MPAA Costs Hollywood More Than US BitTorrent Piracy http://t.co/A67CYG6W Kind of silly exercise but it’s an interesting exercise!
Even TorrentFreak aren’t taking themselves seriously with this one, but by extrapolating how much more the MPAA studios would make if all the US BitTorrent traffic moved to NetFlix subscriptions, and comes to the conclusion:
What does this mean?
Nothing. It’s a simplistic attempt to put a number on BitTorrent piracy in the US.
It shows that even when you assume that 90% of all US BitTorrent traffic is dedicated to video piracy, the added revenue for Hollywood in 2010 would have been less than the amount they paid to the MPAA. That is, if all BitTorrent users switched to Netflix.
The real added revenue if BitTorrent disappeared would of course be a fraction of this, as not everyone would start paying.
We don’t want to draw too many conclusions on this simple thought experiment, but it’s something to consider, especially when ISPs are expected to dedicate millions of dollars in resources to send BitTorrent users warning letters early next year. Not to mention the negative effect of the censorship bills that have been proposed recently.
Is it really worth all that?