Piracy, How much money is being lost, and what percent of them would have bought it?

[Mancora]

There have been a fair amount of threads touching on piracy lately. Though looking back i cant say whats been talked about or even really settled on as they seem to bounce all over every subject.

As this thread is titled blah how much money is lost from piracy, lets keep it to that. No legal arguments, and no word definition arguments please. I mean stuff like whether it is stealing, theft, piracy, warez, or copyright infringment, thats already been beaten to a bloody pulp in other threads and will only serve to get this thread OT.


I found a few sources for the money lost, but not much of a critique on that. The critique's are important because its the main without it there is no counter point, there is only one group talking at the table. And its understandable to me that someone would want to pass on the blame and increase the estimated amount of pirates, and not do adjustments for the much hard to messure amount of people that would not have bought it in the first place so they can create a bigger threat and as such get more funding for this.

The one i found didnt offer much except some numbers he pulled out of his ***, is there anyway we can get a better estimation of the number of pirates that didnt really "pirate?"



Group: Piracy Costs Software Industry $29 Billion This is software in general, and on a worldwide basis. Interestingly according to this china has a massive amount of piracy at around %95, and the US is at 22%.

The study was done by researchers at IDC for the Business Software Alliance, which includes Microsoft, Apple, Borland, Sybase, Symantec and Veritas. IDC researchers looked at business applications, operating systems, consumer software and local market software. IDC used its own worldwide data for software and hardware shipments and conducted more than 5,600 interviews in 15 countries.

...

The United States was both the best and the worst when it came to piracy, according to the study. By percentage, the United States led all countries with a low piracy rate of 22 percent. But due to the size of the U.S. software market compared to all other countries, dollar losses in the United States were the highest of any country at $6.5 billion.

The worst offenders by piracy rate were China (92 percent, $3.8 billion), Vietnam (92 percent, $41 million) and Ukraine (91 percent, $92 million). Authors of the BSA report expressed deep concern about piracy rates in the Asia/Pacific (53 percent, $7.5 billion)




News Article: Piracy Costs U.S. Game Industry Serious Money
News Date: 02/16/2002
Source: Reuters Estimated 30% piracy rate on games.

According to the ISDA...In 2001, piracy as a whole cost the United States $1.9 billion. (Yes, that's billion, with a B.) That's an amazing 30% of sales lost to illegally reproduced games...



Editorial: The State Of Game Piracy Today
I could make a safe assumption and say 75% of the people that pirate games are those that just couldn’t afford the game, not because they didn’t want to spend money they already had.

Note, the two different studies were done in different years, by different groups.

edit:i changed around my 3rd paragraph some.