Bullshit. The film industry is boasting record profits, piracy has had a negligible effect on American jobs.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/piracy-once-...
The pirates aren't taking the money they would have spent on content and burning it. Instead, they're spending that money on something else. So it's not that jobs were lost, or even that the total GDP was reduced. It's simply that the money was spent elsewhere: it flowed into coffers other than those of the MPAA or the RIAA.
So at the very worst, from an economic perspective, the damage is that resource allocation is happening somewhat inefficiently, with money being directed to the consumer's second-higher priority relative to Content. There's no reason to think that in the big picture this is harming total employment or GDP any more than a thousand other inefficiencies that regulations have created in the market.
It also gets murky quick when you try to decide whether a job is destroyed, created, or moved.
So this was a lot of wasted time because first we'd need to agree on a methodology for measuring this stuff, and that's a hard thing to do.
MPAA
The Walt Disney Company 156,000
Time Warner 32,000
General Electric 287,000
Comcast 102,000
News Corporation 51,000
Viacom 10,900
Sony 168,200
RIAA Big 4
Citigroup (!) 260,000
Vivendi 54,560
Total: 1,121,660
If the same allegations were laid against any other industry in the United States like the automotive industry or Wall Street, there would be more indignation.