If you stole 1 game, then another person did the same, then a million others did, and the game costs $1.00... that dev's lost out on $700,000.
Before I begin, I'll reiterate
MY position is to support art I like and artists I like. The
copying aspect is meaningless to me since the act itself is just shuffling bits of ones and zeroes around and trying to equate
THAT to breaking into someone's house and taking their television is just utterly absurd. Stealing is stealing and copying is copying. The former is always wrong. The latter happens every time you boot your computer whether you know it or not. In fact, just thinking about a song you heard on the radio is pretty much playing back a copy your brain AUTOMATICALLY stored in your head (can they sue me for that too?). You can't un-hear something. God designed my brain to RECORD EVERYTHING so I could
technically even make a case that God is 100% for copying information since he designed a brain that does it constantly. But the real QUESTION is whether intellectual ideas that get converted into stored data (i.e. ART) is worth supporting or not and I say YES, it is. But it can't all be supported so I support art I actually LIKE. And if I don't like it, I don't generally watch/listen to it so I find myself in line with copyright law most of the time without even trying.
But the idea that
every copy of something like a game or even an album is a lost sale is really a fallacy because it's
ONLY true
IF those same people would have bought the game if they could have not have gotten a pirated copy but that is obviously
NOT always the case (probably not most of the time). In other words, what you'll take for free is different for what you're willing to pay for. People who copies Commodore C64 games at users groups weren't too picky on what they copied. They had no idea what games were good and what weren't until they got home. To say each game they copied was a lost sale is absurd. They wouldn't have bought a fraction of those games if there wasn't a user group and that's were these statistics from the record industry, etc. are WAY OFF.
IMO, it's far more important to stress ethical concerns (i.e. pay for what you actually like/enjoy because you should support artists you like) rather than some strict idea of what you can and cannot preview since it becomes utter absurdity when you get to library comparisons or hearing an album in a friend's car or house, etc. It's illegal to preview a song by downloading it, but legal to hear the same song on the radio or in your friend's car? WTF is the DIFFERENCE!?!? THERE IS NONE and that's why the laws are ridiculous to treat the same as a law against theft since they are not remotely the same thing no matter how much you pretend they are. No goods are missing. It's legal to watch/listen to the same material at
Place A but not
Place B??? WTF?! It's therefore reduced to pointlessness and that's why it's rarely enforced.
You'd do FAR better to get the
ethical idea across to people to support artists they like or those artists won't bother anymore. THAT at least makes logical AND ethical sense and more importantly, it's deals with the SOURCE of the issue which is convincing people to SUPPORT ART. Putting tons of DRM on video games just cheeses off the people who legitimately bought the software while the pirated stuff has all the DRM wiped out so who are these people REALLY hurting???)
Another basic problem is that current laws don't recognize the digital age and allow for ridiculous ease of data transfer (and yet they recognize libraries letting you watch/listen to the SAME art for free so it's absurd). Besides, copyright lengths are far too long for media with very short shelf lives like arcade games that have mostly long since been abandoned and without projects like MAME to preserve those games, they'd eventually be lost as their circuit boards all degraded and failed or were thrown into a landfill. Like old music and books, they had their time. Unlike them, there are only a few nostalgics that still want to play a game a game like Armor Attack or Dig Dug 2.
Even stranger, whether you've even committed a "crime" or not depends on WHEN you do it. If I copy a tv show to watch and later delete it (i.e. time-shifting) it's "fair use" (despite the fact I recorded and therefore COPIED the digital bits). If I copy Beethoven's music and even sell it, it's not a crime. If I copy Lady Gaga, it is a crime. But if I take a lamp out of someone's house, it's still illegal even if it's 300 years old and yet people like
you want to say copying is THEFT. No, copying is copying. How wrong it is depends on whom you ask. I personally think it's an ethical matter, not a physical crime. You support art you like because you'd want someone to support your art in that position too if they liked it.
I'm a music artist too with a copyright on an album of rock music so it's not like I have nothing to lose by saying such things. But I have no issue with someone hearing my album for free. It's art. It's meant to be heard. It's on Spotify so it might as well be free anyway. If people like it and want to support me as a music artist, they can buy a copy off iTunes, Amazon, etc. But I'd be a total hypocrite to act like Metallica did with Napster. All they did is piss off potential fans that having heard their music might come and pay big money to hear them play and in the process they looked like a bunch of greedy SOBS (i.e. they're not starving artists or anything so it only came across as pure greed). I lost a lot of respect for them because of that (as if they never listened to music at a friend's house or taped something off the radio in their entire lives).
Ultimately, what is needed are better laws and better education and in some cases better understanding from all involved. But what we get instead are people like yourself yelling THIEF and thus driving those that disagree with you even further away from your position.
Of course someone isn't entitled to income by mere virtue of creating something.