According to This story, a confidential study for the Australian government has concluded that industry statistics concerning financial loss due to piracy are "unverified and epistemologically unreliable." The study by the Australian Institute of Criminology and leaked to the The Australian, a national newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, was said to be in an "early draft" stage.

I've long believed that publishers pump up piracy statistics in order to portray themselves as victims. We've already seen that the publishing industry can't (and doesn't want to) distinguish illegal downloads from legitimate use of the Internet to transfer open source and public domain materials.