oh, absolutely. There are tons of studies on this, that piracy in the end is free PR much more than it is a straight up loss. The "2 download 0 1 lost sale" fiction is lobbied for by the publishers in courts, so courts use that fiction to calculate losses for the publisher, which increases penalties for those unfortunate souls who got picked up for it. It's widely known that these calculations are legal fictions, and BS.

SwearyDoctor

econ

Lyn Alden on pirating *Broken Money*

StillStackinAfterAllTheseYears

Oh yeah. I saw a midlist author years ago complain that he'd lost 10K book sales based on the torrent numbers he saw. As if all 10K folks who downloaded the book would ever have bought it. There were probably 20 folks like that, another 1000 who discovered his work from the torrent, and just under 9K who downloaded it and never read it at all because ebooks are tiny and it's easy to download a ton.