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Comment by magduf | Hacker News Reader

>> The pay-TV industry is projected to lose $6.6 billion in revenue from password sharing and piracy this year, according to Parks Associates. By 2024, the number could grow to $9 billion, the research firm said.

>BULLSHIT, we heard this SAME argument about piracy. Piracy/Account sharing DO NOT equal a 100% loss in sales.

The software, music, and video industries have been posting enormous "losses" in the billions like this for a few decades now. If they were really losing that much money, they would have all been out of business by now. Instead, last I checked, most of them are more profitable than ever.

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I think I know the point you are making, but...

They use that number to put political pressure on the DoJ, FBI, and DHS to enforce their IP ownership claims. I get that 100% of their claimed loss would never be 100% of a potential revenue, but AFAIK there is no standard alternative way to calculate those "losses". From what I know, all companies use the same method when describing losses/damages due to hack/cyberattack.

>but AFAIK there is no standard alternative way to calculate those "losses"

This isn't the problem at all. The problem is that they're calling them "losses", when they aren't losses at all. "Lose" is a plain English word with a very specific meaning: it means you no longer have something that you used to have. These companies never, ever "lost" anything at all due to "piracy". You can't use the word to describe "something you don't have, and never had at all, but which you should have"; it doesn't work that way.

If they used a different term, such as "unrealized revenue", then we probably wouldn't be having this discussion.

> it means you no longer have something that you used to have

No it doesn't. It means you lost out on potential revenues because someone decided not to pay for it. That's a loss. If people are consuming your content and not paying you for it, you're losing something in the transaction.

Or... Someone would have just watched something else that was free. It seems to me that actually they're getting free publicity

> It seems to me that actually they're getting free publicity

This is ridiculous. There's a subreddit choosingbeggars that's FILLED with people asking for free art for "publicity". It's insulting to content creators to hear this silly shtick.

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