That point always bothered me about the whole "our economy loses X billions because of piracy". If people would have purchased everything they pirated, then some industries would have gained those X billions, but the flipside to that is that other industries would lose the same amount of money. So you would create Y million jobs in the entertainment industry, but you'd lose Y million jobs in other industries. Is that an acceptable trade? Probably not.
When someone pirates something he may otherwise have paid for, it isn't necessarily a net loss in production. Imagine that one person pirates software A, which he would have bought and spends the money on software B, which he would not have bought. Now imagine another person does the reverse.
Same amount of money goes into these two software companies, twice as "much" software comes out. There is a consumption benefit (that goes to the pirates). If the pirates use that software to create more wealth, that is benefit leaking back out into the rest of the economy.
Because of the way size is usually calculated (like volunteer work), we wouldn't count that pirate as having gained anything. That is probably not the right way of looking at things. Even if it is, it is very hard to say that anything "cost the economy X.'
It also brings up interesting questions like, "What other purchases would they have forgone?"