According to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), they are losing a million bajillion dollars every day from media piracy, and it is killing their industry. See, they have all these figures that prove a pirated DVD costs them a million dollars per disc, and that downloading a thousand songs means they lose half of the planet’s GDP.
OK, so researchers have come along and shown that almost nobody actually commits media piracy on any meaningful scale, but so what? WE’RE LOSING A MILLION BAJILLION DOLLARS! It has to be the fault of pirates! It can’t be the free market!
According to a new report called “Copy Culture in the US and Germany,” run by actual objective professionals and not shills, though, the statistics are, well, this:
- 46 percent of all Americans have downloaded something illegally from the Internet, but most of those don’t do it to any significant degree.
- 2 percent of Americans have downloaded 1000 tracks or more illegally; only 1% have downloaded more than 100 TV shows or movies illegally.
- 46% in the survey said they illegally downloaded less often thanks to legal methods of listening to music, like legitimate downloads and streaming services.
- 40% of video pirates stopped completely thanks to Netflix.
- Only 16% of Americans think it’s OK to upload to file-sharing networks, 8% think posting pirated content to Facebook is acceptable, and only 6% think selling pirated media is acceptable.
We’d like to add a statistic of our own: 100% of MPAA and RIAA complaints about the Internet consist entirely of equine feces. Not that this study will stop them from demanding complete control of the Internet, but hopefully it’ll make Congress think twice.