Quote:
Originally Posted by Sonarman
PC Sales: 300,000
PC pirated downloads: 4,100,000
Console sales: 6,000,000
Console pirated downloads: 970,000
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Regarding such "assessments", there is a very recent report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), which provides and analysis questions for Congress.
http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d10423.pdf
It is a long document, but even if you only read introduction, conclusions and browse the headlines, you'll find that they conclude that the loss estimates made by MPAA etc. are bare any basis. Their data sources are not reproducible, and their employed analysis methods lack. For example one very trivial statement that they characterize is that every pirated download equals a lost sale, which is just by reason evidently not true (in contrast to a resell!). So, this is official evidence that you can smoke above numbers... ;-)
I assume that piracy estimates in the 10-30% of sales volume range would be more accurate, but I would be curious if someone could try an experiment to show that even if all torrents went away today, the sales wouldn't increase much in the next year, two, three... But I assume that reselling software is a big thorn in the eye of software companies. I kind of can understand that, and I guess if I were the boss, I'd probably try to close that down too unless customers would start to rebel against it... But that doesn't make it any better!