$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."

Comments

Big Business

[Traze]

Trying to get more free money from the government?
Gasp!

Re:Big Business

[popo]

The idiotic claim made by big business is that every counterfeited product "would" have been purchased had it not been counterfeited.

The claim not only illustrates a complete lack of understanding of the basic supply/demand curve, but gives us yet another example of a deeply flawed business model which relies on legal threats and big government to plaster over it's shortcomings.

I for one see counterfeiters as a necessary force: Reminding us of the stupidity of major-brand retail prices, and their massive disconnect from underlying value.

Re:Big Business

[Internetuser1248]

I for one see counterfeiters as a necessary force: Reminding us of the stupidity of major-brand retail prices, and their massive disconnect from underlying value.

If you don't want to pay brand-name prices, how about not fucking buying brand-name goods?

Way to state the obvious. I have one too "if you don't want to go bust, get a working business model". Well thats my contribution to the save the obvious foundation for the week. Wait here's an even better one "drinking water makes you less thirsty". I am on fire today.

Can't really hurt many US jobs...

[Kepesk]

I don't see how counterfeit products could do much damage to the US job market. Most of the legit products are made overseas too, right?

Re:Can't really hurt many US jobs...

[cpt kangarooski]

That's one of the reasons countries trying to modernise their economies tend to put a focus on IP creation - it leads to a large influx of cash for a long, long time. Same goes for moving away from a primarily extraction-based economy.

Well, only so long as other countries respect it. Creation, after all, is expensive but not remunerative on its own; it is publishing that is (or at least can be) where the money is made. It's reasonable to let someone else invest the time and money in creation, and then to copy them cheaply and profitably. Convincing states to not do this is tough, especially if they don't have, and don't expect to have, much local creative effort that could be exploited elsewhere, justifying mutual respect for these rights.

Given that it seems unlikely that two countries would openly go to war over, say, DVD piracy, copyrights, patents, trademarks, etc. just don't seem like a stable, long term basis for an economy. It's just too imaginary. Extraction isn't too good either, but perhaps there's some other way.

Maybe newspaper articles should list references

[Matt Perry]

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.

Re:Maybe newspaper articles should list references

[Matt Perry]

Do you know how long it would take them to verify all their sources.

I didn't say that the author needs to verify their source. They merely need to list them. They got that $200 billion figure from somewhere. Cite it.

Re:Maybe newspaper articles should list references

[Jeremy Erwin]

So, based on the 216,000 acres per day in the April, 1990 Vegetarian Times article your search turned up, my estimate was off by a factor of 4. As in, Vegeterian Times was claiming the denuding of the Earth by your figures every 4 years instead of every year.

Surface area of earth: 510 072 000 sq km
Veg Times estimate of acreage lost per day: 216000 acress
Veg Times estimate converted to square kilometers: 874 sq km
Yearly loss, assuming 365.24 days/year: 309605 sq kilometers

Years it would take to denude 510,072,000 sq km of rainforest at that rate: 1650 years.
Your estimate: 4 years.

square Kilometers get read as square miles, hourly estimates based on 8 hour work days get scaled up again using 24 hour work days. All rainforests are read as just the Amazon.

Old media sucks

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

On one hand, they are trying to salvage old media, and on the other hand they are trying to kill efforts like Wikileaks.

It seems pretty obvious.

CNN can just say anything they want, even if it's completely inaccurate and has no sources to back it up. They can just say their source is secret, and nobody is even going to ask.

Wikileaks, OTOH, shows you the actual docs. That's why they are being persecuted as criminals.

Encyclopedia Britannica is written by an unknown number of employees under unknown circumstances, and they cite no sources clearly (In the best case, they just cite a bunch of sources that might or might not back up their claims, and there's no direct way to check them easily).

Wikipedia is edited by the general public, each edit can be easily identified and accredited to a single author, and all sources are directly linked to in most cases.

And yet, Encyclopedia Britannica is considered more credible than Wikipedia, even when it's been shown that it's far more inaccurate, not to mention outdated.

Old media has to die, but the almighty economic powers that run this world won't let it go without a fight.

Re:Old media sucks

[copponex]

Just because you disagree with the facts doesn't make the facts political. It makes you wrong.

Re:Old media sucks

[Tim C]

Wikileaks, OTOH, shows you the actual docs. That's why they are being persecuted as criminals.

They're being persecuted like criminals because some of the documents in their possession are of questionable legality, not because they show the docs full stop.

*illions lost to piracy, counterfeit goods...

[Sheetrock]

The missing element in these claims is the citation of some sort of study that combines an examination of buying power and psychology to determine when piracy or the purchase of a counterfeit good represents a lost sale to the afflicted rights holder and when it does not. You can't just multiply retail cost of original good by estimated number of IP violations; that very likely surpasses the upper bound of the "damage" that has been caused. It's faulty journalism to ignore this fact or pass the responsibility for the veracity of this information to somebody else, but that doesn't seem to stop anybody from breathlessly regurgitating these sky-high numbers.

Re:Ever been to Brazil?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is largely not due to high import duties but due to corrupt customs officials. Fucking hell hole, I'm longing to get out of it.

Re:$5,000,000,000

[Lloyd_Bryant]

Five billion dollars is still a lot of money.

But put the numbers in perspective.

US GDP $14,260,000,000,000 (2009 estimate, courtesy of the CIA)

$200 Billion equals 1.4% of the GDP
$5 Billion equals 0.035% of the GDP

One is a problem worthy of immediate attention. The other is a problem to worry about when nothing else is pressing.

Re:Counterfeiting is Ok.

[mogness]

Like most other U.S.-bashing slashdot members, you fail to include some important facts in your comparison. For instance, population of either country. Please note...

Approximate population
Norway: 4,478,497
USA: 309,162,581

Whether your underlying point is right or wrong, I don't consider your comparison valid because of this little detail.
I would even venture as far as to say that your statement goes against your point. The fact that the US figures in your original post are so close to those of Norway even though the US has to govern almost 80x the population is actually more of a testament of an effectively scaling government. It's unlikely that the governmental system of someplace as small as Norway would meet the needs of such a large population.