Spanish Judge: Piracy Doesn't Always Affect Sales

An interesting piracy case in Spain revealed itself to be a breath of air for individuals involved in copyright infringement cases after the judge stated that it's impossible to determine the damages brought to sales by bootlegged software commercialization.

According to TechDirt, the judge dismissed the idea that an exact compensation sum can be determined on the assumption that a certain number of products would have been legally sold.

“It is not possible to determine the damage and corresponding compensation due to loss of benefits to the rightsholder, for the simple reason that customers of pirated copies of music and movies, when making the purchase of pirated copies, externalize their decision not to be customers of music and movies as originals, so there is no profit that could have been gained,” the judge said.

“In other words, those customers either buy a pirated copy at a low price or they don't buy an original at a price between 15 and 20 Euros.”

He believes that in some cases, certain artists can benefit from piracy acts as their fans might decide to legally purchase their materials, the pirated edition acting as sort of a demo.

“In any case, reversing the legal argument, it is conceivable that a customer, after hearing or viewing the pirated copy, may decide to purchase the original, finding it to their taste, so that the sale of pirated copies, far from harming, benefits the market for original items,” he concluded.

This is an interesting approach to the matter of copyright infringement. Maybe it's not so awful to download something as long as in the end you make sure the rightful owners or the creators of the content are rewarded accordingly.

In the meantime, remember that piracy is illegal and try to think about the effort people put into certain movies or songs before downloading them, or even worse, commercializing them.