Piracy is generally bad for business. It can undermine sales of legitimate products, deprive a company of its valuable intellect

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问题     Piracy is generally bad for business. It can undermine sales of legitimate products, deprive a company of its valuable intellectual property and tarnish its brand.
    That principle is worth defending. Yet companies have to deal with the real world — and, despite the best efforts of companies, piracy has proved very hard to stop. Given that a certain amount of stealing is going to happen anyway, some companies are turning it to their advantage.
    For example, around 20 times as many music tracks are exchanged over the Internet on "peer to peer" file-sharing networks as are legitimately sold online or in shops. Statistics about the traffic on file-sharing networks can be useful. They can reveal, for example, the countries where a new singer is most popular, even before his album has been released there.
    In other industries, piracy can help to open up new markets. Officially, the software giant has taken a firm line against piracy. But unofficially, it admits that tolerating piracy of its products has given it huge market share and will boost revenues in the long term, because users stick with Microsoft’s products when they go legit. "It’s easier for our software to compete with Linux when there’s piracy than when there’s not," Microsoft’s chairman Bill Gates told Fortune magazine last year.
    Piracy can also be a source of innovation, if someone takes a product and then modifies it in a popular way. In a recent book, The Pirate’s Dilemma, Matt Mason gives the example of Nigo, a Japanese designer who took Air Force 1 trainers made by Nike, removed the famous "swoosh" logo, applied his own designs and then sold the resulting shoes in limited editions at $300 a pair under his own label, A Bathing Ape. Instead of suing Nigo, Nike realised that he had spotted a gap in the market. It took a stake in his firm and also launched its own premium "remixes" of its trainers.
    That this silver lining exists should not obscure the cloud. Most of the time, companies will decide to combat piracy of their products by sending in the lawyers with all guns blazing. And most of the time that is the right thing to do. But before they rush into action companies should check to see if there is a way for them to turn piracy to their advantage.
By this passage, the author intends to______.

选项 A、warn companies that they should be careful of piracy
B、persuade companies to make use of piracy as possible
C、say that piracy should be severely punished
D、point out that piracy has the right to exist

答案B

解析 文章从第2段就指出盗版屡禁不止,一些公司正开始利用盗版带来的好处;接着分别例证了几个盗版带来的好处;最后一段作者总结:盗版固然应该受罚,但公司在行动之前应当考虑一下是不是能把盗版转化为其优势。由此可以看出作者写此篇文章意在劝说公司尽可能利用盗版,使其成为优势。故B)正确。
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