IPTAblog

Henry Blodget visits DVD pirates in Shanghai: Visiting the Pirate's Lair:

The expats explained that buying real DVDs wasn't an option, especially for the Chinese, because real DVDs cost 10 times more and weren't even available. (The TV producer claimed she knew of a store that carried them, but the others disputed this.) Fake DVDs, moreover, often were real DVDs: The same factories that produced and shipped real ones during the day produced and shipped fake ones at night.

This, of course, reveals one of the two fallacies in the media industry's assertion that file-sharing and DVD piracy are the same as 'stealing': Some of the supposed damages from 'lost sales' would never have been sales in the first place. The other fallacy is that the 'theft' of digital property is the same as the theft of physical property—which it isn't. When someone steals a physical product—a car, say, or a DVD from the shelves of Blockbuster—the owner has lost more than a potential sale; he or she has lost inventory. When someone buys a copy of a digital product, however, for which the owner of the copyright has paid nothing, the owner has lost only a potential sale. This doesn't make file-sharing or DVD piracy OK—there must be some way for producers and packagers to get paid—but it does explain, in part, why millions of people who would never shoplift are so eager to collect pirated DVDs.