"Your business model is not the same as mine or PhilC's. PhilC, myself, Sixus1 and others have generated revenue to support one or (many) more people doing this professionally, and have done so for many years now. Other content professionals do the same.

Our creation of content is exactly the same as R&D in any market. We acquire tools, and there is a cost of production. There are often, but not always, salaries and taxes paid, and these are no more subjective than a company estimating salaries (if you take it seriously). ......"

Lovely..Bloody Good for You.

As I stated earlier,  these Hyperbolic claims of "Millions lost to Piracy",even in your business model, are subject to endlessly debable semantics

"There are often, but not always, salaries and taxes paid,"

But Alas,under the current western Economic system our "losses" to "piracy" are not Claimable to any insurance underwriter or IRS tax Deduction.

 

(as in the hypothetical Case of the hijacked shipping container

of Apple ipads would be)

That IMHO makes such  Dollar amount Claims Illusory at best.

Best wishes

I am not disagreeing that its really hard to assign a number to losses.  There's no telling how many people downloading a pirated product would actually have paid for it. Collecting data just for the downloads themselves is herculean, but some really huge numbers can still be estimated depending on server data, and a creators pricing can be assigned to those downloads, even if the downloader never would have paid for it. And if there are a million downloads at $1 each based on USSRP - you took it, you pay full price for it reasoning - easily $1 million (PhilC's prices not used here).

But here's the inherent problem with your response and reasoning, which I have seen many, many times. Since the actual amount of harm caused is extremely hard to calculate, that is then used in the argument that losses are not actual at all because they cannot be easily quantified. And then that fuels the argument of the actual "cost" of the product vs penalties that are vastly bigger.

On the face of it, suing some kid for $250,000 for a $20 download seems absurd. But this is a "death by millions of cuts" problem rather than a one time beheading, and the associated use of that may have a different value entirely. This sort of semi-mythic numbers association is nothing new legally, its just really unfortunate that the industry is driven to it for lack of enforcement and weak laws.

The software industry has been suffering from this for a long time. The more peripheral a product is, more likely for a single project or a one time use, the more likely typical payers are to consider pirating something. It used to be for example, that most pro artists were happy to pay for their photoshop license, but then they'd consider pirating a plugin because "they only need it this one time".

The software industry has a partial solution (it also solves the software maturation problem)  that we content folks don't have - the subscription model. I completely hate it. But if the software can be turned off remotely, like a service, then they have the opportunity to enforce licensing. With the direction both Poser & DS are going with interactive downloads of content in their software, its possible we'll see that as well for content. That's less control over what we buy for everyone.

Just ignoring it means more controls over what we do on our computers are coming - they are already here in fact.

Best regards,

chikako
Meshbox Design | 3D Models You Want