Re:'Encouraged Piracy' (Score 3, Interesting)

There's also a long-standing notion that piracy is good for the business. In an odd twist, tacitly allowing people to watch pirated TV is a way to gain market share, since many pirates eventually give in and convert to paying customers.

I hadn't expected to hear that on MSNBC. In fact, I'm led to wonder if the 'higher ups' even know of this policy.

Of course they do. Back a few years ago when there were three office application suites that all had a decent market share for PC's (being WordPerfect, Lotus and MSOffice), Micro$oft released it's Office97 suite, and also offered $5-$10 try out that were nearly identical to the full suite, with exception of a 90-day expiration. This expiration was extremely easy for crackers to break (I believe as simple as altering a single byte), and downloadable patches were on the Internet within a day of the Office97 release.

This cheap way to obtain the full suite for a few dollars, rather than paying for the more expensive and better protected competitors suites destroyed their market shares and in a matter of months Micro$oft have over 95% of all office application users utilizing their own software. By the '2000' release of their office suite, the copy protection was now nearly uncrackable, but they'd already secured their monopoly. Users, no longer trained in other suites, were stuck in using whatever Micro$oft provided.

The MS part of MSNBC knows all to well the value of piracy in gaining initial pirated users who become paying customers later.