Would you be surprised to hear that the MPAA, RIAA and other content thugs behind the SOPA/PIPA debacle fudged their numbers to increase costs and job losses associated with unauthorized copying of copyright materials?
No?
Well you should be, the figures bandied about by supporters of the unmaking of the world wide web, $200-250 billion per year and 750,000 jobs lost, were not fudged from various studies, they were fabricated from whole cloth. What's more the cloth is missing.
Julian Sanchez tracked down the source of these numbers 3 years ago. C'mon, let's take a look...
The story appeared on ArsTechnica, and has been revived by the astute bloggistry of Kevin Fogarty at ITWorld.
Julian leads off nicely:
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.
Ars Technica tracked the 750,000 jobs claim to a US Customs and Border Patrol press release from 2002, but the CPB disavowed the numbers, since they do not produce studies like that on their own, and have no idea where the figure originally came from. The figure did appear in their press releases going as far back as 1993 however. I think it was Karl Rove or Josef Goebbels who said that if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth. By this standard, the figure must be indisputable by now.
But that did not stop our intrepid reporters from scouring press archives back to the pre-history of the web, 1986:
The Christian Science Monitor quoted then-Commerce Secretary Malcom Baldridge, trumpeting Ronald Reagan's own precursor to the recently passed PRO-IP bill. Baldridge estimated the number of jobs lost to the counterfeiting of U.S. goods at "anywhere from 130,000 to 750,000."
So that 750,000 figure includes Gucci knock-off handbags and fake Toyota parts, but no DVDs.
About that $250,000,000,000
Ars Technica tracked that figure to a 2002 conference featuring the FBI, which is often cited as the source for that number, and the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center. Neither organization could find a source for the number, but it does happen to match the result you would get if you adjust the 1993 estimate of $200B to 2002 dollars. Sweet.
So where does the $200B come from, you might ask. Well the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition submitted that figure in 1995 congressional testimony for the Anticounterfeiting Consumer Protection Act of 1996, saying "estimates the economic cost due to product counterfeiting to exceed $200 billion each year".
They got this figure, it seems, from the Oct. 25, 1993 issue of Forbes:
Ars eagerly hunted down that issue and found a short article on counterfeiting, in which the reader is informed that "counterfeit merchandise" is "a $200 billion enterprise worldwide and growing faster than many of the industries it's preying on." No further source is given.
Note that this unsourced figure is a worldwide cost of counterfeit merchandise. On the other hand, the US International Trade Commission came up with a somewhat empirical guesstimate by combining the results of unverified surveys of selected IP-reliant businesses, then doubling it. So the numbers are fishy, but there are real and substantial losses in there somewhere for sure...
or not:
All the projections we've discussed, the rigorous and the suspect alike, calculate losses in sales or royalties to U.S. firms. This is often conflated with the net "cost to the U.S. economy." But those numbers—whatever they might be—are almost certainly not the same. When someone torrents a $12 album that they would have otherwise purchased, the record industry loses $12, to be sure. But that doesn't mean that $12 has magically vanished from the economy. On the contrary: someone has gotten the value of the album and still has $12 to spend somewhere else.
...
To calculate the net loss to the economy over the long run, you'd need to figure out the value of the lost innovation in which IP owners would have invested the marginal dollar lost to piracy, and subtract from that the value of the second-best allocation—which is to say, whatever the consumer of the pirated good spent his money on instead
So is it all just self-serving industry bullshit meant to con and scare congress into dismantling our rights and letting the feds act as muscle for a grand extortion scheme?
Who knows, but Wired did a few rough comparisons, noting that 750,000 jobs represents 8% of the currently unemployed and $250 billion is more than the combined 2005 gross domestic revenues of the movie, music, software, and video game industries.