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US Government admits piracy claims bogus

by on15 April 2010


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But we will still do what the content industry says


The former
British colony of Virginia has finally admitted it does not believe all those bogus figures about the cost of online piracy that the content industry claims.

The United States of America has been encouraging the world+dog to change laws to create tougher laws that will involve bankrupting pirates. This has been done on the back of “studies” which claim massive losses to the US economy from piracy. One figure which has been used by content and the government to justify this has been that 750,000 jobs and up to $250 billion a year could be lost in the US economy thanks to IP infringement.

Now the US government's own internal watchdog took a close look at "efforts to quantify the economic effects of counterfeit and pirated goods." The Government Accountability Office has concluded that it is "difficult, if not impossible, to quantify the economy-wide impacts." It said more specific studies that focus only on single industries don't fare much better because "the illicit nature of counterfeiting and piracy makes estimating the economic impact of IP infringements extremely difficult."

Basically the whole anti-piracy thing is being forced through on the basis of assumptions that cannot be justified. It said that all the studies which are frequently quoted should be dismissed. None of the claims can be substantiated or traced back to an underlying data source or methodology. One study quoted a fabricated FBI statistic and another a CBP report which was also discredited.

The GAO hit out at the Business Software Alliance which claimed a loss of $9 billion to piracy in 2008. Its study used an assumption that every pirated use was the loss of a sale. The results from the surveyed countries are assumed to apply to non-surveyed countries. None of this is to say that piracy and counterfeiting aren't real problems. The GAO accepts that the problem is "sizeable," but it also points out just how much bad data is used to produce these studies.
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