A new "report" has been released by Copytrack, supposedly detailing the insane amount of "stealing" that goes on every day. "Report" is in quotes for reason. First, the "report" [PDF] opens up with a literally unbelievable statistic conjecture.
[I]t is estimated that more than 2.5 billion images are stolen daily. These license violations have the potential to result in up to €532.5 billion in damages daily.
Not even in the most fevered dream of the most overwrought copyright maximalist could this number be considered plausible. As attorney/law professor Jeff Pearlman points out, this hilarious extrapolation from facts not in evidence conjectures that copyright infringement of images alone results in a number that swallows the entirety of the world's economy.
Let's do some math! GWP (combined global GDPs) is ~$87 trillion. That's ~$240 billion/day. Copytrack says $600 billion/day in "stolen" images.
So: they say the value of "stolen" images is more than twice what the en ...