Affidavit2
United States of America v. Luke Simmons
District of (name)
Lisa Fitzgerald, Ph.D., being first duly sworn, deposes and says:
My name is Dr. Lisa Fitzgerald. I am a Professor of Marketing and Advertising at New State College. One of my areas of expertise is calculating lost profits due to retail theft - both due to shoplifting and electronic piracy. In May 2006, lawyers for the Defendant, Mr. Simmons, contacted me and asked me to review Susan Dougherty's calculations for the dollar amount of the loss attributed to the Defendant's allegedly illegal downloading of music and movies.
I agreed to do so, and drew the following conclusions. In a technical sense, her findings were accurate; however, in a practical sense, they were not. The difference arises in the way Ms. Dougherty calculated her loss numbers. She based these numbers on the average price for all movies and music. In other words, several prominent statisticians gathered a collection of thousands of movies and songs, and averaged their prices. The result was an estimate of roughly $1 per song and $10 per movie.
When one takes the actual retail value for the songs and movies that Mr. Simmons was alleged to have downloaded, they average much less-roughly 30 cents per song and $7 per move. So, if, for the sake of argument, the Defendant actually downloaded some 714 songs total and some 54 movies, his actions would have only resulted in losses totaling $214 for the songs and $378 for the movies, or $592.00 for both.
While it is true that Ms. Dougherty employed the more commonly accepted method to calculate losses, the method I used to arrive at my conclusions is specifically sanctioned by several leading journals, and is slowly being employed in more and more situations because it is based on the actual retail value of the products.
/Lisa Fitzgerald, Ph.D./
Subscribed and sworn to before me this first day of July 2006.
SEAL /sig/
Mike Farrell
Notary Public
My commission expires January 2019.
2. Adapted from: West's Legal Forms: 3rd Ed. Vol. 27. (Bradford Stone, General Ed.; St. Paul, Minn. West Publishing Co., 1996).