I think it is ignorance to make excuses... this thread has outlined that people who weren't going to buy the product download a pirate version to now if pirated content didn't exist we basically wouldn't worry about high speed Internet. Do people actually believe this nonsense as self justification?
Do industries inflate figures? I have no doubt about it. Do people use stupid excuses to justify breaking the law? Yes they do it seems.
Piracy is illegal. Distributing pirated content is illegal. Downloading pirated content is illegal. If you get caught doing any of it, then quite honestly you deserve to be fined, infringed or given a sentence. Justification of the act puts you fairly and squarely in the box of denial.
Put yourself in the same position and take stock. If you put your heart and soul into a project and created something that was valuable (various terms define value), then would you be ok with anyone just copying it and disregarding your terms? This is different than willingly freely distributing something to begin with.
If the answer is Yes... then you really are in denial and should seek psychological help, because you're lying to yourself on an epic scale.
It's not quite that easy. For example, downloading in my country isn't illegal. Uploading is. Yes, that's weird in many ways, but it's still true.
Secondly, many series from America, get released on television here about a year (or longer, if at all) after they were released in America. DVD versions even longer. This means that if we want to follow these shows, we're forced to wait over a year for them, hope they'll actually be released here, that it will remain on television and at a reasonable time, to follow it. None of these are guaranteed. However, it is always available to download, and again, that is legal. So it's the perfect way to make it work, because even if we wanted to watch it in another way, we couldn't, until much later.
Thirdly, ever noticed how most things you can buy, have quality assurance, you can test them, and if it's not working properly, you return it? Well, with movies, games and to a lesser degree music and programs don't have that luxury. You can't really test a movie to see if you like it, and you don't often find out a game is total crap until you've bought it. A lot of companies release stuff just to quickly get some money, without actually trying to make a good game / movie / CD / whatever. In a normal market, for example if you bought a car, you'd test the product first, then decide to buy it, and if you find out half way that the makers didn't put any chairs in it, you go back to the shop to get it fixed. In a normal market, if the car was of a bad design, and missing key things like chairs and they wouldn't get fixed, the price would either drop like crazy, or it wouldn't be sold anymore. Ever noticed how none of this applies to any of the downloadable things? The price almost always stays high, and if you're not happy with it, too bad. There's often no or a very small return policy on these items, and often only for one day, or for a short while as long as you haven't actually opened the product.
If companies release good products, against acceptable prices, people will almost always buy it. As long as stuff like World of Warcraft and Diablo 3 sell millions of copies (and neither are even that good) you can't really argue that people are willing to spend money on it. If companies release crap products that are unfinished, against high prices, with loads of "anti piracy features" that only harass legal buyers and not the actual pirates, people will keep downloading stuff. And that may be illegal, but it's also the way people balance it out as the normal market system doesn't apply.
On a related note, ever noticed how legally bought movies always have at least 5 minutes worth of anti piracy warnings and advertisements, and games generally have some kind of anti piracy feature like always having to be online, having to keep putting the disk in, or even more annoying ones that actually cause problems playing it? Ever noticed how pirated copies of either don't have anything like that? Speaking of punishing the legal buyers... It happened in several games that legal buyers couldn't play the game (because of security, servers offline, other issues) while people that downloaded it could play it all they like without issues. Typical, isn't it?
