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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."
If you're pirating recent then nothing of value is lost :)
...that the people who wouldn't have jobs if there was no piracy are the same people who discovered these numbers?
As I've said before, the actual losses are zero. An opportunity cost only exists when an opportunity exists in the first place. Nobody is crying foul that horse and buggy makers are out thousands of jobs and dollars due to the advent of cars.
To content industry: the advent of the internet results in consumer p2p. It cannot be stopped. Deal with it. Do so by competing against it, not legislating against it.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
Read TFA a few days ago... It's actually quite scary that lobbyists can throw around completely made up figures which convince lawmakers that we need law X for problem Y. There should be some kind of accountability for quoting random numbers...
.: Max Romantschuk
And not to mention, the massive loss of dignity to Talk Like A Pirate Day.
We all knew this; having a geek site say it doesn't mean much. Now, if the New York Times did an analysis and came up with the same information, and published it, that would actually be news.
Just remember that 74% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
Sig temporarily out of service.
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
Lawrence Lessig's book Free Culture goes into detail about this subject and comes to the conclusion that it's a load of bullshit made up by the media companies.
Your analogy completely breaks down; buggy whip manufacturers went out business because demand vanished. Here, demand isn't vanishing.
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.
all the jobs created by piracy? There's been how many software jobs created to come up with new anti-piracy software, DRM and the like. How many law suits have been thrown around bloating the salaries of overpaid lawyers and their ilk. Whole corporations such as the RIAA have been created to combat the travesties of pirates on the high webs.
How many jobs have been created due to the piracy itself. Napster has its roots in file sharing, if not for this company the likes of iTunes would not likely exist. Thepiratebay while not a piracy company would not be what it is right now with out some pirated content.
On the flip side of all of this imagine what the media would be like if artists did it for the art and not for the money. Movies such as Indiana Jones and the Crystal skull wouldn't exist. Aliens, wtf? Thats the kind of "art" that comes out of focus groups and market testing.
Eschew Obfuscation
What really kills me is not that the RIAA and MPAA lied (*gasp*) but by how much they've lied. The numbers they quote aren't even vaguely believable. Even if one fudges some numbers and gets creative with accounting/HR tracking, the numbers are still off by several orders of magnitude. I can understand them fudging numbers (applying lost sales from a downturn in the economy to piracy, for example), but these numbers aren't even close to that. Not by the longest of long shots. As the article says, $200 billion is more than the movie and music industry combined. Are they really claiming they've lost more to piracy than they made? Are they really claiming that 7% of the unemployed are from their industries? Because that's what their numbers are saying...
Why do people have to be so black-and-white on this issue? Pirates think everything should be free and argue like they're entitled to steal. Argue with them, and they point to illegal MediaSentry tactics and DRM as justification.
The truth is both sides are wrong. The MPAA, RIAA, ESA, etc. forge huge numbers of loss, not pointing to money that shifted to another market. Pirates aren't entitled to steal, but people who produce IP shouldn't be entitled to harass their customers either.
If you really want to solve the issue it is quite simple.
Put out a convenient product, instead of a DRM-ladened one, and people will but it. People will even accept DRM if it isn't too obnoxious. People are buying music and video legally over the internet. Digital distribution is the future and the big boys better embrace it rather than fight it.
Next, if you want to see were the real theft is, it isn't 12-year old girls downloading Rhianna albums, but rather rampant pirating in places like China and Russia, where pirates mass-produce your material and resell it illegally.
The US economy would be vastly better off if they received money from the IP they produced globally. The entire world watches our shows, movies, listens to our music, uses our software, plays our games, etc.
A real international force (unlike the UN) should be able to enforce sanctions against nations who do nothing to crack down on massive piracy. Allowing pirated DVDs to be sold on the street is not acceptable.
Next, consumers in China often have less money to spend than their US counterparts (though that may change) and they are used to cheap prices on pirate goods.
The MPAA should HIRE the guys doing the best bootleg releases over there to turn around quick, legal, localized releases and sell them cheap to compete with the pirate market.
The sad thing is that pirate releases are sometimes vastly more convenient, and better than commercial releases. Check out pirate Windows XP CDs loaded with new drivers, pre-loaded apps, simpler installers, etc.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I know that figure because thats how much an album I wanted would have cost me had I bought it. Instead, I downloaded it. If the download wasnt available, I would have purchased it. But since it was, I didnt have to spend my money. Another perfect example. I saw a training book I wanted, at the store. I came home, search for a torrent, and next day I had it. Again money lost due to piracy. I doubt Im the only one doing this. I know /. Likes to pretend that such pirating activity doesnt exist, but of course most of it is exactly that. People can easily download, so they easily download. Theres no information wants to be free here. Theres no philosophy at all. Just plain old fashioned theft. I would have paid for it, but I didnt have to. I wanted it, and can take it, so I took it.
Im sure the numbers are not as high as these groups claim. But they are by no means zero.
It can be go tiem now plees?
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.
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.
You make the fallacy of equating every pirated instance to a lost sale. Many songs are copied that would never be bought otherwise, and the same applies to movies and software. People would simply go without at the price demanded for a legal sale, or find a cheaper alternative (listen less, FOSS, etc.). So to say that sales are lost to piracy is no more valid than flogging the figures of $200B and 750,000 jobs.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Aside from mentioning that The National Enquirer broke both the John Edwards affair story and the Jamie Lynn Spears pregnancy stories and was ridiculed for both why the mainstream media tried to spike them (both turned out true), just what constituted trusted media today -- an old name, or results?
Remember that the NYT also thinks that Barrack would make the best president.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
How many lawyer jobs did it create? What about engineers working on DRM and other antipiracy methods? And the guys that make the trailers that say copying movies is stealing, etc, etc. Where would they all be without pirates?
Would you buy that $15 DVD if they were to sell it at $1?
You're losing sales.
Let's go through the logic of that shall we?
Seems to make sense at first.
Problem with that logic is that it typically implies that every instance of copying equals an instance of lost sales which is clearly and demonstrably not true. Someone who cannot afford the authorized copy will never purchase it so that cannot be a lost sale. Someone who is unwilling to pay the price being asked is likewise never going to be a lost sale. Ergo the only population in question is those who are able and willing to pay the price being asked but decide to pirate anyway. This is necessarily a smaller population.
What really is being claimed is that copyright infringement cannibalizes a percentage of sales that otherwise *may* have come to the copyright holder. For digital works, the marginal cost of a copy is essentially zero so while the copyright holder may lose a sale, he/she/it doesn't lose any cash since they have not lost an asset they owned. It might induce a higher fixed cost per unit since fewer units are sold and the cost cannot be amortized over as many units. A problem to be sure but a very different issue.
It also implies that unauthorized copying never results in purchases of authorized merchandise. It is relatively easy to find examples of products where bootleg/unauthorized copies actually helped drive the popularity of the product to the point where authorized copy sales increase.
You'll notice the word theft never was mentioned because it isn't theft. This doesn't make the copyright infringement any more moral or legal but it does make it a different situation.
Your comparison does not take into account transportation impact. (Factory -> Store, Store -> Home) Nor of the discs themselves, which are eventually discarded and end up in a landfill. Also, the computer in your comparison often would have been running anyway, if that is the case, you cannot count the cost of electricity used against the cost of the CD production.
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.)
You've completely forgotten about the cost to actually produce the content.
Studio time, recording equipment, instruments, etc. are not free.
Point being that you don't just pay for the plastic, you pay for the content and the cost to create that content.
#2: Uh, sir, I'm not sure that figure will quite do it...
Dr. Evil: Well, okay, then. Two... Hundred... MILLION... Dollars!
#2: Yes, but you see, that really not so much money anymore. Congress spent more than that on their new gymnasium...
Dr. Evil: Alright. Try this then: Two... Hundred... BILLION...
(#2 nods)
Dr. Evil: ...Dollars. Alright--let's contact the press...
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
"and who are you to say how much someone can charge for something?"
The Consumer.
You know...the one who decides whether the goods are worth the amount being asked???
That's how the free market works. If you charge too much and people won't pay what you are asking, then you lower your price or go out of business.
Only markets, where the price is fixed through conspiracy of the sellers, is this not true. (i.e. Gas, Movies, Music, etc)