Sometimes I pirate media as a trial run. If a get a few chapters into a book or an hour or so into a game and decide I hate it then great, I didn’t waste my money. The flip side of this is I have to be honest with myself and shell out when I feel I’ve gotten enough out of the media. The nice thing is that I get to draw that line for myself rather than some third party arbitrarily telling me how long my trial should last.
This holds true for music, but what about other forms of media like books, games, and movies which don’t tend to see the same kind of revenue streams resulting from free advertising?
If I pirate a movie, for example, it might be because I didn’t want to go to the theater and now my wife and I can both not buy a ticket and watch from home. I guess I could see how some big studio games could benefit through merchandising in the long run but if your game doesn’t have merch or any other revenue streams then what?