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Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
I may be missing critical details, but as far as I know, there are no "peer-reviewed" studies on the subject. If you're familiar with any, please feel free to link them.
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Which was precisely my point, you keep throwing out numbers as facts, when there is no credible basis for these numbers. I don't have any peer reviewed studies of my own, but I'm not quantifying losses or claiming precision in those losses.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
Possibly the closest thing is the GAO study from last April ( http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d10423.pdf). So, do you plan to blast a report by the United States Government Accounting Office (the independent non-partisan research department of Congress) as biased, before or after you read it?  |
Hey, what can I say, if I read an introduction, or abstract as they called in at Uni, and it smacks of poor procedure or bias, I write off the rest of the lengthy document without wasting my time. That said, I'm working through the IFPI report whenever I have a minute or two.
On page 13, it states that in 2004 digital was 2% of revenue at 420 million. In 2010, 29% at 4.6 billion. Well, 420/0.02 = 21,000, or 21 billion. 4.6/.29 = 15.86 billion. Huh? but on page 5 they say they've experienced a 31% decrease overall. That, from 21 billion, would equal 14.49 billion. Where'd that extra billion go?
Mainly what I'm looking for is a methodology, which I haven't come across in the IFPI report as of yet. Page 16 says "Digital Piracy - Counting the Costs", yet doesn't tell me HOW they count them?
For the GAO, forgive me, but it doesn't appear to deal with digital goods. They specifically mention substitution of counterfeit goods for legitimate goods, which leans towards physical items. Additionally, they often speak of pharmaceuticals. Here, I'll quote one passage for you:
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Originally Posted by GAO
According to experts we spoke with and literature we reviewed,
estimating the economic impact of IP infringements is extremely difficult,
and assumptions must be used due to the absence of data. Assumptions,
such as the rate at which consumers would substitute counterfeit goods
for legitimate products, can have enormous impacts on the resulting
estimates and heighten the importance of transparency. Because of the
significant differences in types of counterfeit and pirated goods and
industries involved, no single method can be used to develop estimates,
and each method has limitations. Nonetheless, research in specific
industries suggest that the problem is sizeable. Most experts we spoke
with and the literature we reviewed observed that despite significant efforts, it is difficult, if not impossible, to quantify the net effect of
counterfeiting and piracy on the economy as a whole.
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Emphasize mine. So, still not what we're looking for.
As far as numbers, I'll throw out a few of my own. There's a popular music tracker out there, one of many, which has according to their stats page, 96,047 FLAC torrents with seeders. Run the same search for MP3, and you get 192,207. However, that includes all bitrates for MP3s, so if you use a conservative factor of 2, leaving you with 96,103. Does that suggest that enthusiasts might care about the quality of their tunes?
Run a less fine grained search at the Bay, and you get approx 1,000 (that's what it says) for "flac", and 975 for "mp3". That's before you reduce the MP3s by any factor.
I don't currently have time to read more, but I'll attempt to get around to it since so many others seem to believe in the report