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.