Is The Entertainment Industry Doing Itself Any Favors With Ridiculous Loss Claims?
from the doubtful dept
The entertainment industry is famous for its bogus stats, claiming massive losses from things like file sharing. However, when those reports are looked at by any credible source, it's not hard to realize they're totally bogus. This also comes up in various lawsuits. For example, a Russian torrent tracker was shut down, and the operators of the site are now being accused of causing $1.25 billion (with a b) in losses for the movie industry. This is substantiated by... well... absolutely nothing other than movie studios insisting that it's true. I'm curious as to why they do this, because when they put forth such unbelievable numbers, it seems like they're only hurting themselves. No one believes that such numbers are even close to true and it just makes it that much more difficult to take them seriously. Then again, maybe they're just using some Hollywood accounting to figure out those losses...Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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No one owes you a monopoly on anything and so copyright infringement isn't morally wrong apart from the law.
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Point out an article where Mike and/or regular commenters you regularly attack have actually said this, please. Otherwise, that strawman you keep attacking just keeps looking shabbier.
Piracy does cause losses, it just cannot be combated with lawsuits and doesn't cause anywhere near the losses the industry claims.
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I'm sure there's still a net loss, but nothing that couldn't be recouped through clever business tactics instead of lawsuits.
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Now, that may suck for you as an ice cream shop owner, but you cannot reasonably claim that everyone that takes the free ice cream would have bought yours. Especially once word of mouth spreads, lots of people that would normally not have bought ice cream would be showing up.
Will you lose ice cream profits? Yup. Did the price of your ice cream just drop to zero? Yes again. Is it valueless? Of course not. Can you come up with creative ways to utilize the popularity of your (now free) ice cream? I hope so, because if you do not, someone smarter will and you will be working at Wendy's lamenting the days when you didn't have to wear the stupid hat.
That's free enterprise. It seems completely unfair when you cannot figure out how to benefit from it.
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Good one, TAM.
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