No crystal ball required. You can extrapolate estimates. And you do it using existing factual data, to estimate a value. Otherwise, according to your logic, my house is worth nothing until someone hands me over a wad of cash in a sales transaction.
I said that there was no way to
establish specific losses. It will always be a guess at best. There are tons of variables that are by nature, unknowns. With stolen physical property you can establish the loss as it is immediate and tangible, i.e. your loss = 1 TV. BTW, a house (or anything else) is only worth (monetarily) what someone is willing to pay for it. If you go the rest of your life without finding a buyer, then what is its monetary worth?
As an extreme example, say you are a studio and you own the movie "Blahblah". You plan on releasing it on DVD. You do not have a crystal ball, but you do have factual data based on other movies released before it. (sales figures, average retail price tag, time of year, how it did at the box office, how comparable movies did in sales and box office, amount of marketing dollars invested, type of advertising, duration of marketing, etc, etc). Someone with the training and education to look at such data will be able to extrapolate optimistic and pessimistic sales estimates.
Now I said i'd be using an extreme example so here I go. They release "BlahBlah" and it sells Zero, yet everyone on the net is talking about having seen it on DVD, etc. So obviously a large number of people have pirated copies. Now you mean to tell me that the company's losses are zero?
No, I don't mean to tell you that the company's losses are zero, nor did I say anything in my post which would lead one to believe that I would think that. There are likely losses in your scenario but they can not be established factually; because there is no way to know exactly how many copies would have sold if no one had copied the movie.
Now, it is within the realm of possibility that no copies of the movie would have sold and their losses would have been zero. Unlikely, but certainly possible. It is also within the realm of possibility that each of those people with bootleg copies, had the bootlegs not been available, would have bought 10 legitimate copies each for themselves, or 20, or 50 out of sheer adoration for the movie and wanting to plaster it all over their walls. So anyway, when talking about a
possible range for the loss, it could be anywhere from 0 dollars to a zillion+ dollars. Now they can come up with an educated best guess and assume that they are in the ballpark but it still won't be a fact.
Keep in mind my disclaimer from my first post. I am only talking about differences here between stolen IP and stolen physical property. A tangible loss is
different than a speculative loss, no matter how you slice it.