This morning, in going through my feeds, I found a beautiful info graphic representing the piles of money that Hollywood has made this year for taking film of people saying things.

The infographic is pretty neat, and is put out by a fellow named Zach Beane, and is not just a static graphic, but an active representation of box office share (when you hover over the movie’s graph segment, it’ll pop up a hard number of what that movie made total).

It’s serendipitous I saw this when I did, because this morning, NYC’s PR folks forwarded news of a new anti-piracy campaign: “Piracy Doesn’t Work in NYC.”

The premise is that “if you download a free movie, this woman loses her job.”

The fact is that the numbers don’t really support it. Some of the highest grossing films, even adjusted historically for inflation, occurred in the age of “rampant online piracy.”

As Mike Masnick is fond of saying, this assertion doesn’t “pass the laugh test, let alone close scrutiny.”

The folks in Hollywood have been working overtime lately trying to convince the world that piracy is harming the industry, even as the industry is having its best year ever in terms of both money made and the number of movies released. It’s an uphill slog, so lobbyists, lawyers and execs from the various studios have resorted to what can only be described as “making stuff up.”

The assertion is made, not just by industry wonks and shills, but by high powered Hollywood directors like Steven Soderbergh, that not only is Hollywood losing money to piracy, but fewer films are being made.

This, of course, is contradicted by the numbers the movie industry puts out itself:

2004 Total Movies Released: 567 Total Combined Gross: $9,327,315,935
2005 Total Movies Released: 594 Total Combined Gross: $8,825,324,278
2006 Total Movies Released: 808 Total Combined Gross: $9,225,689,414
2007 Total Movies Released: 1022 Total Combined Gross: $9,665,661,126
2008 Total Movies Released: 1037 Total Combined Gross: $9,705,677,862
2009 Total Movies Released: 1147 Total Combined Gross: $10,858,015,636
2010 Total Movies Released: 874 Total Combined Gross: $9,441,294,022 (numbers not yet complete).

The number of movies has steadily increased over the past decade, and the amount of money Hollywood makes as a whole has remained relatively constant.

Meanwhile, the “poor movie industry” employees we’re made to feel sorry for in the NYC PSA are actually getting more work from the emergence of New Media.

Over the past year, SiliconANGLE has been very active in our video coverage of major conferences and press events, and typically, these types of unionized video professionals dominate the scene. Most of the time, when it comes to video, the SiliconANGLE crew is the only non-unionized video crew at these events, and even we must rely on convention-center employed unions to take care of our lighting, electricity and bandwidth.

Most of the folks who have followed my coverage of piracy and New Media aren’t surprised by this – I don’t think anyone truly believes that the movie industry is failing because of piracy. They may be failing or seeing their consumer base erode in the face of other ways technology has exposed better entertainment options, but piracy isn’t costing jobs in the movie business, plain and simple.

I do have to question, in the face of contrary statistics, why it’s the government of NYC to shill for the movie industry, or the mis-guided unions for the film industry.

[Editor’s Note: Cross-posted to SA MediaLabs. Updated with accurate 2009 numbers and partial 2010 numbers for movie release data. –mrh]