Can people lose money to pirates? Sure. Do they? Not per the statistics gathered by the University of Minnesota's department of economic research!. Interestingly, more than 60% of the people who illegally download music, as per this two year study, went on to purchase it within the next 3-6 months. The margin was slightly less, but still over half, for more expensive software. Now, let's contrast this against another market commodity of significant value; exposure and product familiarity. If 1,000,000 people download your product illegally and 500,000 buy it as a result, you're better off than if only. 250,000 people had purchased it without that exposure. And don't think the savvy software firms are dumb to this. They'd rather have you pirating their software than a competitor's, for example. Why?. Because you are far more likely to buy what you're familiar with! The RIAA is just too dumb to flex with the changing times, plainly put...but I guarantee you that big software producers like Microsoft and Adobe aren't. But, go check it out for yourself. Microsoft and Adobe have both made a lot of their priorly protected products available for commendably long trial-period downloads, and that's only the beginning. Even game producers are starting to get wise to the reality of turning piracy into profit; look at all the demos available now and compare that to how many were available 5 years ago. Big difference, eh? Expect the brilliant marketers in the wor. to capitalize further on making good on the exposure and familiarity piracy hands them for free. Expect also for monkey businesses like the RIAA to have many more panic attacks before going the way of the dinosaur.

Bittorrent is by far the best and fastest way to distribute free software such as Linux ISO's. In fact, bittorrent helps support the open source community by offloading bandwidth from project servers onto those who are downloading software, saving these projects significant amounts of money.