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Study: Fair Use Drives Large Part of US Economy
angry tapir writes "Industries that rely on fair use exceptions to U.S. copyright law have weathered the recent slow economy better than other businesses, according to a new study released by a tech trade group. The fair use industries, including consumer device makers, software developers, search engines and news organizations, had US$4.5 trillion in revenue in 2009, up from $3.4 trillion in 2002, according to the study, commissioned by the Computer and Communications Industry (CCIA) Association. Fair use businesses make up about 17 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product, according to the study. The study shows the importance of fair use exceptions in copyright law, said Ed Black, CCIA's president and CEO."
Please, please, "Industries built on Intellectual Property Theft have further imperiled other sectors of the economy during the recent economic downturn."
xoxo, RIAA/MPAA.
Fair use businesses make up about 17 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product, according to the study.
From the report:
Fair use-related industry value added in 2008 and 2009 averaged $2.4 trillion, approximately 17 percent of total U.S. current dollar GDP. Value added equals a firm's total output minus its purchases of intermediate inputs and is the best measurement of an industry's economic contribution to national GDP.
It's the value added, not the total fair use businesses. After reading the study, I think what they're trying to say is that everyone benefits by some amount of money to be able to access -- say -- non-copyrightable facts online presents a benefit to many businesses and that added value equates to 17 percent of the total U.S. current dollar GDP by their estimates.
My work here is dung.
I'm a librarian. My entire profession would not exist if not for similar provisions.
"We should be able to get no less than 450 billion in fees from these thieves. Lawyers, to the courtrooms!!!" - Unknown RIAA exec.
mpaa , riaa and bsa etc are working hard to destroy any of it...go go go i say quicker the usa is destroyed economically the better
I have not RTFA to know whether it is adopting a strict definition or not, but non-copyrightable facts are not examples of fair use - they are examples of something which falls outside the copyright regime.
In this case I would suggest you at least throw a cursory glance at the actual report (PDF warning) because from page 15 they list some examples of how "Other Information Services industry (NAICS 519)" benefit of Fair Use and Other Limitations and Exceptions to Copyright Law (which is what this report is targeting). They list several statutory provisions like: 102(a) non-copyrightability of facts, 102(b) idea/expression dichotomy, 107 fair use: criticism; comment; news reporting; browser, cache copies; teaching; scholarship; research, 108 library uses, 109 first-sale doctrine, 512 ISP safe harbors, 302-304 copyright term and 105 no copyright in U.S. Government works. Granted, those are very brief descriptions of what are undoubtedly lengthy legalese but I hope that someone makes it clear that this report is not referring strictly to just fair use in the sense that you are speaking of. It's talking about fair use related industries that rely on provisions like the above.
I think a better description would be "All Limiting Exceptions to Copyright" than "Fair Use" for this particular study. Side note: I think you can see how Google and others benefit from the protection under cache copies to a very large degree.
My work here is dung.
Fair Use Drives Large Part of US Economy
but to have fair use you need someone to create the content in the first place
To be fair, if libraries were privatized
...then they'd be associated with universities, much as some are now.
Ah, but if we had extremely restrictive copyright rules in place benefiting big companies (where "big companies" = RIAA/MPAA and not bigger, low-copyright companies like clothing designers), that $4.5 trillion would have been $89.6 quadrillion.*
* Study funded by the RIAA/MPAA. Figured based on completely unbiased** mathematical modeling.***
** Where "unbiased" means "completely biased."
*** "mathematical modeling" means "we pulled some big numbers out of our posteriors."
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
This growth appears to be tiny - most of that appears to be inflation. The total US inflation between jan 2002 and jan 2011 is 24.35%. Therefore, after accounting for inflation making all of the numbers bigger, if the fair use portion of the economy grew not at all from 2002 to 2011 it would end up at 4.23 Trillion. Therefore the real growth is less than 300 billion in US 2011 dollars
"Copyright maximialists are anti-business, anti-economic-growth, anti-jobs."
Most of us make use of or benefit from fairn use countless times every day. This morning I watched a news show that showed god knows how many trademarked images, copyrighted clips, personal images, snips of audio, etc. I hummed a song I liked. I emailed a joke I had overheard to a friend. I downloaded a ungodly number of copyrighted images to my PC as part of my morning web browsing.
There are countless incidents of fair use we each do every day without even thinking about it. Can you even imagine a world where that WASN'T the case? Where humming a copyrighted song without permission was a criminal offense? Where news reports weren't allowed to use any copyrighted or trademarked images/audio/etc.? Where web browsing meant signing a copyright agreement with every website?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Appreciated - thank you.
Anytime! On a side note, I would also like to relay the comic irony I discovered in trying to copy/paste those snippets to you from the PDF report (Adobe's Reader). When I try to copy/paste "Other Information Services industry (NAICS 519)" instead I get:
I assume this is to prevent people from easily reusing or finding via search engine this free report extolling the benefits of limiting copyright. I wish I could have shared more with you but I had to retype everything by hand.
My work here is dung.
While scavenging may be intellectually frugal, creation is the maidenhood of civilization.
Rather than torrent that next low grade horror film, why not write a word, a sentence, a paragraph -- anything -- snuff, hate, poem, story, flame and put it up on a blog, email, or otherwise share it. Then you will have added to the world rather than recycling it.
And it is so easy to be novel. Virtually everything you utter more than a few words has probably never been heard or seen before in the history of the world.
For example, the first sentence, the entire sentence is unique in Google and subsets beyond "may be" or "is the" have very few hits.
To be creative in writing is as easy as forgetting to meme.
Copyright is terribly abused by big corporations and cartels that want to suck money out of everyone. However, copyright's original intent was to encourage creating of original content. IMHO, corporations should have very limited copyright protection, whereas individual artists should have rights bordering on the draconian. This should apply in many cases even when you're paid a salary for what you create, but it's especially applicable if you license your creation to a company after you've completed it, as with the major record labels.
The same should be true of patents.
But not trademarks. Trademarks are fine.
$89.6 quadrillion
*** "mathematical modeling" means "we pulled some big numbers out of our posteriors."
They've gotta have some huge posteriors!
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Trouble is, how do you prevent people from getting the 'good' copyrights from selling those to the corps. Or do we say that any copyright held by a corporate entity is of the 'inferior' type? and how do we prevent whatever racket they come up with where they sue on behalf of "their client" who owns the copyright and then keep a huge chunk of that (or whatever racket they devise where they keep the power, even though they don't have the copyright)?
Easy. Copyrights not registered last for 5 years. Copyrights first registered to a private individual are valid for the life of of the individual. Copyrights held by corporations or transferred from one individual to another entity are valid for 20 years.
Problem solved. You're welcome.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Johanna Blakley: Lessons from fashion's free culture
Long story short: there is very little IP protection in the fashion industry (both in the U.S. and worldwide) and they do very well, thankyouverymuch. It's a surprisingly interesting video from a geek's point of view. It's like a game, really: here are the rules, here are the limitations, now solve the problem and check out the unexpected results.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
FYI there are already a ton of licenses like that. The problem with it is that it stifles cooperation because some people have a financial investment in it, and others don't (and either can't get their patches official because it would 'taint' the codebase, or CAN get them official, but only if they assign copyright to the commercial venture. Not everyone thinks that's a good idea, and to a certain degree the GPL is used as a Mutually Assured Destruction licensing scheme: Everybody plays nice or nobody gets to play at all.)