US government finally admits most piracy estimates are bogus
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
And there's a separate link to "Tell us how your life is affected by global trade - what it means for your job, your business, or your community." http://www.ustr.gov/about-us/press-office/share-your-story
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?
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?
This is only a single example (one datapoint does not a trend make), but..
http://torrentfreak.com/ink-the-movie-that-blew-up-on-bittor...
He made more money (and got significantly more exposure) out of it being pirated than he would have otherwise.
Film ticket sales have been relatively stable since 1995 and revenue has doubled in that time.
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...
(personally, I'd prefer settling numbers on this take, which does not require money changing hands: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1252512 )
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.
It also brings up interesting questions like, "What other purchases would they have forgone?"
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.'