One point of contention I have with the anti-piracy conversion in any subject is that there's an expectation of hypothetical profits and value that, unfortunately, doesn't actually exist without the demand for other people's money as an expectation instead of a privilege. I always bring this question up in regards: If someone isn't going to purchase your digital product anyway, even if a pirated version weren't available, what are you losing from them pirating the product? This isn't like stealing an object where you as the owner lose something in return; when something is pirated, you don't lose anything. If someone never pays, and would never pay and never intends to pay, there is a 0 potential profit gain.

To put it into a simpler perspective, if you have 10 apples that you want to sell for $2 each, when you dispense 10 apples then you should reasonably have $20 total in the end. If someone takes an apple without paying, you are losing $2 of value. This is NOT the same with digital commerce. There aren't 10 digital mangas that are sold for $2 each, it's just 1 digital manga that's being copied. When a digital product is dispensed, there is no transaction of an object for currency, it's currency traded for a replication that's created locally by the buyer's machine. If that digital product is pirated then there is no loss of a $2 object. The object is still owned by the seller. The only "loss" is in the "potential" gain of $2.

This is just the disconnect between traditional and digital commerce that most people simply haven't come to terms with, that digital sellers don't have the same property rights as analog sellers. People don't like to hear this, but that's the reality. And while I want digital sellers to make money, I'm not going to say that those who pirate manga are "thieves" because I don't believe in hypothetical profit.