In IDC/BSA piracy report you see the size of pirated software market measured in billions of dollars and percentage of pirated units. It is wrong. Not only the number is wrong, their so-called researchers measure it in wrong units.
Pirates measure themselves in gigabytes. Bob will never say "I downloaded 7 movies that would cost 269$ if bought legally". In fact his friends will hear "I downloaded 15GB of videos and it all was crap". Pirates who sell disks in Moscow or Beijing do not charge per title or as percent of the price of legal copy, their customers pay per disk. Show me a BitTorrent tracker or DirectConnect server that measures users' activity in stolen dollars and number of products uploaded.
IDC/BSA should measure piracy in terabytes. They will surely learn something important if they do. I do not know what exactly and how, but using appropriate measures and terminology is always a good thing to do.
Surely you can say that Americans constitute 10% of all human mass on Earth, but such statistic fails to shows the population of USA and the obesity rate.
