The Cost Of Piracy: Ignoring It May Cost Less

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In the UK, the music industry claim that £200 million is lost due to piracy each year. BT, one of UK's largest ISPs, is now claiming that in order to implement the "three strikes" system, it will cost each user £24 per day, and as much as £365 million a year, that's £165 million more costly than actually just leaving piracy be.

The £24 per day will no doubt be passed onto consumers, and so in effect, it's a piracy tax. But unlike an actual piracy tax, where the money goes to the studios and they then turn a blind eye to piracy (at least casual piracy), this money goes to the people who are employed to spy on your Internet usage, and the lawyers that will sue or defend you in court. And so you have a situation where innocent people are actually paying for the prosecution of pirates, and perhaps other innocent people who have falsely accused of piracy. And the studios still end up not making a single cent more than before.

It's a raw deal for consumers, and this all assumes that the £200 million the industry quotes is actually real, even though investigation into the issue suggest that the actual loss is much smaller than this amount. These are, at best, approximations (that the studios have come up themselves, so it's hardly unbiased), and I suspect the actual loss when you take into account the small number of people that would actually pay if pirated content wasn't around, is probably only a quarter of this or less. So basically we now have a situation where consumers are expected to pay £300+ million to fight a £30 million problem for studios using a "solution" that doesn't even work anyway.

More:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...-cost-more.ars