Fact: Switzerland has a "legal for personal use" policy on file sharing.
Fact: The Swiss government, under pressure from anti-piracy lobbyists commissioned an independent study (read: not paid for by companies who gave their researchers their conclusions and asked them to fit (or manufacture) evidence around those conclusions) into whether piracy for personal use was genuinely harmful to the entertainment industry.
Fact: The study concludes that file sharers (or pirates if you insist) tend to spend more money on entertainment products than non file sharers. On this basis the Swiss government decided to uphold their existing policy.
Fact: an independent figure or statistic such as "5 million illegal downloads of x product" "proves" precisely nothing past the information contained in the original statement. At best you can infer an additional conclusion based on this statement, however without additional qualifiers any such conclusions are wholly worthless.
So what would it take to actually prove what back_up claims to have already proven with his dribblers logic? Simples, find the 5 million people and draw up an in depth profile for every single one of them. Age, location, employment or position in the education system, income, spending on entertainment products, file sharing habits including what they download, for what purpose and whether they ever buy or intend to buy some or all of the things they pirate.
All these factors are important in determining how much of a real issue file sharing actually is. A lot of illegal downloads come from countries where western media (including games) is either completely unavailable or illegal. How many lost sales does it count as if the file sharers cannot buy your products even if they wanted to?
Next up: teenagers up to students. These demographics are responsible for a big whack of all illegal file sharing for sure. If I was a rights holder I'd just write off that demographic. These people download because they can't afford, but most of them will one day, and when that day comes they will buy a lot of what they pirated and much more besides. I don't see the point in hobbling your consumer base before they get a chance to become consumers. In fact, free access to media early in life is what will build appetite later in life. All the best music and games I pirated when I was a kid or a student I now legally own, bought and paid for, if I'd never had access to it back then would I have got around to buying it now?
So why don't I really see piracy as a problem? Nobody has convinced me it is, and dribbling idiots like back_up with the analytical prowess of a fried turd just fill me with disdain.
