Though game publishers and music labels and all other sorts will say piracy is massively hurting their sales, in reality we know such claims are essentially impossible to back up (and many have already been debunked). The US government has come forth with the same conclusion after many years of supporting refutable claims, thanks to its internal watchdog, the Government Accountability Office (sweet name).
Their report, released yesterday, is sourced from all available data from the government, as well as consultations from numerous experts within and outside of the government. Their conclusion? It's "difficult, if not impossible, to quantify the economy-wide impacts." They go on to note the illicit nature of piracy is largely the source of this quandry, and that determining what is and isn't a "lost sale" is calculated only with "assumptions... which can have enormous impacts on the resulting estimates."
The GOA then slams three piracy reports often linked to the government, one from US Customs and Border Protection, which is still in use by Homeland Security (not for long, we hope). After this they move onto the Business Software Alliance and MPAA (same deal). One interesting point brought up is how disposable income is ignored in one particular study. While many pirates have little or no money for luxury spending, there are surely many others which do, and so are left with income to spend in other parts of the economy, therefore not harming it as a whole.
Of course, piracy is definitely a problem, and the GOA agrees, describing it as "sizeable", but notes there's far too much bad data floating around. It says dollar figures and job loss numbers should be handled very carefully and treated with much skepticism. Lastly, they say they were told by many experts piracy has positive economic effects and these should be asssessed too.
If you're wondering why the government would go to the trouble of making itself look dumb, it's thanks to the PRO-IP Act, passed under Bush. To this effect, President Obama has since appointed an Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator within the White House, and part of her duties include gathering data on piracy and counterfeiting, which includes the GOA report.
Indeed, the name of the Act is in a sense ironic, but sensible folk can agree little progress will be made (or even steps backward) unless both sides are truthful and as accurate as possible about the circumstances at hand, so not only could this work to the benefit of property holders, but consumers as well.
Following GOA's report, we may well see some good effects on the gaming industry, like less DRM on PC games, less strict DRM on PC games, and maybe even more investment on all platforms. Heck, maybe even Sony will put back in that "Install Other OS" feature in a future PS3 firmware update.
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