This caught my eye, I,m sure we all have our own take on the subject.
http://torrentfreak.com/good-pirates-help-businesses-sell-more-product-080324/If you are downloading stuff you wouldn’t have bought in the first place, according to economist Karen Croxson, you are probably doing the company that created the product a big favor. You, Mr ‘Good’ Pirate, are telling your friends, adding to the media ‘buzz’ and driving up sales.
Imagine a situation in the future where Internet pirates are accepted - maybe even recruited - to replace expensive marketing and consumer awareness teams when bringing a product to market. Imagine the reward for the pirate was a free copy of the software/media he agrees to promote. According to an economist, it could be happening right now.
“Building a theoretical model of `promotional piracy’,” says Croxson, “it is possible to distinguish markets that are best advised to put considerable resource into safeguarding their products from others which may live quite comfortably with a higher incidence of digital piracy.”
Well I,ve been saying this for years, if you like something you found on P2P you dont mind going to seek out more of the same at the stores, after all 128k audio whilst deemed acceptable by the !plod generation is hardly acceptable to most p2p users ears and gives the artist something in return for their creativity, although we are talking here about the miniscule portion they obtain after the money-lending media corporations have extracted their multiple portions of revenue.
Word-of-mouth does indeed drive interest and real life sales, its nice to note someone has taken the time to document it at last.