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Ars Examines Outlandish "Lost To Piracy" Claims and Figures
Nom du Keyboard writes "For years the figures of $200 billion and 750,000 jobs lost to intellectual property piracy have been bandied about, usually as a cudgel to demand ever more overbearing copyright laws with the intent of diminishing of both Fair Use and the Public Domain. Now ARS Technica takes a look into origin and validity these figures and finds far less than the proponents of them might wish."
I would estimate the number of jobs lost to intellectual property theft to be very little, and probably mostly due to patents.
Please stop grouping trademarks, patents, and copyrights together.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
I've always said I'd believe the numbers when an insurance company pays out a policy for the amount, and/or a company writes off the loss to the IRS in tax filings. Generally speaking, I don't accept claims that are in a forum or format that would not be construed as testimony by a federal court. I have never heard anybody with any authority to speak for a US corporation, give a deposition under oath that makes the claims addressed in the article. It is as though they tell their shareholders, artists, performance rights organizations, and their own attorneys, different things from what they tell the FBI, the Customs agents, certain elements in the media, and lobbyists. I'm thinking there might actually be a crime here, but what do I know?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
What makes you think that the NYT has more credibility than Ars? Personally, I see it the other way around: I'm far less prone to double-checking Ars figures than NYT figures. That's because when I did so in the past, Ars figures were a lot more accurate than NYT figures - at least when it came to tech issues.
Unless you mean that it would be nice for the MSM to pick it up. In which case I have news for you - the MSM hasn't been mainstream in about 2 years. Reader- and viewership numbers are down across the board for these entities, while numbers for blogs and radio talk shows are through the roof.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Doesn't rebadge Snow White as their production, not Disney's.
Whereas GPL violators ARE passing off the code as theirs.
This sort of abuse of statistics happens all the time. Ars Technica's article was an excellent investigation into a very simple question - where do these numbers come from? It's scary how many government agencies just assumed they were true.
However the question is more interesting than the answer because no one has bothered to ask it before. Everyone just assumes that because the numbers come from government sources, they must be legitimate. This question should have been asked years ago.
Instead, as happens time and time again, this shows that if someone throws out a number with enough confidence, people will believe it. And once the number gets an air of legitimacy attached to it because of who's quoting it, no one will question it.
It's speaking something into being that didn't exist before, and enough people believe in it it is, in essence, true. Like the Hogfather in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series.
Whole corporations such as the RIAA have been created to combat the travesties of pirates on the high webs.
The RIAA is older than I am, and I'm a geezer.
An analog disk has a hard time with bass; the grooves would have to be way too deep. Fortunately, you can correct this in hardware using what is called an equalization curve. It works somewhat like Dolby in reverse.
The record is recorded with the bass attenuated, and played back with the opposice curve (see the wikipedia article for detail).
In the beginning there was no standardization, but with high fidelity albums came the need for standardization. The RIAA was formed to standardize the various hardware companies' and recording companies' curves.
They didn't start suing their customers until this century.
Free Martian Whores!
In a certain way, it advantages the entertainment industry to claim such outlandish figures. If you're going to sue an average woman for hundreds of thousand of dollars, or bully a 12 year old child for upwards of 25,000$, you need to make your claim based on a tiny percentage of your actual losses. What court would allow a six digit suit against any ONE person when your ENTIRE industry losses only tally up a few millions? It's all part of being able to push around helpless citizens, like the Juggernaut picking on a class of non-mutant first graders.
Perhaps more importantly, both numbers are seemingly decades old, gaining a patina of currency and credibility by virtue of having been laundered through a relay race of respectable sources, even as their origin recedes into the mists. That's especially significant, because these numbers are always invoked as proof that the piracy problem is still dire--that everything we've done to step up international enforcement of intellectual property laws has been in vain. But of course, if you simply recycle the same numbers from 15 and 20 years ago--remember that IACC's 2005 publications still cite that 1995 congressional testimony, from which it seems safe to infer that they have no more recent source--then it will necessarily seem as though no ground has been gained.
In other words, those standing to benefit are perpetuating the reuse of old numbers so to get ever more beneficial measures passed. Nice to see it stated, but I can't see anyone with clout (e.g. members of congress/their aides) actually reading this.
And me without mod points. Even RIAA execs have said they lost an entire generation of buyers because they didn't have a pay-to-download strategy soon enough. If they'd had *something* worthwhile, kids (now young adults) wouldn't think the best way to get your music is through BitTorrent.
Yes, the current distribution model is retarded. It forces you to buy a bundle of things you may not want (wanting only THAT song that haunts you day and night) instead of exactly what you want. I stopped buying disks because of that.
iTunes Music Store.
No DRM? Amazon Music Store.
So you're done pirating then, right?
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
It's been proven multiple times that if you look at actual downloads versus purchases, the loss is indistinguishable from 0. I see the value in having multiple studies for the same claim, but it does make it less interesting for the informed.
Also it's important to note that any figures from anti-piracy groups will have two assinine assumptions:
1) Every downloaded song WOULD have equaled one purchased CD. No one ever buys individual songs from the outlets available to them, and no one EVER EVER buys a CD and listens to more than one song. (I suppose there's some truth that most albums have at most one song worth listening to.)
2) Every single person that downloads songs WOULD have bought every song if it wasn't available for free. (Once again, greatly overestimating what their albums are worth.)
By pirating it, I'm attempting to determine its worth.
If I determine that it is worth the asking price, I purchase it.
If I don't purchase it, by this policy, I am proving its lack of worth.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
An apt comparison, since as I recall, the only reason diamonds are expensive is because the supply (at least of "good" ones) is artificially restricted.
One does wonder... if the diamond supply were let freely into the marketplace, would there ever have been a big demand for cheap artificial stones, even at the industrial level?
(If the content had been marketed at realistic prices in the P2P environment in the first place, would there ever have been a big demand for illicit sources??)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?