Movie Piracy Hurts Entire U.S. Economy

Motion Picture Industries are not the only ones who lose revenue from movie piracy. According to a report that the Institute for Policy Innovation - IPI - just released on September 29th of this year, motion picture piracy is harmful to the U.S. economy as a whole.

Bye-bye money.
Copyright infringement of audio-visual works costs American workers $5.5 billion annually in lost earnings. And the majority of those losses were not to the motion picture industry. Workers from the local rental store clerk to ad agencies are affected. Specifically, IPI states that "of this amount, $1.9 billion would have been earned by workers in the motion picture industries while $3.6 billion would have been earned by workers in other U.S. industries."

Bye-bye jobs.
Piracy also caused over 141,000 new jobs to not be created in 2005. 94,433 of these non-existent jobs would have been added to industries not related to the motion picture industry.

Bye-bye taxes.
Also, all levels of government lost a combined total of $837 million in tax revenue. Millions of dollars were not able to be collected from personal income taxes and corporate taxes from motion picture businesses.

Piracy hurts us all.
This statement from IPI sums up the affects of piracy. "It is obvious that copyright piracy and counterfeiting harm intellectual property owners... But that is only part of the story. Piracy and counterfeiting also cause significant and measurable harm to the overall economy, directly affecting upstream suppliers and downstream purchasers, with a cascading effect that includes lost output, lost earnings, lost jobs, and lost tax revenues."