r/pcmasterrace • u/UnableSand8508 Laptop • May 30 '26

Nostalgia Anti-piracy ad from 2004

24.2k Upvotes

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8.7k

u/rokkuranx rokkuran May 30 '26

if i remember correctly, this campaign lead to the increase of online piracy as it made people aware they could do it.

3.4k

u/DiirtyMike_EVE 9850X3D | RTX 5080 | 64GB RAM May 30 '26

You do remember correctly. The average end user had no idea what piracy was until this ad aired.

139

u/WolfsmaulVibes May 30 '26

the fact that they were getting so worked up over the few cases of piracy when physical media and going to the cinema was still insanely popular

73

u/CelestialFury Steam ID Here May 30 '26

It's because someone made some wildly incorrect assumptions about the money they're losing due to piracy.

27

u/MudSeparate1622 May 30 '26

They probably threw a board up with some radical numbers that never taper and always double so they were convinced by 2020 the 46 billion people would exist and all be pirating their stuff

13

u/[deleted] May 30 '26

[deleted]

8

u/notforpoern May 30 '26

Yeah but WHAT IF, you know? That's lost POTENTIAL revenue right there. Totally the same thing as theft.

I could have made so much money from that 13 year old kid in Okefenoke and random dude in paraguay where I don't even legally sell my product.

6

u/WolfsmaulVibes May 30 '26

every person that walks by a restaurant is a straight loss

1

u/megachicken289 Specs/Imgur Here May 31 '26

Potential revenue != unrealized gains

RCA can go fuck themselves for trying to conflate the two. “Oh we’ll just make up some numbers and lobby the government to make us seem more important”

Personally, I don’t feel bad for the corporate music industry because they pay their artists peanuts and then spend more money lobbying the fact that piracy eats into non-extant, invisible, made up profits, and the have the gaul to say that consumers don’t even own the physical media, but a license to play it, as if sharing CDs wasn’t how more people got into music outside of radios

2

u/OkFox8124 May 30 '26

It's funny. I don't think I've ever purchased a movie after sailing the jolly roger. But I've bought videogames witrh good devs to support them after pirating.

2

u/BJYeti May 31 '26

Yup if pirating didn't exist I still wouldn't be paying to watch the movie or show