Yesterday we told you about a letter from the US Chamber of Commerce to President Bush in an effort to convince him to sign the annual attempt at draconian intellectual property enforcement legislation. The centerpiece of their argument to the President is a pair of oft-cited statistics claiming piracy has cost the US 750,000 jobs, as well as annual financial losses of $250 billion.
Now Ars Technica has published an interesting article that sheds a significant amount of light on the actual source of those figures and the closer you look, the less credible they look. That’s not surprising considering $250 billion is more than the combined US revenue of the music, movie, and software industries. It’s more than a little difficult to believe they’re losing more than they’re making.
A look at the sordid history of these numbers reveals just how useless they really are. To begin with they appear to have been extrapolated from the results of a survey compiled in the 1980s. The survey was conducted on a small sample of US businesses, with the resulting numbers then multiplied into an estimate of worldwide losses not from piracy, but from the IP laws in many countries, which are far less restrictive than in the US.
And even its authors apparently didn’t have much faith in their figures, noting that they “could admittedly be biased and self-serving.” Not exactly a glowing recommendation to take it seriously two decades later.
Although this doesn’t bring us any closer to real figures, it does reveal something that may be more important. If there is any real evidence compiled since this study it’s less compelling. Otherwise we wouldn’t keep hearing the same old story.
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Several times a year we see lobbyists and legislators in Washington trying to sell the Department of Justice on the idea of a so-called Copyright Czar. Such a position would essentially create a staff of pro bono lawyers to litigate what are currently civil cases for copyright holders (ie the music, movie, and software industries). Now they’re getting heat from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which sent a letter to President Bush claiming IP infringement “has already caused the loss of an estimated 750,000 American jobs.”
That’s right. Of the 9.5 million Americans who are unemployed, nearly 8% have apparently been put out of work by pirates. At least if you believe the Chamber of Commerce figures.
Of course you’d be hard pressed to confirm that since the letter doesn’t bother to list any sources for that figure. Nor does it explain exactly how it “poses a severe health and safety risk to consumers.”
The letter was sent in support of a bill known as PRO-IP, or the “Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act,” which is just the latest version of legislation that gets proposed annually and shot down just as routinely in one or both houses of Congress.
