Is one month's piracy worth more than France's GDP?
A blogger multiplied the number of music downloads from ThePirateBay in a month by the $150,000 the RIAA asks for in statutory damages for each download and discovered that the music industry believes that one month's worth of downloads costs it more than the GDP of France.Link (via Digg)
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. I ran my program, and when I saw the results I was shocked! 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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Cory Doctorow
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