Commerce Department Pushing For New "Copyright Czar"

TechDirt is reporting that those all-too-familiar "stats" surrounding the cost of piracy are being trotted out in an attempt to push through a new "Copyright Czar" position. "In urging President Bush to sign into law the ProIP bill, which would give him a copyright czar (something the Justice Department had said it doesn't want), the US Chamber of Commerce is claiming that 750,000 American jobs have been lost to piracy. Yet, it doesn't cite where that number comes from."

Comments

Easy

[Eponymous Crowbar]

If we just hire 750,000 copyright czars, well there ya go. That would be mavericky, you betcha.

Re:Easy

[Jimmyisikura]

Yes but then we have created a problem by removing 10,000,000,000 pirates from the market. Pirates need to eat too. Studies also show that 12/15 of those 750,000 are part-time ax-murderers. I think the statistics show the real victims here.

Re:Easy

[ShieldW0lf]

Average Americans used to be restricted to a very small subset of the information and culture that exists. The average person just couldn't afford any more than that.

Now, thanks to piracy, they have access to most of it.

In addition to having access to more, percentage-wise, it is a fact that despite current conditions, there are more creative works being made than ever before in recorded history. And they get access to most of that too.

Therefore, rampant piracy has improved the average persons quality of life.

If it came to pass that there was an end to piracy, and an extra 250 billion a year was divided amongst all Americans, that amount of money wouldn't be anywhere close to enough to pay for what the average person currently has access to because of piracy.

Therefore, the average Americans quality of life would be significantly diminished should effective copyright enforcement become available and common.

In conclusion, the victims of the American War on Piracy are... the American people.

Re:Easy

[OVDoobie]

Oddly enough, the same goes for the American War on Drugs. 80% of arrests are for simple possession. Before you mod me off topic think about this: if they pass this, and are equally efficient with enforcement how may millions, if not billions, will this cost average Americans (assuming there is no jail time, just fines).

Re:Easy

[gnick]

That's an interesting way to phrase that - And you're not actually wrong. Piracy spreads culture to a much wider audience than could appreciate it otherwise.

However, there are a number of activities that people can undertake that improve their quality of life without any cost to other individuals or society as a whole. But some of these we've decided to outlaw because of various problems. For example:
* Jumping over subway turnstiles rather than walking to your destination or buying a ticket.
* Sneaking into private museums/movie theaters/plays to observe the goings-on rather than buying a ticket.
* Peeking into your sexy neighbor's window while she's changing for a cheap thrill rather than going to a strip club.
* Breaking into a house that's are nicer than your own and living there when the normal tenants are known to be away on vacation before cleaning up after yourself and leaving the house as you found it.

I could go on, but hopefully you see my point. All of those activities improve one person's quality of life without any noticeable cost to any other person or society overall (assuming that nobody gets noticed - then society suffers due to law-enforcement.) The first couple of examples are outlawed because, if everyone did them, the business model would fall apart and we (society) would lose things that we value - The same logic used for copyright enforcement. The latter couple of examples are outlawed because they offend our popularly accepted morals, although they are still examples of one person benefiting with no cost to others (assuming again that nobody gets caught or causes damage).

So do you jump subway turnstiles and sneak into museums/movies/plays/concerts? If not, why not? I see very little difference assuming that you would not have ridden or attended if you would have had to pay.

As a side note, I really need to learn to post A/C when countering somebody here who advocates rampant piracy. For some reason I just can't bring myself to do it... I must mention this to my analyst.

Re:Easy

[nine-times]

If it came to pass that there was an end to piracy, and an extra 250 billion a year was divided amongst all Americans, that amount of money wouldn't be anywhere close to enough to pay for what the average person currently has access to because of piracy.

What if we added in an extra $700 billion? Because I've heard that if you throw in an additional $150 in pork projects, Congress will pass anything.

Re:Easy

[Dun Malg]

Who am I to tell someone they can't destroy their own body?

You are a taxpayer and you have to cover the social costs of drug use.

This is a bullshit argument. If "society" thinks it's unfair that it has to pay the price of helping those who fuck themselves up with drugs, then it bloody well ought to stop paying. It's completely asinine to ban a substance because of the irresponsibility of a small subset of the population. The substance isn't what fucks people up. Fucked up people turn to substance abuse. It's idiots like you parroting discredited religious nutjob temperance bullshit from the turn of the previous century that are the problem. The foolish notion that the only difference between a drunkard and a pious churchgoing citizen is the bottle of whiskey is what keeps reasonable programs to address the root of the problem from being created. Do you treat suicidal tendencies by banning razor blades, ropes, guns, etc.? Of course not. You treat the person so they don't feel like they need to kill themselves! Why, then, does it make sense to you that the way to treat drug problems is more aggressive prohibition of drugs?

Re:Easy

[Endymion]

This entire problem seems to be based on two really idiotic 'theories':

1) That banning something with laws actually changes the rate of occurrence of something, in any significant society-changing scale.

2) That if someone cannot do something stupid with a particular thing, they will magically turn into an upstanding member of society.

These are such obvious bullshit that I put anyone who seriously believe in this idiocy into the "(mildly?) mentally handicapped" group. It's what psychs call "Magical Thinking" - that wishing something would happen makes it happen, and is a pretty significant delusion.

The example of suicide you bring up is a good one. If someone wants to kill themself and they can't get a gun, they'll use a rope. If they can't get a rope, they'll use pills. If they can't find pills, they will find a tall bridge. You cannot stop a determined person* simply by stopping one of the methods they might use. With drugs, it's the same. If they want to get messed up on drug "A", and they simply cannot get it, they'll use drug "B' instead. You actually see this behavior all the time: people that cannot use relatively safe drugs like marijuana end up moving to other, more dangerous things.

As a society, are we better off by spending money on a drug test that pushes a heavy user from marijuana to, say, cocaine? That one is a pretty obvious "no"...

* - Speaking of "determined persons", it's worth noting that the same reason banning razors to prevent suicide is a stupid idea makes "banning XYZ on an airplane to prevent terrorism" a really stupid idea. The big thing that 9/11 showed us is that terrorists can be innovative if they need to. Nobody had thought of box cutters in that manner before, and we aren't thinking of the weapon for the next terrorist attack for the same reason.

Piracy

[arizwebfoot]

We know where those lost jobs went, India and Pakistan all pirated our IT jobs.

--
Oh Well, Bad Karma and all . . .

Commerce Department?????

[lecithin]

The Commerce Department is not the US Chamber of Commerce.

Chamber of Commerce = non-for-profit business federation.

Commerce Department = Federal Government Entity.

As a matter of fact, the Commerce Department OBJECTS to a "Copyright Czar"

Henry Paulson

[whisper_jeff]

They got that number from Henry Paulson - he's so good at pulling out random large numbers that sound plausible while being founded on nothing of substance, after all.

Re:Henry Paulson

[n0dna]

Dammit.

I was going to say exactly the same thing, only I would have probably guessed where I think he pulled them out of.

Good show.

Re:Henry Paulson

[mcgrew]

Thanks for not linking his wikipedia entry. Unfortunately for me, I looked him up. Do not click that link! Jesus Christ but that's one freaky looking fuckweed! In order to save you the horror of seeing that man's face (makes goatse look like it came from a children's book) I'll quote wikipedia's entry on who he is:

Henry Merritt "Hank" Paulson Jr. (born March 28, 1946) is the United States Treasury Secretary and member of the International Monetary Fund Board of Governors. He previously served as the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Goldman Sachs.

Born in Palm Beach, Florida, to Marianna Gallaeur and Henry Merritt Paulson, a wholesale jeweler,[1] he was raised in Barrington Hills, Illinois. He was raised as a Christian Scientist.[2] Paulson attained the rank of Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts of America.[3][4]

A star athlete at Barrington High School, Paulson was a champion wrestler and stand out football player, graduating in 1964. Paulson received his Bachelor of Arts in English from Dartmouth College in 1968;[5] at Dartmouth he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and was an All Ivy, All East, and honorable mention All American as an offensive lineman.

He met his wife Wendy during his senior year. The couple have two adult children, Henry Merritt III and Amanda Clark, and became grandparents in June 2007. They maintain homes in Washington, DC and Barrington Hills, Illinois.

In 1970 Paulson received a Master of Business Administration degree from Harvard Business School.[6]

He is, in short, an anti-nerd. He is the complete and polar opposite of you and me.

I think it's obvious now why the banking industry crashed and the stock market is crashing. It's because of people like Henry Merritt "Hank" Paulson Jr. who will not lose their jobs and homes and who will NOT go hungry as a direct result of their actions, as you and I may. Not as a result of our actions, but as a result of HIS and the actions of people (and I use that term loosely) just like him.

If you fear people like Osama Bin Laden more than you fear people like Henry Merritt "Hank" Paulson Jr., IMO you're brain dead stupid.

Re:Henry Paulson

[mcgrew]

I'm not talking about those who have lost their homes, I'm talking about those who WILL lose their homes. Prepare for a really really bad recession; perhaps even a depression. I'm not the first to say "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it" but nobody listens to them, either.

If you want the crap scared out of you, I have three uncaracteristally SFW mcgrew journals to chew on:
Hoover for President
More Hoover (DAMN!) and
I hate it when I'm right

I already lost one house. It was back in '04 after my marriage went south. I'd bought my ex-wife a brand new PT Cruiser two months before she and her income left. She'd not paid the bills in order to save up for an apartment. She left me with months worth of bills, a broken van that I was still paying for, a mortgage, and two teenaged daughters to feed.

After declaring bankrupcy I gradually got my credit good enough to buy another house (after throwing my money away in a basement apartment for three years).

My house payments tripled this month. Yeah, it's MY fault.

I'll be able to make my payments, barely, but I won't have much if any left over to buy anything with. My lack of money caused by the mortgage company's greed will hurt all the people I normally do business with, who will all have a hell of a lot less of my money, because I have a hell of a lot less of my money.

You'd better hope you're not one of the millions that will lose their jobs in the next year. Can you afford your mortgage payments on unemployment insurance?

Re:Henry Paulson

[coyote_oww]

This is hyperbole. We're perhaps seeing one reason why his wife left - wild exageration can get old in an intimate partnership.

1) ARM (adjustable rate mortgages) can and usually do have annual increases in interest rate, resulting in an increase in the monthly payment. Usually, ARMs are limited to 1% per annum, and have a cap interest rate around 5% higher than the starting rate. I was in an ARM when I first bought my house, so I have a little experience to draw from.

(aside - ARMs typically offer a lower interest/payment for the first 2y, making them attractive for entry-level buyers)

2) Adding 1% to your interest rate on a 30y mortgage will not cause your payment to triple. That's just really bad math.

3) Buying a house 3 years after declaring bankrupcy puts you, by definition, into the high-risk pool.

4) Anyone posting on Slashdot ought to have the savvy to read a mortgage, look through the payment schedule, calculate the worst case scenario, and not be suprised by anything that happens. Some people can claim stupidity, but that won't fly here.

5) Further, the OP is on his second mortgage - he's been through this before. So he really has no grounds for complaint. He made a financial bet - that housing prices would continue to rise, even though they were at all-time highs. The bet failed, in that housing prices are now declining. Smart money would have stayed in the apartment for 1 more year, he'd be $100K ahead or something like that (based on my area's housing prices). If only we could see into the future....

6) It is his fault his mortgage is increasing - he decided to buy, he picked the mortgage, he signed on the dotted line. I certainly didn't - so I don't want it blamed on me. "The Government", George Bush, Henry Paulson, et. al. did not sign on the dotted line. Part of life is trying to pick and choose what to do and when. In a free country, you can make your own choices, but you have to live with the consequences. Buying was his choice. He certainly could have chosen NOT to buy - home-ownership is not legally required of anyone. Renting is sometimes the better financial choice. Given housing prices at historic highs (relative to wages), not buying would have been a sound decision, and time has proven it would have been the prudent course.

750,000??

[jgtg32a]

Are there even that many people working in the music and movies/tv industry in this country?

Re:750,000??

[Eponymous Crowbar]

Including porn, or not?

Re:750,000??

[theM_xl]

Well, not anymore, obviously ;)

Re:750,000??

[sesshomaru]

I think most of that number was clerks at Blockbuster video.

Reliable source for numbers of all kinds

[ivandavidoff]

The numbers came from The U.S. Department of the Posterior.

Uh huh

[Xeth]

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 383,000 people employed in the Motion picture and sound recording industries in September 2008.

My money is on the idea that they took the amount the industries estimate they lose from piracy and then divided that by some moderate wage.

Re:Uh huh

[halcyon1234]

Heck, think about it this way:

There are about 300 million (thousand thousand) people in the States

According to All Knowledge Ever, 24.6% are minors, and 12.7% are of retired age. That means there are only 188 million "employable" citizens.

The same BLS says the unemployment rate is 6%. That means there are 11.3 million unemployed citizens

If every single one of those lost jobs resulted in a currently unemployed person, then 6.65% of all unemployed persons were from the entertainment industry.

Now, assuming that their number isn't complete and utter bullshatistics-- nah, I think I'll just call BS and be done with this one.

Quickly!

[tgd]

We need a content producer bailout!!!

"...it doesn't cite where that number comes from."

[Snarfangel]

Easy. It comes from the set of real numbers.

Source of the number

[192939495969798999]

That 750,000 jobs number comes a very reliable source, the bird. Haven't you heard, about the bird?

Inefficency

[Wildclaw]

claiming that 750,000 American jobs have been lost to piracy

Overexaggerated number for sure, but jobs may very well have been lost because of piracy. But, so what? Let me formulate the matters in another light.

750,000 American jobs would have been wasted if piracy hadn't existed to combat the inherent inefficencies in the copyright and IP systems.

Jobs are good if they actually produce something useful to society. Otherwise they are just a big waste, and do little more than shuffle resources around because the current system don't have a better way to allocate it.

Even if more actual intellectual property were produced with stronger IP laws, it still isn't sure that it would be a better idea. The real value of IP isn't how much is produced, but how much is produced times how well spread it is among the population. Also, that total value has to be balanced against the cost of producing it.

Say that 700,000 more jobs would be created. That is a multi billion cost. And what would be the gain. More tv? More music? More movies? It isn't like there is a lack of choice right now.

Re:Inefficency

[mcgrew]

More like 75000 jobs GAINED. I would like to Quote Cory Doctorow from the forward to Little Brother (emphasis mine):

I recently saw Neil Gaiman give a talk at which someone asked him how he felt about piracy of his books. He said, "Hands up in the audience if you discovered your favorite writer for free -- because someone loaned you a copy, or because someone gave it to you? Now, hands up if you found your favorite writer by walking into a store and plunking down cash." Overwhelmingly, the audience said that they'd discovered their favorite writers for free, on a loan or as a gift. When it comes to my favorite writers, there's no boundaries: I'll buy every book they publish, just to own it (sometimes I buy two or three, to give away to friends who must read those books). I pay to see them live. I buy t-shirts with their book-covers on them. I'm a customer for life.

Neil went on to say that he was part of the tribe of readers, the tiny minority of people in the world who read for pleasure, buying books because they love them. One thing he knows about everyone who downloads his books on the Internet without permission is that they're readers, they're people who love books.

People who study the habits of music-buyers have discovered something curious: the biggest pirates are also the biggest spenders. If you pirate music all night long, chances are you're one of the few people left who also goes to the record store (remember those?) during the day. You probably go to concerts on the weekend, and you probably check music out of the library too. If you're a member of the red-hot music-fan tribe, you do lots of everything that has to do with music, from singing in the shower to paying for black-market vinyl bootlegs of rare Eastern European covers of your favorite death-metal band.

No artist ever starved because of copyright infringement. Many artists have starved because of obscurity.

Re:"...it doesn't cite where that number comes fro

[Qzukk]

It comes from the set of real numbers.

Funny, I could have sworn it looked imaginary.

Incitement Czar

[Doc Ruby]

Has any of these "czars" the US government has been fond of appointing the past decade or so actually accomplished anything except creating more serfs?

Why does the US government have people modeled on the most hated monarchs, who drove Russians so nuts that they went "Communist" on us for 3/4 of a century, and nearly helped us blast the world back to microscopic life?

How about Congress just returns copyright to its Constitutional basis: at most 17 years (a human "generation") of private monopoly on any content, but only when that monopoly will "promote progress in science and the useful arts". That regime doesn't need a czar, it needs a searchable content registry archive and an antitrust watchdog.

Japanese Anime Translation

[Khisanth Magus]

Although it is more in the thousands, possibly as high as ten thousand, it is true that there has been a significant amount of job loss due to piracy in the companies that bring japanese anime over to the US. I've talked with voice actors as well as people who run those companies, and piracy really has hurt them. Some companies are closing up shop, others are just having to severely cut back to make ends meet. This was never a large profit business in the first place, and with people downloading it so much as opposed to buying the DVDs they can't manage to squeak by.

The irony of this is that the "copyright czar" would probably just ignore this as the MPAA and RIAA aren't involved. Not that I'm advocating law suits against people who do pirate it, as I think that is way over the top, just pointing out that people HAVE lost their jobs due to piracy.

Re:Japanese Anime Translation

[SaXisT4LiF]

I think that parent AC makes a valid point. While fansubs may technically be a violation of copyright law, those viewers that become fans of the series will probably end up purchasing the DVDs, T-Shirts, Video Games, and other merchandise related to the franchise.

In respect to the Anime market in the US, there are a number of other factors that could be contributing to low sales:

• Bad voice acting. There are exceptions to this (i.e. Mononoke Hime), but many of the English dubs are terrible. The English actors don't seem to convey the same tone and mood of the original voice-overs. Most anime fans prefer Japanese voice-overs with English sub-titles. The only real reason to include an English dub is if the target audience is very young and can't be expected to read.
• Price tag. The average cost per disk is about $25-$30 and it contains 3 episodes on average, 4 if you're lucky. It probably works out to about $8 per episode. Considering that many of the series contain upwards of 200 episodes, this becomes a hefty chunk of change. I think the problem here is the cost of producing the English dubs. You can often import the same series without English VOs in a box set for closer to $1 an episode. Why pay 8 times the price for English VOs that you're not going to listen to anyway?
• Release delays. The DVDs don't hit the US stores until almost 3 years after the original air date. Presumably this is due to the time it takes to record the English VOs. By the time the DVD hits the US market, the buyer has lost interest in the series and moved on to something else.

In short, Anime publishers should ditch the English VOs and get the product to market sooner and for a lower price.

Re:I have a question:

[wcrowe]

Not sure if you're being serious or not, but the Russian "Tsar" has historically been tranliterated into English as Czar or Tsar. For a long time one might have found it spelled either way, but since "Czar" started being used to describe a high government official, e.g., "Drug Czar" the CZ spelling has tended to be applied to that use, while the TS spelling has now nearly always come to be applied to the rulers of the Russian Empire. The OED comments thusly: The spelling with cz- is against the usage of all Slavonic languages; the word was so spelt by Herberstein, Rerum Moscovit. Commentarii 1549, the chief early source of knowledge as to Russia in Western Europe, whence it passed into the Western Languages generally; in some of these it is now old-fashioned; the usual Ger. form is now zar; French adopted tsar during the 19th c. This also became frequent in English towards the end of that century, having been adopted by the Times newspaper as the most suitable English spelling.

why does a free market economy need commie czars?

[Russ Nelson]

Why does a free market economy need czars? Aren't they an invention of the same country that adopted communist central planning to such poor effect?

Actually...

[SerfsUp]

Great idea. I nominate Lawrence Lessig!

true in some sense

[Trepidity]

Sure, you could say that the lender and lendee are each about half responsible. But the difference is that the lender is supposed to have known better: their job is finance. By contrast, the average homeowner has no financial expertise.

Thus two sides mutually entered a stupid contract, but one of the sides was actually staffed by full-time professionals whose supposed expertise lay precisely in evaluating contracts for non-stupidity.