Rich Fiscus
8 Oct 2008 23:54
Yesterday we told you about a letter from the US Chamber of Commerce to President Bush in an effort to convince him to sign the annual attempt at draconian intellectual property enforcement legislation. The centerpiece of their argument to the President is a pair of oft-cited statistics claiming piracy has cost the US 750,000 jobs, as well as annual financial losses of $250 billion.
Now Ars Technica has published an interesting article that sheds a significant amount of light on the actual source of those figures and the closer you look, the less credible they look. That's not surprising considering $250 billion is more than the combined US revenue of the music, movie, and software industries. It's more than a little difficult to believe they're losing more than they're making.
A look at the sordid history of these numbers reveals just how useless they really are. To begin with they appear to have been extrapolated from the results of a survey compiled in the 1980s. The survey was conducted on a small sample of US businesses, with the resulting numbers then multiplied into an estimate of worldwide losses not from piracy, but from the IP laws in many countries, which are far less restrictive than in the US.
And even its authors apparently didn't have much faith in their figures, noting that they "could admittedly be biased and self-serving." Not exactly a glowing recommendation to take it seriously two decades later.
Although this doesn't bring us any closer to real figures, it does reveal something that may be more important. If there is any real evidence compiled since this study it's less compelling. Otherwise we wouldn't keep hearing the same old story.