Piracy losses fabricated
A draft Australian study is reported to show that the huge losses to piracy claimed by the music and software giants are spurious.
According to a draft report by the Australian Institute of Criminology, the music industry can’t explain how it arrives at its statistics for staggering losses through piracy. The Business Software Association’s claim of $361m per year in lost sales is “unverified and epistemologically unreliable”, the report says.
In other words, these statistics are made up. It has always seemed wrong to me that, for example, the software giants estimate their losses by simply multiplying the number of pirate copies they believe to exist by the shelf price – as though everyone who had a pirate copy would have bought one if only they hadn’t been so naughty. What studies there are suggest that the proportion of people running pirated software who would actually have bought the commercial product is small, well under 10% if memory serves.
pax et bonum
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