Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Peril and danger in the music industry

The music industry loses more than 5 times the GDP of France to BitTorrent

That blog entry is hilarious. The guy is absolutely genius. But allow me to take it a step further. That research only followed one BitTorrent tracker, ThePirateBay. According to Slyck.com, 21 of the top 23 BitTorrent trackers link to music. Assuming that each one of these trackers racked up $11,440,939,650,000 in potential infringement penalties, then the RIAA lost $240,259,732,650,000 to piracy in one month. Yes, that's 240 billion dollars in the space of 30 days. Now, assuming that the number of infringements stays constant (it doesn't) through the year, that means in one year piracy costs the music industry $2,883,116,791,800,000 - almost three quadrillion dollars. That's 252 times the U.S.'s entire national debt, and it's all because of BitTorrent use in the space of a year.

This is the equivalent of a revelation. The music industry is wrong to say that they've lost 300 million dollars to piracy; they just need to come out and say that piracy costs the music industry almost three quadrillion dollars a year, and only then will anyone realize the terrible scope of piracy. Considering that BitTorrent has been around for about two years, the music industry has thus lost around $5.6 quadrillion dollars - just through BitTorrent.

If we were to count the cost of piracy through other file-sharing programs, such as Limewire, DirectConnect++, and KaZaA, and if we were to also include losses to CD trading, the suggestions are staggering. According to this article, the world GDP for 2002 is $32 trillion - $32,000,000,000,000. If we were to count all forms of copyright infringement between 2004 and 2006, I'd esimate that the music industry has lost about $10 quadrillion or more to piracy - $10,000,000,000,000,000. In two years the music industry lost about 313 times the amount of money there is on Earth to piracy. Wherever you live, call your senators and Congressmen and demand that they find a solution to this horrible, horrible problem, because piracy costs the music industry more money than is humanly possible. We cannot let this proceed any longer, or it will continue to cost the music industry more than the cumulative GDP of every country ever. Every second is worth a million dollars.

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