The following link [ http://qntm.org/owe ]leads to a 'piracy calculator.' Based on the amount of downloaded movies, songs etc, you have, it attempts to estimate the 'street value' of your 'illegal horde.' The interesting bit is the text below the calculator....particularly the last para...reproduced below
Notes (you can probably skip this part) All costs are in US dollars. I have assumed that a movie costs $19.95, a videogame is $49.95, an album is 50 minutes long and costs $14.92, a TV season box set costs $39.99 and an isolated TV episode costs $3.70 (note: you cannot as far as I know buy isolated television episodes. But I think you should be able to and I think $3.70 would be a fair price). There are other ways to calculate the total based on e.g. how many MP3s you actually have; I just picked the one I felt was most accurate. Nevertheless there is still a margin of error of at least 25%. The format for entering your music total is hh:mm:ss. Anime movies and episodes count just like regular movies and TV. Ditto pornography. Software is not included here because the price of a piece of ripped-off software can vary from zero to a thousand dollars and higher. A TV season of less than about 10 episodes only counts as .5 of a season. And remember not to count material which you bought legally! Disclaimer Put it this way... my hoard is worth $9003.34. The moral of this story Many of you who actually used this thing will have come up with totals in four digits or higher. But do you actually HAVE that much money? Have you ever? And if you did have the money, would you have bought all that stuff legitimately? Even if it was a simple download? I doubt it. The point I'm making is that only a small percentage of illegal downloads are in fact lost sales. Piracy isn't theft. It's piracy. There's a big difference. Anivar Aravind GAIA -- Knowledge is power... share it equitably! http://www.gnu.org
