Why Piracy is Supposedly Costing the Record Companies $2B/yr

And for the record (no pun intended) that figure they always come up with is irreparably flawed, because to get to that figure they had to assume that every single time a file is pirated, a sale was lost. This is flawed for several reasons

- People pirate when the original is too overpriced to buy

- People pirate when the original is unavailable

- People who buy buy it once and hold on to it, while people who pirate often delete the file after using it, and possibly download it again in the future.

- There is no feasible model that would ever have predicted that the "rightful" profits would be so high. Their actual profits have not changed much, whilst the quantity of files pirated is similar to the quantity of files bought.

This all suggests that the vast bulk of "pirated" files would not have otherwise resulted in sales. IMO the loss to the recording companies is probably less than $100M, and artists are pretty evenly divided over whether piracy has a net benefit for them. On the other hand, the benefit to society of being able to get files that are otherwise not available, that people once owned but lost, and the increase in variety of art people can now find, are much much more than $100M.