Well, maclean, software is an odd business, just because there are no raw materials, and "unit price" is subject to different constraints from Ford trucks. To follow on from your example, once the company has decided to sell X units at Y price, assuming they do sell X units, then they hit the target. If, in addition to selling X units, Z units are stolen, the loss is not the same as if Z Ford trucks were stolen. The loss is actually only equal to the proportion of Z that would have been sales. Accounting practice in the software industry for the last 20 years has been to count that proportion always as 100%, irrespective of Y. This is obviously not the case. Neither is the proportion zero in normal cases. The proportion relates to Y, which is why I gave an absurdly high unit price in my previous post, to make the point clear. To sum up - the software industry does lose money to piracy, but historically has tended to exaggerate the real loss.