“One Month of Torrents is Worth More Than The GDP of France”…

…says the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA). Well, sort of. Donny has calculated the real cost of piracy by comparing the number of downloads from www.thepiratebay.org and the money the RIAA claims to lose per download: $150.000. (At least that’s the amount they sue copyright infringers for in their lawsuits.) If the RIAA believe their own words, they believe that one month’s worth of downloads cost way more than the GDP of France.

The Real Cost of Piracy

The Copyright Act permits a copyright owner to claim $150,000 per infringement, and the RIAA has been using that figure when they’ve sued individuals…In January 2006, there were approximately 2370 music torrents posted. By estimating that each music file is 5 megs, we can estimate the number of infringements as the number of downloads multiplied by the estimated number of songs. … Using those figures, there were approximately 76,272,931 infringements caused by the torrents posted in January! Using the RIAA’s value of $150,000 per infringement, the total cost to the music industry was $11,440,939,650,000!
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