Rob Reid presents a TEDTalk on the concept of "copyright math;" that is, the math the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) use to determine how much money is lost because of pirating. With a comical twist, Reid explains that the MPAA estimates that over $58 billion are lost to the U.S. economy every year because of content theft.
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| A slide Reid used to convey the absurdity of the MPAA's claim. |
Because this isn't just the hypothetical retail value of some pirated movies that we're talking about, but this is actual economic losses. This is the equivalent to the entire American corn crop failing along with all of our fruit crops, as well as wheat, tobacco, rice, sorghum -- whatever sorghum is -- losing sorghum.
The movie folks also tell us that our economy loses over 370,000 jobs to content theft, which is quite a lot when you consider that, back in '98, the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicated that the motion picture and video industries were employing 270,000 people.
In a February New York Times piece, an MPAA spokesman did his best by attributing the eye-popping $58 billion sum to “piracy’s impact on a range of tangentially related industries — florists, restaurants, trucking companies, and so on.”
Reid does a great job of presenting this information in an understandable and often humorous manner. This is a difficult topic: maybe because it's genuinely hard to create these estimates or maybe because the MPAA makes it difficult, as Reid suggests. Either way, it's undisputed that it is not easy to pin down numbers for job loss in the industry or revenue loss; however, the suggestion that florists and restaurants should be included in these considerations is clearly the MPAA grasping at straws to prove their point.
Source:
Reid, R. (2012, March 20). The numbers behind the Copyright Math | TED Blog. Retrieved from http://blog.ted.com/2012/03/20/the-numbers-behind-the-copyright-math/
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