Another concurrent p2pnet story says

“sales of hardware and software associated with gaming will soar to $18 billion by the end of 2007…”.

Its simple: kids are buying less music and, with the same money, are buying more games. This is the result of payola, publicity and sex as a means of sell music along with high prices as opposed to good old fashion music, music/singing talent and value.

Conclusion: For the american economy it is best to get some mp3 files from a friend and then, with the saved money poison yourself with tobacco, damage your brain with boxing or ruin yourself with gambling or wisely spend the money on something of value.

Only when spending money on something of value will the destroyed and amBUSHed economy will be helped with currently mispent on mostly junk-entertainment money.

Forget the advise from the copyright and other junk entertaiment cartels. Their knowlege of what is good for the economy or even themselves is plainly inexistent.

That you went into the study with ‘assunptions’ to begin with is pretty telling, in and of itself.

We understand the study very well.

We also understand that your group was paid to contruct a study around a
premise.

In other words …

You were given the desired conclusion, and created ‘facts’ to prove it.

Unfortunately, people with minds can, and have, torn your ‘conclusions’ to bits.

” But you would have ranted and raved about $8 billion in damages, wouldn’t you? Because your point is not about how much piracy affects the economy, is it? You’re just a habitual, knee-jerk basher of industry, because they won’t let you have all the content you can consume for free. You’re a freeloader, and you don’t want anybody talking about the cost of all the freeloading that you encourage. ”

RKP says …

” So much for mature debate – name calling begins already. ”

That’s right RKP
As I said in the other thread ……

Tom can’t argue the individual points addressed by any of us, So he won’t.
Instead he will rely soley on the ” Attack the Messenger ” tactic, Ad-Hominem attacks.
Standard propoganda rhetoric.

Not one of the highly paid industry shill can ( or will ) debate or discuss the
actual issues, or the glaring flaws, with any maturity or intelligence.

1. They can’t ( they know their ‘facts’ are based on junk science and rely on
number pulled out of their butts.
2. They have a very large vested interest in preserving thngs as they are

So ….

The only choice the have is to attack the posters, since they have no REAL defense for
their position, no matter what number they make up and submit to Congress.

Tom knows this.
We know this.

Their study has been totally debunked and reasonably dissected ALL OVER the
web.

So much for mature debate – name calling begins already. What’s the point? I could equally say you are just an industry lapdog whose personal livelihood relies on payments from corporations who want to make us consume all the content THEY choose, at THEIR extortionate prices, and on THEIR terms. Would that get us anywhere? Nope, it’s pointless.

Plain fact is, all these studies and figures the **AAs and their ilk produce are pointless (even if they were accurate and unbiased). You know why? Because Pandoras Box has been opened, the internet, and the fast means of distribution – for legit or pirate copy – is here to stay. No reports, no laws, no gnashing of teeth by the company execs is going to close that box again. It’s a losing battle for you – the days when the big cartels held everything in a virtual stranglehold are gone. In its way, the net has broken the near total monopoly of the giant ‘entertainment’ corporations, and liberated the consumer. We are now used to getting what we want, when we want, and how we want – not on the unfair and biased terms which the cartels used to dictate to us. As I said in an earlier post, instead of driving for new laws, producers and distributors should be adapting, asking how they can get a share of this huge pot of ‘lost’ revenue. The smart move for the companies now is to work with us all, not against us – because, despite all the rhetoric, just about every p2p’er probably recognizes that the artist, companies and so on do need compensating for their work. We’re just not prepared to live with the one sided situation at the moment which quite frankly leaves everybody ripped off – artists included – and just serves to make the major companies richer.

Quick afterthought re the study itself – and Tax. Let’s say I have X amount of income to spend. Normally I’d spend we’ll say $50 of that on dvds. Only I find piracy. I can download all the dvds I like for free now. So what do I do with that $50? I spend it on something else. That something else is still taxed, the money is still going back into the economy. If your losses – real or fictional – mean you are paying less tax, then that only represents your sector of the industry – that money is still in circulation elsewhere, still being taxed. Considered as a global whole, the tax revenue on consumer capital will stay the same whether those consumers are buying DVDs or music or using it as payments on a new car instead. Linking piracy and tax loss may well be a winner with politicians, but in the real world the only difference will be just what else the consumer is buying to pay tax upon, not on the amount of taxes he is paying – after all, the consumer only has a finite income.

And, incidentally, what about all the taxes governments lose from huge companies using practices like offshoring, exploiting legal loopholes etc? Or don’t they matter because it’s good business practice for companies/ultra rich individuals to do that?

besides, the only ones concerned with this apparent damage to the economy are the ones who can afford black and white glamour shots of themselves.

what is wrong with bashing an industry so desperately in need of reform anyway? you weren’t conservative in any way. how can 12 billion dollars ever be construed as ‘conservative?’ can’t you just sue some more college students to make up for all that?

We began with industry figures, yes, because they are the only figures available. But then we made numerous adjustments to industry estimates, including NOT counting every unauthorized download and every pirated CD as a lost sale at full retail price, as industry does.

We were also very conservative in our methodology, in both our tax loss calculations and the nationwide impact our employment losses.

Again, if you bothered to read the study, understand its methodology, and interact with the data, perhaps you could come up with some meaningful critique, instead of the typical anti-industry ranting.

Maybe you disagree with some of the inputs of the study. Maybe going with a different set of assumptions would have led us to, say $8 billion in losses. These are the kinds of things we could talk about, if you could understand the study.

But you would have ranted and raved about $8 billion in damages, wouldn’t you? Because your point is not about how much piracy affects the economy, is it? You’re just a habitual, knee-jerk basher of industry, because they won’t let you have all the content you can consume for free. You’re a freeloader, and you don’t want anybody talking about the cost of all the freeloading that you encourage.

But it’s a good pic, though. Thanks for posting it.

“The IPI has a history of pushing what it calls a pro-market agenda with its research, including one study asking if open source has reached its limits and another similar to that under discussion here that attempts to quantify the economic impact of movie piracy (probably the one Jon mentions). Given its track record (which includes this gem from the aforementioned open-source study: “Open source will go the way of other IT industry fads that were once trumpeted as the way of the future, like Macintosh computers, business AI, 4GL programming languages and Y2K”) and ideological bent, the results of this study are rather unsurprising.”

This IPI “report” is just another bunch of RIAA hooey.

(*) http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/93759

Let’s prepare the tar and the feathers.