US government finally admits most piracy estimates are bogus

This Ars Technica post confirms what most experts have been saying for a while:

We’ve all seen the studies trumpeting massive losses to the US economy from piracy. One famous figure, used literally for decades by rightsholders and the government, said that 750,000 jobs and up to $250 billion a year could be lost in the US economy thanks to IP infringement.

Those figures have been debunked by smany sources; apparently the GAO finally admitted that they have no real basis in fact:

In a new report out yesterday, the government’s own internal watchdog took a close look at “efforts to quantify the economic effects of counterfeit and pirated goods.” After examining all the data and consulting with numerous experts inside and outside of government, the Government Accountability Office concluded (PDF) that it is “difficult, if not impossible, to quantify the economy-wide impacts.”

That it took this long to come clean really pisses me off.  These phony numbers only bolstered the music and movie industries’ false claims about imaginary monetary losses and disincentivized them from actually rethinking their obsolete, Luddite strategies that demonized moving into the Digital Age.