite of love isn't hate, it is apathy. The fear for anything that is worthy of copyright isn't piracy, it is being irrelevant and forgotten, out of the zeitgeist. If piracy can keep something relevant, it is worth the cost.

Anecdotally, a pro-audio software company I worked with had to fire 1/3 of the company when their copy-protection was cracked and sales tanked immediately afterwards, and recovered once a new copy-protection scheme was developed and applied. And just to be clear, software licenses in direct-to-user sales are not that company's only revenue stream (they sell hardware and software to OEMs).

This is to say, the evidence in this natural experiment points towards piracy reducing sales by a lot.