"[D]omestic piracy may well impose losses on specific industrial sectors, but these are not losses to the larger national economy. Within a given country the piracy of domestic goods is a transfer of income, not a loss. Money saved by consumers or businesses on CDs, DVDs, or software will not disappear but rather be spent on other things-housing, food, other entertainment, other business expenses, and so on. These expenditures, in turn, will generate tax revenue, new jobs, infrastructural investments, and the range of other goods that are typically cited in the loss column of industry analyses. For our part, we take seriously the possibility that the consumer surplus from piracy might be more productive, socially valuable, and or job creating than additional investment in the software and media sectors. We think this likelihood increases in markets for entertainment goods, which contribute to growth but add little to productivity, and still further in countries that import most of their audiovisual goods and software - in short, virtually everywhere outside the United States."
January 1, 1970
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Internet_file_sharing