China piracy cost U.S. firms $48 billion in 2009

reuters.com

5 pointsorijing2 comments

It always strikes me as overly audacious when anybody makes a quantitative claim about how much piracy costs, as if they know how many people would have paid, had pirated alternatives been unavailable, and the benefits of viral marketing.

Also: "It also concluded 2.1 million jobs could be created in the United States if China complied with its current international obligations to protect and enforce intellectual property rights."

Really?

Yep. There are way too many other factors. Many people who pirate may never have considered paying for the material in the first place, and pricing would probably be quite different if piracy wasn't ever an option.

This is just more finger pointing from big corporations trying to blame consumers for all their woes. While movies aren't quite the same as software in general, they should take the hint from Netflix success that there is a legitimate problem on the supply side when much of what is watched on Netflix is easily pirated via upload sites and torrents.

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