
US government finally admits most piracy estimates are bogus - kmod
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/04/us-government-finally-admits-most-piracy-estimates-are-bogus.ars
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conanite
Will somebody please forward this to the ACTA negotiators?

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anamax
> Will somebody please forward this to the ACTA negotiators?

What makes you think that they haven't known the numbers for years?

More to the point, what makes you think that telling them the numbers will
change their position?

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yason
Telling them we know the numbers (or lack of them, really), too, might change
it.

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MichaelApproved
At the end of the article it says

the GAO also noted that numerous experts told it that "there were positive
effects [from piracy on the economy] and they should be assessed as well."

But it doesn't state any. Does anyone know what these positive effects might
be?

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lutorm
As noted above, if the pirated software does not represent a lost sale but is
used for something that is a net benefit to the economy, it's a positive
effect. And even if it does represent a lost sale, it still might be positive
if revenue is redirected from the movie industry and instead to something that
has a higher multiplier value like some more labor-intensive thing.

Clearly the assumption that it's all loss is ludicrous, the people who pirate
software or whatever probably are mostly in segment of society that already
use all their disposable income. If they couldn't pirate, they would either
forego it or redirect their spending from something else. Given that the net
savings rate of the US population, at least, is negative, it's not like people
are hoarding cash while pirating stuff...

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ableal
If I were the G.A.O., I'd be calculating income from taxing the "intellectual
property" that the state protects.

(personally, I'd prefer settling numbers on this take, which does not require
money changing hands: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1252512> )

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c00p3r
Assuming that each download is a spoiled sale is utterly wrong.

People download stuff from net because it cost them nothing, they have good
connectivity and the process runs in background. People share stuff because it
cost them nothing.

Sharing works only on flat-rate tariffs. That is the starting point.

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dhume
_Assuming that each download is a spoiled sale is utterly wrong._

It also brings up interesting questions like, "What other purchases would they
have forgone?"

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henrikschroder
That point always bothered me about the whole "our economy loses X billions
because of piracy". If people would have purchased everything they pirated,
then some industries would have gained those X billions, but the flipside to
that is that other industries would lose the same amount of money. So you
would create Y million jobs in the entertainment industry, but you'd lose Y
million jobs in other industries. Is that an acceptable trade? Probably not.

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netcan
It's an interesting place to dig though.

When someone pirates something he may otherwise have paid for, it isn't
necessarily a net loss in production. Imagine that one person pirates software
A, which he would have bought and spends the money on software B, which he
would not have bought. Now imagine another person does the reverse.

Same amount of money goes into these two software companies, twice as "much"
software comes out. There is a consumption benefit (that goes to the pirates).
If the pirates use that software to create more wealth, that is benefit
leaking back out into the rest of the economy.

Because of the way size is usually calculated (like volunteer work), we
wouldn't count that pirate as having gained anything. That is probably not the
right way of looking at things. Even if it is, it is very hard to say that
anything "cost the economy X.'

