Notes on “Does software piracy exist?: Matthew Butterick”

But what is the optimal level of soft­ware piracy?

The naive answer is zero. But consider that there are only two fool­proof ways to prevent soft­ware piracy. The first is to never release the soft­ware at all—silly but effec­tive—in which case revenue is $0. The second is to permit the work to be freely copied and redis­trib­uted—say, under an open-source license, which condones the other­wise pirat­ical behavior—in which case revenue is also $0. But at both ends of this continuum, revenue is $0. So the maximum revenue happens in the middle, where some amount of piracy occurs. There­fore, the optimal level of piracy is greater than zero.