Moreover, the presence of a virus on an illegally shared file is only indicative of the individual file-sharer's incentive to infect, and not the incentive of internet piracy as a whole. Some parties claim that the loss of profit from piracy negatively affects budgets for research and development; this is unsubstantiated because it is impossible to gauge the extent of loss from piracy. While it is easy to argue in favor of regulating piracy, evidence remains limited and piracy displays little of those negative traits.
Internet piracy occurs on a truly massive scale, and because of this, it is nearly impossible to regulate with legislation and government enforcement. The top pirated TV shows alone are downloaded millions of times every single week. These large numbers reflect the insurmountable challenge of regulation; the effort and resources required to curtail even a very small portion of this number is not worth the possible results of such an operation. Industry expert and NPR correspondent Eric Garland explains these numbers with a statement claiming that "piracy follows awareness." The natural bell curve of interest cannot be changed with a manual reshaping because the fluid demand by pirates for content is a constant unaffected by regulation. Parties lobbying Washington to enact piracy reducing legislation are essentially asking for a favor tantamount to regulating the amount of carbon dioxide produced by humans.
Not only does the scale of piracy prevent the possibility of successful piracy regulation, the entertainment industry may also have incentives in not regulating piracy. At the very least, claims of the horribly negative effects that file-sharing supposedly imposed upon the industry is vastly overstated. A report released by the International Intellectual Property Alliance meant to establish that copyright industries are valuable enough to merit government protection instead painted a picture of economic well-being (Sanchez).