How bad is piracy hurting the entertainment industrie's economy? Are they going bankrupt or have a good outlook? By entertainment I mean book publishing, music uploads like on iTunes or even movies whether DVD, Blue Ray, Netflix, Hulu whatever.  So much is moving online, that's the future.  Piracy cannot be stopped, Sean Parker of Napster a site that was hit hard and sued for piracy lawsuits of releasing music for free, he even said, "The war on piracy is a failure."  If a war is something to be won, piracy will win, but how much is what I and others are worried about.

Along with the big suits and artists/writer/actors/singers whatever, there are movie theater employees, Apple store employees, programmers for online entertainment companies, etc...the economy for this industry is huge and can be hurt a lot since as online media is growing so is online theft, hacking, and piracy.  While it is good to go into a field of medicine, engineering, business (which this is), entertainment is a cultural classic and the people in it mostly work hard and moved up to get where they were in turn making jobs for everyone.

Star Wars made like a billion last month, but that's now and that a big movie.  Kick@ss 2 stars said another sequel can't be made because the last two were pirated too much.  Scary.  Is the industry's outlook more collapse than still being profitable in the future?
Economic evidence on the effects of piracy is mixed. Most of the evidence focuses on the music industry, where piracy has been especially prevalent and where data is often more readily available.

Some papers find evidence that piracy has little or no effect of industry profits (here is one prominent example).

Other studies (example) find that piracy displaces sales and reduces profits. The estimates there imply that each song pirated costs the industry about 30 US cents.

Most surveys of the literature seem to conclude that the overall effect is negative.

Some messages that emerge from the literature:


piracy especially harms large, well-established content creators, but may benefit small/independent creators who otherwise find it harder to reach an audience;
for music: the industry has somewhat pivoted away from recorded music sales in favour or live performances as a source of revenue;
the revenue cost of piracy is offset by the benefit consumers get from consuming free music. Putting aside the competing interests of firms and creators, the main social problem associated with piracy is its potential to reduce the number of creative works produced in the first place (by reducing the rewards to creating new works).
evidence on the incentives to create new works is also mixed (see, e.g., here);
thanks to political lobbying, creators probably enjoy 'too much' copyright protection (see here and here). Piracy may be helping to offset this somewhat;
there are other things going on in the industry that may may more important than piracy. In particular, (i) search technologies give rise to 'long-tail' effects where a small number of works (e.g. Harry Potter) become incredibly successful but the majority not (a reference is here), and (ii) platforms such as Spotify, iTunes and Netflix are emerging as very powerful actors who are able to appropriate much of the industry revenue.


In summary, piracy probably does seem to be hurting the entertainment industry to some extent, but not critically so.