If piracy is such a big deal to media corporations, if piracy is responsible for billions in “lost earnings”, why do they never report this as a final loss on their financial statements? Corporations would miss no opportunity to cook the books.

It’s because there is no such actual loss due to piracy. If it was real, every media corporation would gleefully report themselves as being millions, if not billions, in the red due to “piracy”.

Finance and economics are full of polite fictions, but it turns out that you can’t claim tax offset against something that isn’t real.