Well, I noticed that the article seems to focus on music, but I'd like to talk about game pirating, since that's what most people will think of when they read the topic title.
Let's be not-stupid about this, and put it into perspective.
Let's say a game gets made that took years to make and cost a lot of money. It then costs more money to distribute it on several game consoles in stores across "the" country (whichever country that may be).
And then, nobody buys it. Ever.
Oh, they're playing it. They're loving it! But they're not BUYING it, because, SOMEHOW, everyone in the whole country pirated it. Thus, the company spent all the money to make the game, all the money to distribute it, gets zero dollars for making the game. Game stores don't make any money, but they spent money to get the games, so now the economy is crashing! Oh no! So nobody's making any money for a game that everybody is playing, but they spent all that money making it!
Now obviously there's no way that NOBODY would buy a game that EVERYONE loves, but I'm putting it into perspective to say that,
YEAH,
PIRATING IS A BAD THING.
Doesn't stop people like me from doing it but it hurts the company when people don't pay for the games they paid to make, and it hurts game stores, too.
But to hell with Gamestop. EB Games was better.
When it comes to music, I don't even care. I never buy albums because artists only ever make one good song and then every other song on the album is crap. Most of the songs I like are either singles or they come from video games or they come from artists that don't charge people to download the songs anyway.
