DRM News

Piracy ruins the economy! You’ve heard it from the RIAA, the MPAA, Senators, Congressmen and the news media. Industry funded studies claiming piracy impact numbers of  thousands of jobs and billions of dollars lost every year. However, a report (PDF) released a few weeks ago by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has thrown those wild numbers out the door, basically saying that there is no real way to definitively quantify the impact of piracy. It has always been claimed by these industry reports that piracy has costs thousands of jobs every year, billions of dollars lost, and the economy gets damaged because of it. For example, if someone pirates a $60 video game or $20 CD or DVD, that doesn’t necessarily mean that money isn’t being spent elsewhere in the economy. It also calls out the previous ‘studies’ that the RIAA, MPAA, etc have been using saying that the model used to come up with industry supporting numbers has serious flaws. Something pretty much everybody else has known for awhile, but we don’t have lobbyists.

Yesterday, a report (PDF) was released by an industry group called the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA), which includes companies like Microsoft, Google, AMD, Facebook, ebay. This report states how ‘Fair Use’ brings in a hell of a lot of money into the economy. Trillions in fact.  Ars technica reports:

The CCIA report’s numbers are staggering. The “fair use economy” accounted for 23 percent of all US real economic growth between 2002 and 2007. Fair use industries (core and non-core combined) generated $4.7 trillion in 2007. And “about one out of every eight workers in the United States is employed in an industry that benefits from the protection afforded by fair use.”

Now you’re probably wondering why the two are connected (No I’m not going to bring out a blackboard and go all Glen Beck on you. Although, that might be fun.). I link the two reports about piracy and ‘Fair Use’ because if the industry (RIAA, MPAA, ESA, etc..) had their way there would be no ‘Fair Use’. In many cases, the industry treats examples of fair use, such as moving music or video from one platform to another, or burning a backup copy of a disc, as an act of piracy.

Right now the industry is lobbying hard for stricter and tougher laws concerning IP. Just take a look at what they are trying to do with ACTA. Look what they have done around the world in getting countries to put in ‘three strikes’ laws. Look at how much pressure they put on the USTR to punish countries who’s IP laws they don’t like. Its all happening now.

“We must be careful that any attempt to alter our intellectual property laws not overlook any crucial sectors of the economy… We must therefore safeguard the fair use economy from the unintended consequences of overbroad copyright regulation in order to ensure that technology innovators can maximize their contribution to our nation’s economic health.”

If we allow these industries to take us down their road the consequences to our economy could be very large, and very bad. On that cheerful note the US government has decided that protecting IP is a very serious thing indeed. They’ve just added 20 more FBI agents and 15 more Assistant US Attorney positions to fight against IP infringement. There is no word on if they are going to go after the industry when they rip off artists though.