Hi Billy, On Apr 3, 2012, at 7:49 PM, [email protected] wrote:
> In any case the Reuters story, and others like it, is where I get my > narrative from. > I can easily grant some of your criticisms. However, I also feel that > Reuters, etc, > is / are basically right. I have no idea what your sources are. Newspapers like the Washington Post, who actually investigate the issue rather than merely repeating Hollywood soundbites: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/how-much-does-online-piracy-really-cost-the-economy/2012/01/05/gIQAXknNdP_blog.html > For example, the Motion Picture Association of America estimates that piracy > costs the U.S. movie industry some $20.5 billion per year. But Julian Sanchez > scrutinizes these figures and finds they don’t hold up. After you remove all > the double-counting and restrict the focus solely to American users — which > is the only thing SOPA addresses, anyway — then, he notes, those > industry-estimated losses come to just $446 million per year (“roughly the > amount grossed globally by Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel”). > > And even those numbers might not be right. The Government Accountability > Office has raised further questions and concerns about the copyright > industry’s claims of losses here. Part of the difficulty here is that it’s > not always easy to tally up the true costs of piracy. For instance, if a > person illegally downloads a movie or song that he never would’ve downloaded > otherwise, then it’s not clear what the losses actually amount to (the > benefits, by contrast, are fairly clear). Is it a problem? Yes. Is it on the scale Hollywood likes to complain about? Almost certainly not. Shockingly, mainline journalists have once again failed to actually vet the facts they repeat with such confidence... -- Ernie P. More analysis: http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d10423.pdf http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/how-copyright-industries-con-congress/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/10/dodgy-digits-behind-the-war-on-piracy.ars > If you pay any attention to the endless debates over intellectual property > policy in the United States, you'll hear two numbers invoked over and over > again, like the stuttering chorus of some Philip Glass opera: 750,000 and > $200 to $250 billion. The first is the number of U.S. jobs supposedly lost to > intellectual property theft; the second is the annual dollar cost of IP > infringement to the U.S. economy. These statistics are brandished like a > talisman each time Congress is asked to step up enforcement to protect the > ever-beleaguered U.S. content industry. And both, as far as an extended > investigation by Ars Technica has been able to determine, are utterly bogus. -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
