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$200B Lost To Counterfeiting? Back It Up
An anonymous reader writes "Over the weekend, the NY Times ran a story about how the recession has impacted product counterfeiters. In it, the reporter regurgitates the oft-repeated claim that counterfeiting 'costs American businesses an estimated $200 billion a year.' Techdirt's Mike Masnick asks the Times reporter to back up that assertion, noting two recent reports (by the GAO and the OECD) that suggest the actual number is much lower, and quoting two reporters who have actually looked at the numbers and found (a) the real number is probably less than $5 billion, and (b) the $200 billion number can be traced back to a totally unsourced (read: made-up) magazine claim from two decades ago."
The whole "back it up" line made me think for a second, they wanted people to copy money to preserve it from counterfeiting...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Get over it. Truman defeated Dewey already.
An article would not an article without the obligatory "Obama" comment. It doesn't matter if the article is about counterfeiting or sewing, I read the comments intently for the Obama comment, and sure enough am able to find it.
Citation needed.
For an online encyclopedia with no political bias, see: http://www.conservapedia.com/
Maybe newspaper articles should cite their sources and have a list of references at the end like academic papers do. That way at least readers or other interested parties could independently verify the facts in the article.
Heck, even wikipedia articles list their references and are conspicuously labeled if they are in need of references. This article says the figure is from "the authorities".......WTF is that???
By the way, I work for a company that sells products that could be counterfeited. I estimate that just my company loses approximately 200 trillion dollars a year just from people selling products in our name. Why didn't she report that?