The Piracy Calculator

What's your illegal hoard worth? What's the street value of all your pirated MP3s and movies? How much would the RI/MPAA demand - minimum - if they sued you? Find out!

Fill in the blanks, then hit "Calculate"

Number of movies =
Number of complete TV seasons =
Number of isolated TV episodes =
Number of videogames =
Duration of all your music (hh:mm:ss) = : :

Cost of movies: $
Cost of TV: $
Cost of videogames: $
Cost of music: $
Total cost of your illegal hoard: $

Convert this to: More...

Notes (you can probably skip this part)

All costs are in US dollars. I have assumed that a movie costs $19.95, a videogame is $49.95, an album is 50 minutes long and costs $14.92, a TV season box set costs $39.99 and an isolated TV episode costs $1.99 as it does on Google Video. There are other ways to calculate the total based on e.g. how many MP3s you actually have; I just picked the one I felt was most accurate. Nevertheless there is still a margin of error of at least 25%.

The format for entering your music total is hh:mm:ss. Anime movies and episodes count just like regular movies and TV. Ditto pornography. Software is not included here because the price of a piece of ripped-off software can vary from zero to a thousand dollars and higher. A TV season of less than about 10 episodes only counts as .5 of a season. And remember not to count material which you bought legally!

Disclaimer

Put it this way... my hoard is worth $9003.34.

The moral of this story

Many of you who actually used this thing will have come up with totals in four digits or higher. But do you actually HAVE that much money? Have you ever? And if you did have the money, would you have bought all that stuff legitimately? Even if it was a simple download? I doubt it.

The point I'm making is that only a small percentage of illegal downloads are in fact lost sales. And NO illegal download actually deprives the stores of physical product and hence potential sales. The actual CDs are still right there on the shelves to buy. Piracy isn't theft. It's piracy. There's a big difference.

Want to go one step further? Try The Sin Calculator.

Looking for the April Fool's Day version of this page? See here.