During the post Lehman recession, the entertainment and software industries actually saw a comparative growth when measured against the entire economy as a whole. The fact that the industry is not suffering at all serves as a more than adequate refutation for the common rhetoric that the industry is suffering because of piracy. .
When inspecting the position of large corporations regarding anti-piracy regulation, it is vital to look at their current market positions. Companies such as HBO have monopoly on their content; they only legally provide it through their own lucrative avenues. In doing so, they are essentially artificially creating an outsized demand for the content online that, in the absence of an official source, encourages illegal file sharing. According to technology analyst Nick Bilton, companies purposely do not put their shows online in an easily accessible format because even if it decreases the amount of piracy, "the price [they] could charge would still pale in comparison to the money [they] make through cable operations." If the representatives of the industry themselves secretly support a status quo where piracy is encouraged, it does not make sense to dedicate large amounts of time and money towards combatting a non-issue.".
Even though piracy regulation is obviously detrimental to fiscal performance, some parties claim that copyright enforcement is still important because the absence of it can prove to damaging to artistic creativity. However, upon closer inspection, that statement seems very suspect. If piracy actually had a sufficient negative impact on the economics of the creative industry, then artistic output would be expected to drop correspondingly. With this relationship in consideration, a comparison of new output from a pre-piracy period and output from a period with prevalent privacy would be highly enlightening. In the year 2000, a total of 35,516 albums were released while 106,000 albums were released in 2010 (Sanchez).
