April 28th, 2010 
Brad McGraw 
Piracy ruins the economy! You’ve heard it from the RIAA, the MPAA, Senators, Congressmen and the news media. Industry funded studies claiming piracy impact numbers of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars lost every year. However, a report (PDF) released a few weeks ago by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has thrown those wild numbers out the door, basically saying that there is no real way to definitively quantify the impact of piracy. It has always been claimed by these industry reports that piracy has costs thousands of jobs every year, billions of dollars lost, and the economy gets damaged because of it. For example, if someone pirates a $60 video game or $20 CD or DVD, that doesn’t necessarily mean that money isn’t being spent elsewhere in the economy. It also calls out the previous ‘studies’ that the RIAA, MPAA, etc have been using saying that the model used to come up with industry supporting numbers has serious flaws. Something pretty much everybody else has known for awhile, but we don’t have lobbyists.
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