US Govt Admits Most Piracy Studies Are Nonsense (i.e. media companies whine too much)

US Government Admits Most Piracy Studies Are Nonsense
^{posted by Thom Holwerda on Wed 14th Apr 2010 11:50 UTC}

A major setback for those that claim piracy is having an adverse affect on the US economy: the US Government Accountability Office, who was tasked with reviewing the efforts to find out what, if any, impact piracy has on the US economy, has concluded that all of these studies - all of them - are bogus. Better yet - the GAO even goes as far as to say that piracy may have a positive effect on the economy.

Over the course of the years, we've been subjected to numerous doom and gloom studies from organisations like the MPAA, RIAA, and BSA, which contained figures supposedly coming from government sources. These reports would get widespread coverage in the media and would influence government policy regarding IP enforcement to a rather great degree.

Consequently, US Congress decided back in April 2009 to task the Government Accountability Office with investigating these reports to assess their validity. Released Monday, the report tears all of these reports to shreds, and I'm not overstating things here; the validity of each and every one of these reports is highly questionable, according to the GAO.

Of the three most often-cited studies, the GAO states that they "cannot be substantiated due to the absence of underlying studies. Each method (of measuring) has limitations, and most experts observed that it is difficult, if not impossible, to quantify the economy-wide impacts." They state that the oft-made assumption that each pirated product constitutes a lost sale is just an "assumption". Some figures used in the reports were attributed to the FBI, to which the FBI replied they have no records of said figures. Loosely translated: big content made them up.

Furthermore, the GAO even concludes that piracy may have a positive effect on the economy, for instance because it leaves consumers with more money to spend elsewhere. On top of that - and I personally believe this is a far more important aspect that gets deliberately neglected by the content industry - people may use illegal downloading to sample content. In other words, without such sampling, they would be buying less media, not more. (more at link

Some figures used in the reports were attributed to the FBI, to which the FBI replied they have no records of said figures. Loosely translated: big content made them up.