Respect Authority

In the wake of the the PRO-IP Act passing, which will allow the government to steal from you in all new and wonderful ways, it turns out that some of the figures the entertainment industry has been using to defend its cause were basically, you know, make believe! And, naturally, by “some of the figures,” I was actually referring to all of them.

The entertainment industry has long thrown out the stats that 750,000 US jobs have been lost due to piracy and copyright infringement, with the fight against these evils costing the economy $250 billion annually. Look, for one thing, these are stats I’m willing to live with if those 750,000 US jobs were talentless musicians who’ve been reduced to nothing thanks to the horrible Internet helping consumers realize their music was bucknasty before they made the mistake of purchasing a CD. I’m willing to lose those jobs to India if we have to. They can take our Katy Perrys, our Jonas Brothers, and our Kid Rocks (especially our Kid Rocks). Both our presidential nominees have been saying it all throughout their campaigns: America’s facing some tough times, and we gotta make some cuts. So enjoy India, fellas… somehow I don’t think they’ll be enjoying you.

Julian Sanchez of ars technica did some digging and uncovered an ancient buried tomb of lost bullshit. As it turns out, the figure dates back to 1986. To provide some context, in 1986, Shawn Fanning, creator of the revolutionary P2P file-sharing program Napster, was six. If piracy was on his mind then, I have a feeling it was only the kind found in bedtime stories. It was in this year that The Christian Science Monitor, which for one thing seems hardly a reputable source for anything other than… well… bullshit, quoted then-Commerce Secretary Malcom Baldridge estimating the number of jobs lost due to counterfeiting of US goods as “anywhere from 130,000 to 750,000,” proving, once again, that if you cite a large enough range you can be right about pretty much anything!

By the way, I was at the gym earlier today and just wanted to share with you guys that I can lift between 10 and 1,000 pounds. Try not to swoon too badly, ladies, or people will think that you’re drunk… with desire.

The 750,000 number was never backed up with any actual proof, since when the hell did the government need that silly thing anyway, and remarkably, is still being widely circulated, and was even used as an argument for the PRO-IP Act some 22 years after it was originally cited. Fortunately for the entertainment industry, nothing’s really changed in the past two decades, right? We have no Internet, no streaming media, no file-sharing mania, no DVD-Rs, no MP3 players… meanwhile, I have no fucking clue what they were thinking.

The $250 billion in losses figure is also approaching “total” on the Magic Bullshit Scale, which is copyrighted, by the way. So take note, you scurvy scalawags… I see you looking at my intellectual property and I don’t like it.

In 2002, FBI spokesperson Catherine Milhoan said the figure “was derived through our coordination with industry, trade associations, rights holders, and other law enforcement agencies,” which sounds like just enough of a blanket statement to disguise from people that what you’re really saying is “shut the fuck up, we’re the motherfucking FBI and we do what the fuck we want, including investigating your bureau with our big government dicks if you start asking too many motherfucking questions.”

As it turns out, the $200 to $250 billion figure comes from an issue of Forbes, dating back to 1993… sort of. Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), a witness in the congressional testimony leading up to the passage of the Anticounterfeiting Consumer Protection Act of 1996, said during his testimony that “a more recent estimate by Forbes Magazine says that American businesses are losing over $200 billion each year as a result of illegal counterfeiting.” This was — get ready for it — kind of a lie.

In reality, that issue of Forbes actually only says that counterfeit merchandise is “a $200 billion enterprise worldwide” and leaves it at that. Ultimately, it seems as if the entertainment industry did not use dark sorcery, mixing unicorn tails and the tears of space aliens, to come up with the figure. Conveniently, if you take $200 billion and adjust it for inflation through 2002, you get $250 billion and well, the rest is apparently history. No word on what actually happens if you mix unicorn tails and alien tears… yet.

It’s often said that history is told by those who win… well, guess who’s winning, kids.

What’s particularly troublesome about the entertainment industry brandishing about these numbers is that they’re often used to show that piracy persists, despite the efforts we’ve currently taken to protect intellectual property, when this is obviously pretty fucking hard to back up if your proof of this persistent, growing problem are 20 year old numbers. So no shit it looks like we haven’t made any progress — nobody’s bothered taking any current statistics. Not to mention, why are we focused on petty issues such as copyright infringement when slavery is still legal in the United States? I just read that in an encyclopedia from 1845 and I am outraged.

[ars technica]