| ...there are 360,714,396 files available for download on my segment of KaZaA's network. Of those, how many would you say are illegitimate? I'll be generous and say about half - although I'm sure it's closer to 3/4s - giving us 150,000,000 (yeah, I know...but I'm lazy) pirated songs, movies, and games - not to mention the oodles of smut that were only meant to be available for download for a nominal fee. Movies and games are pretty big, and not traded quite so often. I'll be generous again and say that those two are a third of the total illegit files out there - it's likely far fewer, since mp3s are smaller files and thus are more prevailing, but who can say for sure? There's 100,000,000 stolen songs floating around out there. CDs go for about $15 a pop, with 15 or so songs on there, so each song can be argued to be worth $1. Simple multiplication tells us that's $100,000,000 in lost revenue out there, and that's just on one leg of the network, and that's also just music. A hundred million dollars (and remember, that's based on conservative numbers) is a hell of a lot of money to be ripping off from anyone. Just because record companies are rich, that doesn't make stealing from them any less wrong. There are plenty of legal uses for heroin too, but the negatives outweight the positives enough to ban it entirely. |
