Arrg! Ye Pirates be Stealing Boat Loads of Me Treasure! Oy, Not Really! Arg!

Ars Technica has an under-reported story about how online piracy isn’t quite as bad for hte economy as the RIAA and MPAA, the major players in the music and movie industry (respectively) would have you believe it is.

It seems that for decades, the media organizations have been using some of the same numbers to list damages to the United States economy from piracy, namely that 750,000 jobs and up to $250 billion a year could be siphoned away from dear old Uncle Sam and his movie and music studios.  A US government report released on the ~13th of April, said that in fact, it was nearly impossible to determine the economic impact of global piracy.

The finding hinges on the fact that many people who download music and movies do so to ‘check them out,’ and would not necessarily go out and spend money on the DVD or the cinema to see the flick. People are picky about music, and spending oodles of money on CDs leads to people being very, very picky about which CDs they pick up. Downloading gives them the option to try music. While there’s some free high quality stuff out there, the truth is that most consumers head to the iTunes Store to pick up music and even some movies. It’s cheap, the content is easy to find, and it’s of the highest quality available. Devices like the iPad, iPhone, and the iPods, which use iTunes as a primary conduit to get music and movies have also helped to stem the flow of piracy.

As services like Fancast, HuLu and NetFlix’s ‘Watch Instantly’ service become more and more popular, there’s less and less reason for anyone to go through the trouble of illegal downloads. The same goes for Pandora and Lala, services which let users listen to all sorts of songs without having to download the music to their computer, and which let them check out the songs without having to commit to purchasing them yet. These services becoming the standard ways to take-in content, so it looks like the networks and other content producers have finally found a paradigm that lets them have their stuff on line, and pay for it too.