Corporations and industry associations report "losses" of money that they never actually possessed. When you hear someone like the BSA or RIAA saying that they "lost" billions of dollars to software or music "pirates", what they actually mean is they came up with some (probably inflated) numbers of how many people copied their "intellectual property" without permisson and multiplied that by the full retail price of the supposedly "stolen" "goods". Besides the fact that this isn't a real loss of anything they actually had, they also purposefully neglect to consider that not all of those "thieves" would have the means or desire to purchase what they "stole" at the full retail price (or even a more realistically reduced price,) meaning that a significant percentage can't even be counted as loss of potential sales. So "loss," in this sense, actually means "what we would have liked to have made but didn't."

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