http://torrentfreak.com/australia-us...friend-120121/

Yeah, so...Ugh.

This just in:
If you get caught bootlegging copyrighted data or say you potentially bootleg some Michael Jackson, you will do more jail time than the man who killed him.

Piracy costs billions every year.

I'll be sure to lose sleep over that when we run a 15 trillion deficit.

Just a thought: Is society worse off because there is just not as much potential to become a mega-bucks rich person through being a musician? Because I have not noticed any real decline in the quality of stuff out there over the last 5 years. And I really couldn't care less if Hollywood goes bankrupt. Hell, the theaters already are.

Oh man, where's Scrappy Jack?! He doesn't like it when people people confuse debt and deficit, nor when they lament the size of the debt.

You rang? :)

The fiscal deficit for 2011 was about $1.3 trillion, or about 8.7% of GDP.

It's less about not liking people that lament the size of the debt and more about not liking how most people (including myself until not so terribly long ago) misunderstand the nature of the debt.


Also, piracy is bad. :inout:

no, and it doesnt stop the BAGILLIZOIAONS of potential legit dollars from entering the industry.

It's just like any business, take a restaurant, that fails. If you start buying cheap product and raising the prizes, people will stop going. When you have to pay $15 to see a movie, plus a $2 city tax...it's not worth it. and when food costs $5 for a small popcorn, you dont buy the food...then the theatre can't afford the $20000000000000000 movie reels, the paychecks, and the lease.

The music industry alone is worth 200 billion, the movie industry about 2 trillion. if they were missing out on a "few" billion, i'd say they aren't doing bad.

Proper terminology is important, thank you Scrappy.

And why do all the anti-piracy messages on my DVDs (that I bought legally....at a second hand store) come in French? Shouldn't they be in Chinese, Spanish, and Russian? Don't the French people get subsidized movies once per week anyway?

Total box-office gross in the US was $10.2 billion in 2011, down from $10.5 billion in 2010. (source)

DVD sales were down 2% from the prior year at $6.95 billion, with BluRay up 20% to 2 billion. Mail-order DVD rental and online streaming rental rose 4% to 2.37 billion, and kiosk rentals (eg: redbox) jumped 31% to $1.66 billion. Video On Demand (via cable companies) was up 7% to 1.87 billion, and iTunes sales of digital movie downloads rose 9$ to $554 million. (source)

In all, consumer spending for all home video fell a mere 2% to $18 billion, despite the implosion of the video rental store.


For 2011, physical sales of videogames in the US (in boxes from the store, not on-line) accounted for $9.3 billion, with the total videogame market (including hardware) at around $16.5 billion. (source) This was down 8% from 2010.


It is interesting that the ESA (the gaming equivalent of the MPAA), which arguably has much more at stake and suffered higher declines over the past year than home video, does not find it necessary to lobby the congress for such draconian measures.


Discuss.