a look at the world of intellectual property theft

With all the talk of internet piracy and intellectual property theft, I think it's time to look at some theoretical scenarios that demonstrate just how complex the situation really is.

First off, the obvious topic of internet music piracy. The record companies like to suggest that every time a person illegally downloads an mp3 of one of their songs they're losing money. They're trying to equate it with theft of physical property.
That is clearly nonsense. I'm not defending piracy, not exactly, but it's not as simple as they're trying to make it seem.
I've heard of people who have pirated absurd amounts of music. I don't remember the number now, but I believe it was well above 10 or 20 gigabytes, possibly in the hundreds. This is a mind boggling amount of music, I honestly don't think I could find that much commercial music that I'd actually WANT to listen to.
But do you honestly believe that if piracy didn't exist such people would have purchased every single one of those CDs? Do you really think that people check to make sure they'd want to spend ten bucks or more on an album before they pirate it? Of course not, since it costs them nothing they can afford to download at will. As such any comparisons between what they're downloading and how much money the major labels are losing is utter nonsense.
On the other hand, of course some people will download music that they would have purchased if they had no way to pirate it. It does work both ways. But it's absurd to suggest that every pirated download is the same thing as stealing the same content.


Now for another far more interesting example. Let's take commercial software. In particular, let's use Adobe Photoshop as our example product. It retails for a cool $700.
Let's imagine that a theoretical individual has just purchased a point and shoot digital camera, and he's looking for software to process his digital images. There's no way he can afford $700 for such a function. He has other options, such as Paint Shop Pro for $100. But he wants to have Photoshop, since it's what all the pros use. So he pirates it.
Adobe would claim that they lost $700 in the process. But there was never any chance our theoretical individual would have payed that much, his digital camera cost less than half of that. He just wanted to play with the "professional level" tool.
In reality I think it could be argued that in such a situation the companies that produce the cheaper products have lost out. If piracy had not been an option the theoretical individual couldn't have purchased Photoshop, but he could have purchased Paint Shop Pro, or some other cheaper program.
Somehow I doubt you'll see Adobe complaining that people pirating their software are costing Corel (the distributors of Paint Shop Pro) money. They'll estimate the number of illegal copies in use worldwide and multiply that number by the absurd price tag they've attached to their product and claim that they've lost that amount through piracy, even though there's no chance that the pirates would have, or even COULD have, paid that much money.

I feel that our current legal concepts of intellectual property (which to some extent apply to software as well as music or movies) are inadequate in our digital world. I have no easy answers on how to reconcile the conflicts that are arising, but I just don't think that stubbornly sticking to the irrational claim that piracy is exactly the same as stealing physical property is realistic. I'm really not attempting to defend pirates either.. I'm just sick of seeing the comparison made between downloading a song and stealing a CD from a retail store.