p2pnet - rss feed: Corporate piracy stats: lies, lies and more lies
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- Statistics emanating from the movie, music and software industries are about as meaningful as entertainment cartel claims that members give a damn about the people who keep them in business.
In other words, they’re worth zilch.
The sad thing is: the mainstream print and electronic media and other organisations, including government agencies, parrot them as though they’re the Word of God.
One of the most glaring recent examples came when it was revealed an MPAA assertion, supported by spurious numbers from a company called LEK, wasn’t merely vaguely off, it was, appallingly, outrageously wrong.
The MPAA stated, unequivocally, 44% of Hollywood’s domestic losses could be attributed to file sharing students.
But if a figure could be used at all, it was more likely to be 3% than 44%.
This should have caused an international uproar, but it barely made a ripple and the statement is still repeated in the US Congress and the Senate as well as, of course, by the lamescream media.
Now, “Declaring that 750,000 Americans are out of work because of intellectual property piracy, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is urging President Bush to sign legislation creating a cabinet-level copyright czar to oversee expanded IP enforcement efforts,” noted David Kravets in Wired a few days ago, continuing »»»
Those are eye-popping numbers, equaling 8 percent of the official number of 9.4 million unemployed Americans.
But the origin of that 750,000 number — which was included Thursday in a Chamber of Commerce lobbying letter (.pdf) to the president — is a mystery.
A spokesman for the Chamber of Commerce said Friday that the nation’s largest business lobbying group obtained the figure from “several federal government departments and agencies,” including the U.S. Department of Commerce.
In an e-mail, chamber spokesman Alex Burgos provided a link to a Sept. 21, 2005 statement from then-Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez citing the 750,000 figure.
But US Department of Commerce spokeswoman Emily Lawrimore said the number came from the Chamber of Commerce, Kravets goes on, and, “That information was provided by the Chamber of Commerce”. Then, “The 750,000 figure is repeated on the Chamber of Commerce’s website section on intellectual property, but cites the office of U.S. Customs and Border Protection as the source.
“And then there’s the same number again appearing on a 2007 joint U.S. Department of Commerce-U.S. Chamber of Commerce press release. A link on the press release goes to the Commerce Department’s trademark division dealing with small business.”
‘What I tell you three times is true’
“Counterfeiting and Piracy cost the U.S. economy between $200-$250 billion per year and the world economy approximately $650 billion per year. Nearly every company, in every industry is vulnerable. Counterfeiters and modern-day pirates rip off everything from brake pads to cell phone batteries to golf clubs and even prescription drugs. As Tom Donohue, president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce says, “You make it, you create it, and you invent it, and they steal it and fake it.” And these products are not just sold on street corners or on the internet. These dangerous and defective products have infiltrated the supply chain and are sold in legitimate retail outlets. It’s everyday products bought in everyday stores. Counterfeiting and piracy can no longer be considered just another cost of doing business.
So promises thetruecost.org, the US Chamber of Commerce Global Intellectual Property Center set up to to, “champion intellectual property as a vital engine of global development, growth, and human progress”.
Julian Sanchez follows the Wired story up in Ars Technica, quoting Lewis Carroll in The Hunting of the Snark, to wit:
“I have said it twice … I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.”
What’s the difference between the RIAA, MPAA and BSA? - p2pnet asked rhetorically recently, answering, rhetorically:
“There is no difference.
“MPAA means Motion Picture Association of America, RIAA is Recording Industry Association of America and BSA is Business Software Alliance.
“All three are front organizations owned and maintained by vested entertainment and software interests to give the entirely false illusion that they operate in a fair, free and open market place.”
The point was to suggest statistics and claims from any or all of these organizations are often unreliable at best, or completely fabricated at worst.
In Ars technica, Sanchez kicks off with »»»
If you pay any attention to the endless debates over intellectual property policy in the United States, you’ll hear two numbers invoked over and over again, like the stuttering chorus of some Philip Glass opera: 750,000 and $200 to $250 billion. The first is the number of U.S. jobs supposedly lost to intellectual property theft; the second is the annual dollar cost of IP infringement to the U.S. economy. These statistics are brandished like a talisman each time Congress is asked to step up enforcement to protect the ever-beleaguered U.S. content industry.
Unfortunately, the stats bear no relation to reality, says the story, going on:
“Try to follow the thread of citations to their source, and you encounter a fractal tangle of recursive reference that resembles nothing so much as the children’s game known, in less-PC times, as ‘Chinese whispers,’ and these days more often called ‘Telephone.’ Usually, the most respectable-sounding authority to cite for the numbers (the FBI for the dollar amount, Customs for the jobs figure) is also the most prevalent—but in each case, that authoritative ’source’ proves to be a mere waystation on a long and tortuous journey. So what is the secret origin of these ubiquitous statistics? What doomed planet’s desperate alien statisticians rocketed them to Kansas?”
Read the post for more.
Meanwhile, another quote fits aptly.
First uttered by Sir Walter Scott, “Oh what a tangled web we weave,” it says, “When first we practise to deceive.”
It used to be companies and organisations could with impunity get away this kind of crap.
But that was then and this is now and thanks to the Net ……………………..
appallingly, outrageously wrong - MPAA student stats scandal: update, January 24, 2008
more likely to be 3% - RIAA, MPAA, pressure US schools, March 22, 2008
Wired - Fiction or Fiction: 750,000 American Jobs Lost to IP Piracy, October 3, 2008
Ars Technica - A 20-year game of Telephone, October 7, 2008
p2pnet - MPAA, RIAA: the fine art of creative accounting, August 1, 2008
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October 9th, 2008 at 1:13 pm
ya heres one for you:
if a man has no money and he takes a candy bar that is a loss as the actual candy bar is gone.
If a man were to clone the bar and take the clone then how can there be a loss?
If a man hasn’t the money for any of it, is there a loss? NO. Poorest people are the pnes that p2p.
The rich ones that do this shame it all. NOW vote for WHOMEVER is on OUR side.
So far a few liberals and most of the NDP, so if your area an MP hasnt done the copyright pledge
then vote accordingly.
Time to go register to vote, 1st time in 18 years….
October 9th, 2008 at 9:45 pm
It is plainly obvious, yet escaping the grasp of the anti-piracy crowd, that the
idea that a download = a lost sale is plainly false. Trying to support this
argument by quoting or parroting bogus statistics from the MAFIAA only
reinforces this.
To paraphrase Mark Twain,
There are lies, damned lies, and then there are corporate piracy statistics.
October 10th, 2008 at 4:39 am
“MPAA means Motion Picture Association of America, RIAA is Recording Industry Association of America and BSA is Business Software Alliance.”
BSA in my books stands for Bull Shit Artist