How do you even start to quantify something like a TV show? Without piracy would you have had subscription services, seen it free when it came on local TV and/or bought a box set of it? Similar situations exist for other media too, which "full price" are we talking about?

Nice try FBI.

Outdated image, these days we just remote into the FBI office, no FBI jacket needed.

This kind of thinking is what the mpaa and others want pirating framed as. Very very little of what's pirated would have been paid for at all had it not been available. I've paid to see sequels for movies that have pirated and have bought books based on series I've downloaded that I never would have bothered to explore if I had to buy them originally.

This is tough to answer, because a lot of pirated stuff is literally priceless, i.e., can't be bought at all.

I'd be happy to pay for the recent Ace Combat 5 and 6 upscaled ports, but they were only available briefly with preorders for AC7 on consoles I don't have. They haven't been sold outside of that brief window several years ago. Even if you tracked down unopened copies from 2019 and bought them from third parties, the license codes they contained expired long ago.

Fortunately, the Ace Combat community has put a lot work into making emulation work. The older games are playable, just not in a way you can pay money for.

Unclear. Cause I don't tell

Pay what? A physical copy? A digital license for streaming on a platform? A digital rental? A month of streaming service that includes it? Taking free access and public libraries (like public broadcasting libraries), temporary or time-limited into account? There's way too much variance to make any reasonable assessment on this.

To get an idea of price variance, even without monthly services, which make individual consumption cheaper still, let's look at the value of digital products on Steam.

Comparing my Steam account value calculated by SteamDB, the "lowest value" is 23% of the "value today". Taking into account that prices reduce significantly over time, you could put it much lower.

How do you expect people to calculate "if you had to pay for every item"?

There are games like Divinity Original Sin 2 that were so good I bought them after I finished them. So.. hard to tell.

Same here. I like to fall out for so much, I bought it after I had around 6000 hours in it.

Depends. Do we count in-app purchases of apps I've modded or obtained pre-modded? Do we count the cost of films as one-off rentals/purchases, or do we count them as subscriptions?

If we consider games as buying one-off licences for them that I kept in perpetuity, it would be in the few hundreds, probably about £400.

If we include streaming, as a subscription service that I've used for the last decade roughly, then 10×12×£10 (assuming a tenner a month), we're looking at £1,200 saved for streaming.

However, at least 20-30 films have been downloaded by me personally, so assuming a cost of about a fiver per film (idk how much films go for these days), we're looking at another ~£700.

But also, we have to include ad-free YouTube as YT Premium. And even if we're to assume that YT Premium is anywhere close to the service I provide myself with, i.e downloading things I actually keep as digital files forever, it would still cost a lot. About 5 years of YT Premium would be (according to ChatGPT because I didn't want to research price increases), just over £800.

But I've also watched both Netflix and Disney+ exclusives, namely Squid Game and The Mandalorian, so I guess streaming would've been much more expensive?

Also, we have about a year of Spotify, which ChatGPT (easier to give more accurate estimates) claims is just over £140.

Adding to that, apparently the cost of Netflix over the same period is just over £1,500, so that changes the total.

So far, £3500, not counting in-app purchases in modded games. If we count that (which is ridiculous cuz I would never spend that much money on games, even if I was a liquid trillionaire (meaning having £1T cash)), we'd probably be looking at something in the hundreds of thousands if not millions.

As a compulsive datahoarders, millions, more ?
It really depends if you include only stuff I actively enjoyed, or just each single instance of a copy I made, every torrent I've seeded.

What is the point of being in the FBI if you're not going to wear the jacket?

Somewhere in the ballpark of 7 million

Nice try, FBI

Does this include media I grabbed but literally never opened or looked at?

This right here is what really grinds my gears. When companies own an IP, refuse to do anything on it, and then engage in litigation when someone makes a fan-based project against that IP, or someone redistributes their IP that they're no longer selling.

Either ride the horse or leave the stable.

Infinite money. Capital wants infinite money for their imaginary property in perpetuity. Otherwise they'll get their state to put you in a cage.

Straight up piracy - probably only like $3k, if we're including backups of a personal physical media collection well over 20k.

nice try Interpol!