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kitler53 on 24 January 2012
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Baalzamon said:
kitler53 said:

or if we we're to follow your logic then if the governement were to double taxes it wouldn't hurt the economy or you cause it's not like your wage was dimished .. it's just going to the government and still being spend afterall...

As much as I hate getting taxed and the government wasting money, one could actually very easily argue that money spent by the government is going into the economy and helping the economy just as much as money spent elsewhere.

I know that piracy HAS led to lost sales, but I'm trying to say that a majority of piracy either wouldn't have been sales, or may even lead to additional sales of an item, which offsets at least a large chunk of any lost sales.

I just think the argument saying it is costing the US economy $100 billion is bullshit.  Without piracy, our GDP would not be $100 billion higher.

was according to your profile you are american therefore you probably already know that.

1. media (movies, musics, games) is americas #1 national export

2. most of our physical products are make overseas like in china to which we have a massive trade deficite that is hurting our ecomony. 

so when you make an assumption that a dollar spent is a dollar spent you are wrong.  not protecting our largest national product contributes both to the amount of money leaving our country and the limits the amount coming in.  would it be $100 billion.  i don't know.  maybe less.  could be more.

also let me tell you a personal story.  i work for a software company.  we are in the engineering space (as oppose to entertainment) and a chinese company got a hold of software while we were trying to make a sale to a chinese power company.  from that "piracy" of our software he extracted our core modeling engine (~$200M investment on our company's part) and re-skined our product to sell in china.  right now he has about a 15M a year company (and growing) from our software that is not brought back to america. our company pulled entirely out of china.  we can't make money in an economy that doesn't respect IP rights.

so let me be plain.  either you reconise IP as property that needs to be protected as would any other product or you don't.  but remember, america isn't a manufacturing ecomony, we're base mostly on IP of various sorts.   if we can't protect IP america's ecomony will collapse because so much of our ecomony is dependant on it.