Is piracy that bad?
Hollywood claims it'll destroy an entire multi-billion dollar industry - But Hollywood got started in California because they were hiding out from Edison because they were pirating his camera technology. And Edison was making money selling pirate copies of 'The first men in the moon'.
America, a young country, was also infamous for never paying royalties on the inventions that they stole from older countries!
And now the USA is arguably the largest media producer in the world - If not quite the economic powerhouse they were ten years ago.
China is doing what the US did 150 years ago, and selling us cheap goods, bootstrapping their economy into the 21st century.
Authors and musicians who's efforts are regularly pirated paradoxically see increases in sales - Which the RIAA laments, even as they take 99% of the profits generated.
The Music industry has balked at every innovation in music - From music halls, to sheet music, to records and radio, through to tapes, CD burners and the internet, promising that at every step, this would definitively destroy not only the industry but actual music itself. And they have never failed to make a profit every time.
Adobe Photoshop is massively pirated - But the result is that now almost everyone who does graphics has experience in Photoshop and so it's the de-facto leader for image creation and manipulation, to the point where it's an officially recognised verb. Adobe has not declared bankruptcy.
And when all's said and done and the actual numbers are examined, the losses through piracy per year add up, in total, to roughly the profit of the Alvin & The Chipmunks movie - Less than $460,000,000.
Or to put it another way, approximately 1/800th of the advertising budget for the USA alone, which is roughly four hundred billion dollars. Roll that around your palate for a moment. Four hundred billion dollars. That’s a round trip to Mars with enough money left over to give every person in the US $330 to play with. And they’re worried because for every thousand dollars they spend on an advert, they lose one dollar of profit to piracy.
What's shocking is not that the figure is so low, but that the Chipmunks movie made so much!