DOES PIRACY AFFECT THE SALES OF A PRODUCT-by Diego Barrinechea

Does piracy affect the sales of a product?

The other day I found myself searching through the internet, looking for some information about piracy and how it affects the sales of products like movies. I was having an argument with a friend about this, so I felt like I could write an essay about it.

Piracy by meaning, is the stealing of on-line content, so it sure is bad, but I won´t discuss that on this essay. I am talking about whether it really destroys some content like a TV series.

If you steal something, you don´t buy it, so you don´t pay for it, right?

Well yes, that´s what happens when you steal, therefor, piracy should ruin the people who write books, make TV series, videogames and so it goes…

Well in a lot of cases, piracy actually makes the sales of a product go higher, this happened with Game of Thrones, which is the most pirated TV series ever, the director of Game of Thrones himself said that piracy doesn´t make them obtain less money, it makes them obtain more money instead. This might sound weird, that´s why I will try to explain it.

Most people pirate because they don´t have enough money so they can´t buy whatever they want or just because they literally can´t buy a product in their own country. This means that the people who pirate some content are the people who would never buy that kind of content, therefore piracy is not less sale as some people say.

Now imagine that someone like a teenager, who doesn´t have much money, pirates a movie which he wasn´t planning to buy. He downloads it for free and he really likes it, so after a few days he decides to buy it. That is one sale that was made thanks to the fact that he was able to watch it for free, and that´s something that in another situation he would have not been able to do.

My humble opinion is that piracy is bad, but it doesn´t destroy some products as some people say, and for some people it's a way to discover new products.