Does piracy cut the revenue?
iRights, a web platform for intellectual property rights in the digital world, reports about a prevailing study of the US Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI), which says that “music piracy” costs US-economy a loss of billions of Dollars per year. Besides that, the study claims, 71.060 jobs get lost, thereof 26.860 in the music industry. One of the consequences shall be that the states are being deprived of 422 million US-Dollars on taxes.
iRights points out though, that at the end of their report IPI writes, all these numbers are estimates and their main source is the report 2006 Global Recording Industry in Numbers, published by the IFPI, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.
In their article, iRights then diggs into the numbers of the last 10 years and finds out:
In 1997 – which was years before the p2p-networks Napster & Co. – the music branch in the US had 2935 companies with a total revenue of 12,5 billion US-Dollars.
In the year 2000 Napster was getting popular in the US and the revenues of the music branch developed like this: 14,08 billion in the year 2000; 13,61 billion in 2001; 13,94 billion US-Dollars in 2002.
More details at the iRights website (in german), download-links to the original documents there at the end of the article.
Neue US-Studie zu den Folgen der „Musikpiraterie“ - iRights
photo by: ceoln at Flickr under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0
