> but media sales have trended upwards in the age of piracy which leads to some interesting hypotheses.

But they were also on an upward trend before the age of piracy, so it's perfectly plausible to think they would be even higher. The same technologies that enable digital piracy also lower the cost of legal distribution, so you'd expect to see the industry doing better at the same time that piracy is rising.

Now, I'm of course not shedding too many tears for the major Hollywood studios, but I would like to live in a world with more niche films and games, and of course it's still quite difficult to make a living as an author or musician—a few manage it, most don't.

We agree that we don't have data—but to me, it just makes intuitive sense that a large majority of pirates are pirating lots of things they would have otherwise bought. For piracy to counteract that by generating buzz or aiding discovery or whatever it is... well, it would have to be an awful lot of buzz!

Occasionally in life, intuitions are dead wrong, and actual data leads to surprising discoveries. However, when faced with a lack of data, the first assumption shouldn't be "reality is the opposite of whatever I'd intuitively expect," that makes no sense.

I think there's a ton of motivated reasoning going on, and it just really bothers me. If you're going to pirate stuff, at least be honest with yourself about it.