Italy's Two-Speed War on Piracy

Audiovisual piracy cost the Italian economy roughly 2.3 billion euro in 2025, including an estimated 902 million euro in lost GDP, 408 million euro in forgone tax revenue and around 11,100 jobs that were never created. What makes that figure striking is that it held steady even as piracy itself declined, which is the detail that should interest rights holders far more than the headline number on its own.

The data comes from the 2025 FAPAV/Ipsos Doxa survey, presented in Rome at an event marking two years of the country's anti-piracy law. It found that 37 percent of Italians aged ten and over committed at least one act of piracy during the year, which works out to roughly 20 million people. That is down four percent on 2024 and seven percent on 2023, and across those two years more than a million people appear to have stopped altogether. As Il Sole 24 Ore put it, there are fewer pirates now, but the bill remains steep.

What is actually inside the 2.3 billion euro figure?

The headline describes lost revenue across the national economy, and underneath it are three figures that tend to carry more weight in a boardroom or a ministry than the top-line number itself. Piracy is associated with an estimated 902 million euro in lost GDP, 408 million euro in forgone tax revenue, and roughly 11,100 jobs that were never created. Those are the numbers that turn piracy from an industry grievance into an economic policy problem, and in Italy that shift has already happened.

The breakdown by content type shows who carries the exposure. Among adults, the most pirated categories in 2025 were films at 28 percent, series and fiction at 23 percent, and television programmes at 19 percent. Live sport came in lower, at 14 percent, and for the first time since 2021 it declined, falling by one point against the previous year. That single movement turns out to be the most instructive figure in the report, because it did not happen by accident.

Live sport is the most heavily defended category in Italy, and it is also the only one where the consumption of pirated content has started to reverse.

Why did sports piracy fall when other categories did not?

Italy did something that most markets have not, which is to build dedicated infrastructure against live piracy. The Piracy Shield platform, operational since early 2024, requires intermediaries to block illegal live streams within roughly thirty minutes of a report. By 2025, according to the communications regulator AGCOM, the number of blocked sites had grown by more than a third in a single year and had passed one hundred thousand. Seventy percent of adults consider the system effective, and among people who specifically pirate live sport, that figure rises to 77 percent.

The point is not that blocking is a complete solution, because it plainly is not, and it remains contested inside Italy by consumer groups, internet providers and even a member of the regulator itself. The point is narrower and more durable, which is that the one category to receive a dedicated, real-time defensive mechanism is also the one category where the consumption of pirated content began to fall. In the categories without such a mechanism, the decline has been slower and the underlying cost has stayed high.

Why does the economic cost stay high when piracy is falling?

Blocking works on distribution, meaning the pirate stream that a viewer actually clicks on, and it does very little about origin, meaning the specific copy that leaked and the specific point in the supply chain it leaked from. A blocked stream is often replaced within minutes by another one drawn from the same underlying source, which is precisely why the number of pirates can fall while the economic damage refuses to move. The market is removing outlets faster than it is removing sources, and the arithmetic of that eventually shows up in the annual figure.

Read this way, the Italian data works as a strategic prompt rather than a progress report. It shows that a serious defensive investment can change outcomes, which is genuinely encouraging. The open question it raises is what protects the content itself, before it becomes a blocked stream and before it becomes one of a hundred thousand domains, at the moment a single authorised copy is first turned into a leak. That is a question about attribution rather than blocking, and it is the one the 2.3 billion euro figure keeps returning to year after year.

Sources

1. [1] Il Sole 24 Ore. “Fewer pirates, but the bill remains steep: 2.3 billion lost to illegal activity.”
2. [2] Advanced Television. “Italy: Anti-piracy efforts seeing success.”
3. [3] Piracy Monitor. “Italy: 37% of Italian population consume pirated content (FAPAV/Ipsos Doxa).”

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