So essentially, they aren't loosing money, they're just not making money?
And yeah OP, you may call it a CPU but many of us don't refer to it as a CPU.
Try Battlefield 3. It's an epic game and I've heard its hard to run pretty well, so
Think of it like a comic book store.
We pirate something like we would pick up a comic book and flip through it or read a few pages of it, then put it back. If we like it, we may buy it. If we don't, we've read some of it (oh poop, copy!) but we haven't bought it. We've at no point ever actually bought a copy (thus they haven't made a sale), but the availability of it to us has made it vastly more likely that they will make a sale.
Their claim is that the act of picking up a comic book and reading a page out of it should be synonymous with purchasing it. That's just outlandish.
Yes, I have a copy of X when I pirate it. No, I have not purchased it. No, I would not have purchased it. Now when I use X, I realize I like it. Now let's say the replay value is small so I don't actually want to buy X because I've played most of it. But I know this author made a really cool game, X, and I enjoyed it. Now steam has a sale, and that author has 4 other games up for reasonable prices ($5-10, not $60), and I now look at them (never would have before), and decide I want to buy 2 of them to play them. Bam, $10-$20 they would've never made had I been unable to pirate their software.
This is a valid analogy, too. I can go into a bookstore and take a book, sit down (they often have chairs/couches for this), and read it in a few sittings. I don't have to buy it, nor do I have to rent it or pay anything. I may not buy that book now because I've read it. But I may be intrigued at that author's future books because I enjoyed it. Therefore, that availability (the book store browsing === piracy) makes it more likely that I am going to buy something from them. But note, I never would have bought that book had it not been on the book shelf anyway, and me reading it hasn't changed that.
The whole "a downloaded copy = a lost sale" argument is completely broken and wrong.
