NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Cato: How Copyright Industries Con Congress
Cato: How Copyright Industries Con Congress
http://j.mp/xgE5Dt (Cato@Liberty) [Julian Sanchez]
"The bogus numbers Carr cites-which I'll get to in a moment-actually
represent a substantial retreat from even more ludicrous statistics
the copyright industries long peddled. In my previous life as the
Washington editor for the technology news site Ars Technica, I became
curious about two implausible sounding claims I kept seeing made over
and over-and repeated by prominent U.S. Senators!-in support of more
aggressive antipiracy efforts. Intellectual property infringement was
supposedly costing the U.S. economy $200-250 billion per year, and had
killed 750,000 American jobs. That certainly sounded dire, but those
numbers looked suspiciously high, and I was having trouble figuring
out exactly where they had originated. I did finally run them down,
and wrote up the results of my investigation in a long piece for Ars.
Read the whole thing for the full, farcical story, but here's the
upshot: The $200-250 billion number had originated in a 1991 sidebar
in Forbes, but it was not a measurement of the cost of "piracy" to the
U.S. economy. It was an unsourced estimate of the total size of the
global market in counterfeit goods."
- - -
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein (lauren@vortex.com): http://www.vortex.com/lauren
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility: http://www.pfir.org
Founder:
- Network Neutrality Squad: http://www.nnsquad.org
- Global Coalition for Transparent Internet Performance: http://www.gctip.org
- PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com
Member: ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
Google+: http://vortex.com/g+lauren
Twitter: https://twitter.com/laurenweinstein
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 / Skype: vortex.com
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