Ah, but your feet message scenario is entirely different. For the cable company, the marginal cost for the person using the cable service without paying is essentially zero. I do agree that they have a right to be pissed (and I think cable theft is immoral), but it is definitely misleading to state the cable companies are losing $6 billion due to theft. Same goes for the music and software industries.
Let me clarify here:
I’m not saying piracy is ok, or even that compaines don’t lose money over it. What I am saying is that these companies shouldn’t be claiming billions of dollars in lost revenue because of it. They are assuming that each and every instance of theft is a lost sale, and that’s simply not true. I’ve copied countless software titles since back in the Atari 800XL days, and of those I would have only paid for a very small percentage if I could not have gotten it for free. Of course there is a certain percentage of people out there that are copying what they would be buying if it could not be had for free, but my stance is that this is a MUCH smaller number than the industries claims.
What cable company are you on? My cousin actually did a few of these kinds of commercials, but we have a different company so we never get to see them.
Actually I used 6.6 billion as they said up top and not million. However, your numbers here seem to be more realistic, I got around 0.6%. I can see around a half percet of people stealing cable, but not 6% or more.