Figures for lost sales usually assume that consumers who use pirated content would always choose to purchase the product at the market rate, if the illegal sources were not available.
However, other scholars and free culture and copyleft activists argue that the industry figures are grossly inflated, because some, if not most, individuals who obtain pirated copies would not have purchased the content even if the opportunity for piracy did not exist.
[6] Estimates of lost sales commonly are given in the values of billions of U.S. dollars for the U.S. market alone, with the worldwide figures being several times higher.
[9][5] Treating each pirated copy as a lost sale, and using an estimate for the number of pirated copies in existence, multiplied by their retail value, as tangible loss of profits by the industry has been called disparagingly "copyright math" (a term coined by writer Robert Reid) that leads to overestimation of the content industry losses.
"[20] In 2015 Peter Sunde (co-founder of Pirate Bay) created a device called Kopimashin to "show the absurdity on the process of putting a value to a copy".