this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Once again for those who didn't know or forgot: just like with every other industry making the same complaint, when they say that it "costs billions", that's true in the exact same way as losing a random lottery ticket would cost me millions: completely hypothetically.
In their calculations, every person who watches an illegal stream would, had the stream not been available, pay their ridiculously high prices to watch legally rather than not watch at all.
In reality, the opposite is many times more common and it's frankly journalistic malpractice that mainstream media always just regurgitate that claim as if it was indisputably true.
Like with copaganda, they're covering for predatory practices, in this case charging much more than your target customers can afford and then using draconian measures against those providing an alternative solution that wouldn't have been necessary if the product had been reasonably priced.
So they are just reporting opportunity cost and the journalists are parroting the numbers.
Correct. Opportunity cost being a bunch of bullshit invented by rich people greedy for more, of course.
The key here is certainty.
They claim that everyone would have otherwise paid for a subscription to watch it legaly. But that is simply not true.
When you could buy either variation of pasta in the store, where there is hundreds of boxes stapled, so price and availability are certain, you can speak of opportunity costs.
But here the elasticity is extreme. Many people will not buy this if it costs anything at all. Most probably would, if there is one service with reasonable prices where they can watch everyting. Some people are probably not able to watch a legal stream at all, because it isnt licenced to their country.
I always call it Magic Math. There's so much of it when you start learning about investing/trading. "Buying calls has infinite potential for gains. Selling calls has infinite potential for losses." Like, yeah, that's mathematically true. But at the end of the day it's not practically true, you're just putting a lot of weight on what you could be getting instead of what you are getting.