I always wanted to know how is the damage done determined ?<p>"U.S. authorities say Dotcom and three co-accused Megaupload executives cost film studios and record companies more than $500 million and generated more than $175 million by encouraging paying users to store and share copyrighted material."<p>Distributing copyrighted stuff is illegal, period. But the way those calculations are made worries me. Do they start from the presumption that if the movie wasn't uploaded on megaupload, some person would have bought tickets to that film ? Is that the underlying premise?<p>I mean as a consumer I could either buy the movie, or watch an illegal upload of it. Isn't that a false dichotomy?. I could just as well not watch it, if that illegal upload didn't exist, and as such I would not have costed the company one cent.