Microsoft spent an estimated $60 million on developing the security for its latest operating platform Microsoft XP and yet it was cracked and made available in a pirated format for free download within 8 hours of release.

The entertainment industry estimates that peer-to-peer sites carry 3.5 billion downloads a month, most of them copyrighted material, including 400, 000 to 600,000 copies of pirated movies each day.

In 2000 the software industry in Europe lost $3 billion to pirates

Last year, according to the Recording Industry Association of America, sales of music CDs fell 6.4%, the largest decline in more than a decade. Sales of MP3 players doubled.