An interesting psychological effect: Diffusion of responsibility, in reverse. If, in a situation where individual contribution to an act is miniscule, no one is to "blame" for making something negative, then no one is also to reward if the result is positive. If a big company creates value, no one individually created that value in any meaningful way, so the value is psychologically "ownerless."

Is this an actual effect? I feel like doing an experiment.

I wouldn't say its necessarily so, take Microsoft - its a corporation with thousands of employees that work on its products, but how many people hold Gates personally responsible for the failings of Windows?

This example is a fairly mainstream idea... it made an appearance in the South Park movie.

Blame human psychology. Jeff knows it's harder to pirate from "the little guys" so he plays on guilt. I'm sure most pirates are open to rational arguments though.

It's very simple: for bigger company piracy is more like a form of advertising, but for a small one it can actually hurt and kill the small guys.

Cory Doctorow is one of the most copyright reform-advocacy-minded people around, and he makes the opposite claim: [paraphrased] "the problem for independent artists isn't piracy, it's obscurity."

If A is the set of people that've heard of your product sans piracy, and B is the people that've heard of it after piracy, then the gap between B' that pirates and B had better be smaller than the gap between A and B. That's likelier for a tiny producer than a huge one.