> and thus nobody 'lost' anything

Every illegal download reduces the size of the legal purchase marketplace.

> I rbobby killed JFK and Hoffa and I did it all for the benjamins

Quotes are for referencing literal quotes of the parent post or at least quotes from the parent poster not to put words in others mouths.

> Every illegal download reduces the size of the legal purchase marketplace.

Source? Why wouldn't it be possible for every illegal download to increase the size of the legal purchase marketplace? Or to have it effectively stay the same for that matter?

Interestingly, there's a post on HN today about how someone made their copyright work (a book) free-gratis and sold more copies.

The effects are complicated and hard to measure, but in the Napster era some bands did find that piracy helped their sales. For small bands it definitely can help with promotion. Then there were megabands like Radiohead that put out free albums and cashed in on the publicity via ticket and merch sales.

The back catalog stuff (Rolling Stones etc) probably suffers although IMHO the copyright on this stuff should be much shorter anyway.

By that logic, I should be able to illegally download a movie, immediately delete it from my hard drive and then repeat this process as many times as I want to continuously shrink the size of the legal purchase market from my bedroom until it is zero.

One illegal download leading to a legal purchase proves this ridiculous statement wrong.

> Every illegal download reduces the size of the legal purchase marketplace.

There's never been a single study proving that illegal downloads harms legal sales.