Now It's The UK's Turn For Some Bogus Piracy Stats

[DeathKnell]

There are plenty of instances of misleading and otherwise bad stats being used by anti-piracy groups, like the recent BSA numbers from Canada that were basically made up. Now, a group from the UK is saying that piracy costs that country's economy tens of billions of pounds. It makes the same mistake as plenty of other studies before it: counting every instance of piracy, or perhaps even just the availability of copyrighted material on file-sharing networks, as a lost sale. It's fallacious to assume that every single person that downloads a piece of content, or simply has access to it for free, would pay for it if the free version wasn't available. Furthermore, any study like this that says an entire economy is being harmed by X amount of money because of piracy is pretty much bogus. This money that's supposedly being lost because of piracy isn't being lost by the economy, as undoubtedly it's being spent elsewhere. It's not being flushed down the toilet or turned into ether, it's just not ending up in content companies' bank accounts.

 

[Whoo]

I recently gave a pro-piracy lecture in my college

 

[Cesto]

I am not too sure how they can claim that they are loosing all this money, how to they know whats being downloaded and in what quantity? there is no way for sure they will ever be able to find out what is being lost. Although as your said, its not being lost, its just going elsewhere.

 

[H3x]

Funny how they moan about piracy costing them all this money yet their profits have sky rocketed past few years, in my opinion free file sharing is free promotion for Software, Games, Movies and Music and if i download something that is good ill go out and buy it.