The U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC) is being warned by some industry observers that the piracy figures provided by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) are unrealistically inflated.
Many have argued over these supposed lost revenue figures, since most copyright owners release reports calculating each unauthorized download as lost revenue. This assumption helps artificially inflate the monetary damage related to piracy.
"It seems a bit crazy to me to assume that someone who would pay some low amount for a pirated product would be the type of customer who'd pay some amount that's six or 10 that amount for a real one," said Frtiz Foley, Harvard University business school professor. "Be careful about using information the multinational [companies] provide you. I would imagine they have an incentive to make the losses seem very, very large."
I have to agree with Foley on this matter -- there is no doubt P2P piracy remains extremely popular, but it's going to be difficult to convince people not to do it if the numbers are so grossly reported.
The U.S. Senate Finance Committee has tasked some members of the USITC to help study what effect Chinese piracy has on the United States -- and how to create better ways to enforce intellectual rights in China. The BSA also estimates $51 billion in software piracy, and is concerned of growing piracy trends in Brazil, India and other developing markets.
PC users aren't much interested in the file sharing debate due to the questionable figures provided by copyright groups and attorneys. Japan's Computer Entertainment Suppliers Association (CESA) recently said handheld gaming has lost $41 billion in revenue since 2004.
In an ongoing legal battle between the RIAA and LimeWire, one lawyer said LimeWire is on the hook for $1.5 trillion -- the result of 200,000,000 counts of alleged music copyright infringement.
In another interesting case, pirated content in Spain, one of five pirate nations, is estimated at $6 billion in lost revenue over six months, IDC Research indicates.
Ironically, the most recent Cisco Visual Networking Index believes peer to peer file sharing traffic will double over the next four years.
It's unlikely the RIAA, MPAA and other groups will suddenly change the numbers they provide -- but this is the first major time they've been called out on their piracy numbers by respected University professors.
