Yes, but for me it’s just not worth the price that the official distribution channels are asking for it. If I didn’t have a free way to consume the content, I would skip it, and I wouldn’t lose anything by doing that. There is plenty of other content to consume, a lot of it legally for free.

What does this statement mean then? Why would you pirate something if you had no interest in it? If it’s interesting enough to download, it must have been worth something to you.

Sure. But it doesn’t mean it’s worth the asking price to me. Because I can’t negotiate on that price, my interest is effectively worth nothing to the company.

Let’s pretend for a minute that piracy wasn’t an option. In that scenario, I simply wouldn’t watch it. Therefore, there’s no potential that the company will get money from me, and there’s no opportunity for them to get money. Because there’s no opportunity, there’s no opportunity cost for the company to me pirating the content.

That’s what people are talking about when they talk about the company losing money to piracy. They’re talking about the unrealized potential income of people that would have paid for the content, but didn’t because they pirated it instead. The counterpoint to that is that there’s no way I’m going to pay for it. Therefore, there’s no unrealized potential income. They’re not out of anything by me pirating their company.

I’m not saying that piracy, as a general concept, results in zero losses for a company. There are people who would have paid to see a thing, who won’t thanks to piracy. I am saying that there is also a ton of stuff I would never pay to see, but would happily watch if it were free. Having some interest in a thing isn’t the same as being willing to pay for it.

Hell, there’s also stuff that I saw thanks to piracy that I wound up liking so much I went back and paid for a copy. In that sense, companies can make money through piracy. The point is that piracy isn’t taking something like theft is, it’s copying something.