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I never said there was consensus. I said some studies, e.g. http://www.rieti.go.jp/en/publications/summary/11010021.html to randomly pick one. Furthermore, even anecdotal evidence is sufficient to suggest a link exists even though, yes, anecdotal evidence is not sufficient to prove such.

As for exponential distribution, knowing the whole enchilada, and DRM supposedly doing "absolutely nothing", not everyone is aware of how to obtain "warez", not everyone who is aware does so, and not everyone has the same level of technical proficiency.

You keep talking in absolutes. Why?

It's more like fraud. And fraud is a criminal offence with substantial penalties in many places, because it is damaging to the victims,

You may be the first I have seen who compares piracy to being more like fraud than stealing. I don't understand your reasoning, could you elaborate?

is unfair to those who conduct their financial business legally, and can have severe economic consequences if done on a large scale.

How is it unfair to people who do their business legally? How is it unfair in a legal sense where piracy is legal? How are there severe economic consequences when piracy has been shown to have positive effects for the economy?

Well, the first recorded usage of the term in the sense we're talking about is given in the early 1700s by most etymological dictionaries, so you're only off by three centuries [etymonline.com]. Hey, at least you were close.

Wiki says at least since 1603, so at the most I was off by a century.

Well, given that Slashdot readership is obviously neutral on this issue, I'm sure that's a representative sample of the literature.

I'm also struggling to find all those studies, but I suppose it's just that my Google-fu is weak. Maybe you could help me out by citing some of them?

The slashdot readership is irrelevant, as they had no influence on the studies that Slashdot chose to report.

Some links to studies:

Do Illegal Copies of Movies Reduce the Revenue of Legal Products? The case of TV animation in Japan

Swiss Government Study Finds Internet Downloads Increase Sales

Canadian Study: Piracy Boosts CD Sales

I hope that helped. You're Google-fu must indeed be weak.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of abundant high-quality work created by people who have rent to pay.

You seem to imply that piracy will prevent the people who create high quality work from being able to pay their rent. That doesn't seem to match with the evidence. Care to elaborate?

It appears to boost...

• Anime DVD sales
• Sales of songs and albums online, as well as music subscriptions
• (and fewer physical CDs, but this was supposed to be a report about online sales).

  There's also evidence to suggest that piracy can really help the little guy :

  Piracy trumps obscurity .. so it's not all black and white. These were all picked off the first page of a search for "piracy boosts sales", so your Google-fu is indeed weak.. or your heart just isn't in it

  It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
    Upton Sinclair US novelist & socialist politician (1878 - 1968)

I used google translate and scrolled to the conclusion of the study. It does indeed say that despite youtube and torrent sites contributing to piracy of animated shows, sales have increased. Direct link to PDF of study.

Yay! You are the first I've seen to mention budget numbers. Since WWII, the United States has funded significant amount of research. This was largely a result of the Cold War, in which high technology played a significant role, and continues today because of the positive effects this research ultimately has on the US economy. Vannevar Bush played a large role in established the beaurocracy to fund pure and applied research. In addition to the purer science agencies you mentioned NIH, NSF, DoE, the military also funds a significant amount of pure and applied research through DARPA, ONR, AFRL, DHS, etc.

One should note that government employees are not allowed to claim IP. It is automatically freely usable. For this reason, many modern numerical packages (e.g. Matlab, GSL) are based on LINPACK and LAPACK, Fortran code written in the 70s and 80s by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, freely available to anyone. Up until the early 80s, intellectual property could not be claimed on governement funded research. Of course, the problem was that the US dumped huge amounts of money into research, but the entire world benefited from the results. At that time, the finger was especially pointed at Japan, who people thought provided no innovation but took advantages of advanced developed in US labs. The Baye-Dole Act created a uniform patent policy across funding agencies and allowed federal research money to result in patents held by the researchers organization. This helped ensure that US benefited financially from US funded research. It also helped lead to the current patent madness. Note that under the previous system in which the government owned the IP, it would be nearly impossible to ensure that US companies would benefit preferentially from US funding. The current structure encourages this naturally, and places the responsibility for tracking IP violations in the hands of the organization that developed the IP.

The US benefitted from an immigrant brain source once (Einstein, Von Braun, Tesla) - it could easily flow the other way if conditions here become too hostile or the grass looks greener elsewhere.

One of main problems is getting a visa to enter the US, even for a conference. It is not only about high profile cases http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/08/17/business/cr ypto.php, but simply PhD students. What do you do when the time to get a visa for entering the US is longer than the time between acceptance and the actual conference?

Also would you go to the US if you were either arab, muslim, or have some family connection in an arab country?

One factor might be piracy. But another is that Chinese people have less money than people in more westernized countries.

There is pressure on both the supply and demand side: Supply of Chinese money is low. Demand is also low because they can get the product elsewhere for less.

It's a perfect formula for low prices.

Some influentail people start to consider about
"Pressing button democracy".
Read original
Japanese text or English translation

They are not majority,of course.