It's absurd to claim that this is costing American jobs, even if it were directly causing significant harm to the Content Industry. The pirates aren't taking t

It's absurd to claim that this is costing American jobs, even if it were directly causing significant harm to the Content Industry. The pirates aren't taking the money they would have spent on content and burning it. Instead, they're spending that money on something else. So it's not that jobs were lost, or even that the total GDP was reduced. It's simply that the money was spent elsewhere: it flowed into coffers other than those of the MPAA or the RIAA. So at the very worst, from an economic perspective, the damage is that resource allocation is happening somewhat inefficiently, with money being directed to the consumer's second-higher priority relative to Content. There's no reason to think that in the big picture this is harming total employment or GDP any more than a thousand other inefficiencies that regulations have created in the market.