DSR: Illegal downloads can be 150x more profitable than legal sales

German anti-piracy agency DigiRights Solutions (DRS) claims illegal downloads can earn copyright holders 150 times more money than legal sales. The outfit suggests pirates can be transformed into cash cows by finding out their e-mail addresses and sending them bills in the range of a few hundred euros per infringement. DSR gets to keep 80 percent of the money, leaving the other 20 percent for the copyright holders.

A typical e-mail tries to get 450EUR out of the pocket of a filesharer, which means copyright holders can expect 90EUR per infringement. Not every pirate will pay up though, but DRS says that about a quarter of all recipients do without asking questions.

So, for every illegal download the copyright holder gets €90 (130$), and that is where the presentation turns into a marketing talk where the company explains how piracy can be turned into profit. They start by comparing the profitability of legal and pirated downloads.

A legal online purchase of a song brings about €0.60 into the pockets of the copyright holders compared to the €90 per alleged file-sharer that pays up. So, the copyright holders get 150 times more from pursuing filesharers than from selling actual music, the company claims.

More details at Torrent Freak.