I actually read this paper without knowing it was sponsored by the Motion Picture Association of America and without realising that it wasn't peer reviewed. I c

I actually read this paper without knowing it was sponsored by the Motion Picture Association of America and without realising that it wasn't peer reviewed. I cringed on the thought that this is the level of social science. In my profession (law), proving loss of revenue is so difficult that it is in many cases considered impossible, even in civil cases. You have to take into consideration many factors and you can't just automatically ascribe declining or increasing revenues to one fact, even if it seems plausible. You can't just make up a model full of assumptions and attach fancy names and mathematical symbols to it. No decent judge would fall for that. To start with you would have to make a year-on-year comparison spanning 5-10 years. Then you would have to make a convincing argument why the revenues didn't just decline or increase due to one of the many other possible factors such as popularity of the movies, internet penetration, broadband access, weather, macro economic trends, changes in taste, normal seasonal changes, supply of alternatives (cable tv shows, sport games etc.), changes in payment options for the legal movie outlets, other changes in business model or marketing that could explain why the legal movie outlets sold more after the shutdown. If the product had been more generic that might have been possible but with movies the popularity of the supply varies so much that changes could often be ascribed to differences in popularity.