Here a little thought-experiment for our friends who seem to be unable or unwilling to see bigger pictures:
The average western pirate (numbers of course pulled out of my ass, but accurate numbers are pretty irrelevant here anyway):
He has 500$ disposable income per month.
He pirates 3 games, 5 movies, 5 albums per month. At 50$ per game, 15$ per movie and 15$ per album that's a total of 300$. Since he does have enough disposable income to pay for that, that constitutes "losses" of upt to 300$ for the media industry, right?
Wrong.
One shouldn't ignore what happens to the disposable income in (this imagined) reality. On average a normal westener saves 10% of his disposable income and spends the rest (Read that figure last week. Seems realistical. Even if it's wrong, savings usually get spent at some point, for houses, cars, healthcare, etc. Apart from the "1%" people rarely inherit 10% of the lifetime average disposable income of their parents. But I'm getting carried away.) So lets say 450$ of the 500$ actually do get spent.
Surveys say that the average pirate consumes lots of media, lots for which he actually does pay (and I know no pirate who doesn't buy media). So for our experiment our imaginary pirate buys 1 game, 2 movies and 1 album per month. 95$ spent on media, the rest 355$ he spends on booze and hookers or other luxury articles.
The point is, even if piracy were magically removed from the picture, and even if that lead to more sales of previously pirated games, the disposable income wouldn't rise, it'd still be 500$.
Lets say he spends 150$ on media once piracy is no option anymore. That'd be an increase of 55$ per month for the media-industry. It'd also be a loss of 55$ per month for other industries. In this joking example the poor hookers (they are only trying to feed their family) and the booze industry (they only try to make people happy).
Pirates need to be made aware that their choices of what to spend money on affect their options in the future. (Far more important and probably far more effective than trying to villify them.) But when it's a simple choice between EA gets my money for some shitty 10 hour long over-the-hip-shooter or some hooker gets my money for a blowjob I don't see why I should side with EA.
EDIT:
*g*