Next You'll Be Telling Me Illegal Downloading Doesn't Spike During the Super Bowl
Jesse Walker | October 8, 2008, 3:33pm
You may have heard that the U.S. has lost 750,000 jobs to piracy of intellectual property and that such infringment costs the American economy $200–250 billion each year. Over at
Ars Technica, former
reason staffer
Julian Sanchez goes looking for the sources of those oft-cited numbers and finds...not much.
An excerpt:
With Customs a dead end, we dove into press archives, hoping to find the earliest public mention of the elusive 750,000 jobs number. And we found it in--this is not a typo--1986. Yes, back in the days when "Papa Don't Preach" and "You Give Love a Bad Name" topped the charts, The Christian Science Monitor quoted then-Commerce Secretary Malcom Baldridge, trumpeting Ronald Reagan's own precursor to the recently passed PRO-IP bill. Baldridge estimated the number of jobs lost to the counterfeiting of U.S. goods at "anywhere from 130,000 to 750,000."
Where did that preposterously broad range come from? As with the number of licks needed to denude a Tootsie Pop, the world may never know. Ars submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of Commerce this summer, hoping to uncover the basis of Baldridge's claim--or any other Commerce Department estimates of job losses to piracy--but came up empty. So whatever marvelous proof the late secretary discovered was not to be found in the margins of any document in the government's vaults. But no matter: By 1987, that Brobdignagian statistical span had been reduced, as far as the press were concerned, to "as many as 750,000" jobs. Subsequent reportage dropped the qualifier. The 750,000 figure was still being bandied about this summer in support of the aforementioned PRO-IP bill.
Whole thing
here.
tarran | October 8, 2008, 7:03pm | #
Please it is not stealing!
Stealing occurs when you take posession of another guys property thus denying him the use of it.
Everlast, for example, can still listen to their music even if every other person on the Earth illegally copies the music.
There is nothing immoral in copying a pattern per se. For example, if you read Milton Friedman's explanation of why racism incurs sever penalties in a free market, and use that argument in a debate with your socialist sister in law, you have not committed an immoral act.
The state has decreed that there is a property right in patterns and that anyone who copies particular patterns without the state and the pattern owners permission is guilty of stealing. The state also used similar arguments of maximizing the public good to decree that black people were not entitled to the same legal protections that white people were. Thus I would take state decrees wit a grain of salt and search for independent justifications of copyright.
And, under the current system, where the state automatically assigns a copyright to all new pattern inventions, and can levy draconian fines/impose criminal penalties even for accidental independent inventions of the same pattern, without the pattern creator lifting a finger to announce to the world that the pattern belongs to him, you can't really justify treating patterns like homesteaded land.
Furthermore, like the Lehman executive in an earlier thread, it is possible to admit that aperson is a victim of a crime, while withholding any sympathy for the victim.
Imagine, for a moment, that Ted Bundy had escaped from prison. So he is driving his minivan, cruising for chicks, when he is carjacked and murdered. In that extreme case, would you not feel any outrage at his demise?
The record companies have fucked things up. The copyright laws they have lobbied for have made us all poorer. Hell, thanks to those laws, my kids will never see WKRP reruns with the original sound track. They have taken what should have made their lives better (the ability to cheaply make music available to a wider audience) and fucked it all up. That people are ripping them off is hardly suprising, and given some of the egregious barratry they have engaged in protecting their copyright, I certainly have no sympathy for them whatsoever. I am not a file sharer, I don't care about file sharing. I have no sympathy for the RIAA because they set themselves up for this. Moreover, their CD sales are tanking because they have forgotten that to make money you have to convince customers to give you money in exchange for something they want. They blame file sharing for what is, in reality, the fallout from their luddite business practices.
tarran | October 8, 2008, 10:46pm | #
Warren,
Fine, you want figures? I'll give you figures!
And being an Austrian Fanboy, and thus mindful of the fact that you can't aggregate apples and oranges into one number, I will now list the precise losses to the U.S. economy as a result of copyright law, using the Imara-Mitsui algortihm which is a numerical implementation of the Alvarez-Donaldson refinement of the Eldri/Ivars-Thomas-Umbers-Peterson method of estimating economic losses:
$3,654,452,211 FRN, 66 lbs Gold, 21 Tons of Tin, 34,456,321 barrels of oil, 3 million chickens, 456,321 windows and -1 Rick Santorum (the existence of Rick Santorum has a negative effect on wealth). Oh, and 15 men could not afford the plastic surgery that Peter Griffin had on that episode when he was inducted into the Beautiful People Club.
In non-economic terms, copyright law also hooked 456,489 children on marijuana, 670,457 of those children took up their habit before they were 1 week old. Also, through a complex geologic process that you non-geologists are incapable of comprehending, it caused the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD that killed hundreds of thousands of people.
One other non-economic loss, remember the movie the Italian job? Remember "the Napster?" Thanks a lot RIAA!
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