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The United States Government Accountability office has been raising this question for the last year, and are now making their questions public. Congress asked the GAO in April 2009 to review the data supplied by the large media companies and tasked the GAO with the requirement of quantifying the size and scope of piracy, including the impacts of Web piracy to the film and music industries. On April 12, 2010, the GAO released a report entitled "Observations on Efforts to Quantify the Economic Effects of Counterfeit and Pirated Goods."
While there didn't appear to be anything earth shattering in the report, there was a regular statement of questioning the data provided by the industry and th data relied upon previously. A few quotes for the interested:
1. "Three widely cited U.S. government estimates of economic losses resulting from counterfeiting cannot be substantiated due to the absence of underlying studies.....First, a number of industry, media, and government publications have cited an FBI estimate that U.S. businesses lose $200-$250 billion to counterfeiting on an annual basis. This estimate was contained in a 2002 FBI press release, but FBI officials told us that it has no record of source data or methodology for generating the estimate and that it cannot be corroborated."
2. "Assumptions, such as the rate at which consumers would substitute counterfeit goods for legitimate products, can have enormous impacts on the resulting estimates and heighten the importance of transparency. Because of the significant differences in types of counterfeit and pirated goods and industries involved, no single method can be used to develop estimates, and each method has limitations."
3. "Commerce and FBI officials told us they rely on industry statistics on counterfeit and pirated goods and do not conduct any original data gathering to assess the economic impact of counterfeit and pirated goods on the U.S. economy or domestic industries."
It seems the largest portion here is that teh Gov't has used numbers which it had no source data for (most likely provided to them). While I won't substantiate the legitimacy of piracy, I will stipulate that the Gov't needs better numbers.
If you want to read the whole report yourself, you can find it here.
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