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Misleading Data Undermines Counterfeiting Claims
An anonymous reader writes "Canada has been the home to a growing debate on counterfeiting with politicians, law enforcement, and copyright lobby groups all pushing for stronger copyright and anti-counterfeiting laws. Writing in the Toronto Star, Michael Geist reports that the claims are based on fatally flawed data. The RCMP, Canada's national police force, has been claiming that counterfeiting costs Canadians $30 billion per year. When pressed on the issue, last week they admitted that the estimate was not based on any original research but rather on 'open source documents found on the Internet.'"
some readers might not realize that the phrase "open source" has a number of common uses.
besides the one most slashdot readers are familiar with, another is possibly equally interesting to slashdot readers:
click here for an alternative definition.
cheers.
Does anyone really believe that one in five dollars spent goes to something "fake"?
I think they are counting lost sales based on any fake would have been a real sale. Just considering my daughters 30 gig Zen would lead to that conclusion. The Zen has 2,200 files on it (I know from making a backup). With the back-up copy also being a pirated copy, that at a dollar per song is about 5K dollars worth of pirated stuff. That counts just my daughters Zen, not my son's iPod. In the last year using those figures, they have collected together over 15% of my income for the year. I think this is the figures they are running with.
What they are failing to figure, is if all that music was paid for for each copy, is they could pocket that money. This is simply wrong. That money isn't there. At full retail with piracy eliminated the reality would be that neither kid would have any use for an iPod or Zen and they would be exposed to less music and would have bought far fewer CD's than they actualy did. With the portable music players and a large exposuere, they have become avid fans of some bands and buy CD's and go to concerts. Without the exposure, this would not have happend.
I grew up in the 1970s. Through those years, I didn't go to any concerts. The local AM station played country. In high school the next town over got a couple FM stations, one was rock. Piracy was mostly non-existant, but so was my involvement with any music industry product.
When I went into the Navy and spent time in the barracs, I was exposed to lots of neat music. I invested heavily in a very good stereo system including a linear tracking turntable and 2 cassette decks. I pirated a bunch of stuff and also bought a bunch of stuff. That was my peak music buying years. If Piracy didn't exist, I would have had little reason to get into stereo and invest in quality duplication decks in a big way. This is seldom figured in any anti-piracy study. For the new generation, the cassette decks has been replaced by PC hard drives and portable music players. The cost of duplication has gone down, the quality of copies has gone up and the media compainies still have way overpriced products.
The biggest roadblock to stopping piracy at the moment is simply overpriced product. This has not changed since I was in the Navy. I would have bought a lot more of my favorite music if it didn't cost so stinking much. I'm glad to see Nine Inch Nails make an issue of that. They are dead right.
The truth shall set you free!