Just when you thought we were finally safe from the intellectual property abuses of Rep. Howard Berman (D-Hollywood), he’s back with a new call for stronger intellectual property laws. Most rational US citizens heaved a sigh of relief when Berman became chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. We thought he was rendered harmless, but he’s merely redefined his old saws as foreign affairs.
What’s really disturbing is that Berman is using data he almost certainly knows is unreliable or simply inaccurate. After all, it’s his job to know that the data he is using is reliable and accurate.
All of this came out in a field hearing Berman held in Van Nuys, California on Monday, 6 April 2009 to allow US movie and music cartel executives vent on the terrors inherent in counterfeiting and piracy. Berman opened the hearing by citing four statistics:
- The International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) claims that copyright infringement caused an estimated US $18.3 billion in losses in 2007
- The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) claims the film industry lost US$6.1 billion in 2005 due to piracy
- The music industry estimates there were more than 40 billion illegal downloads last year
- The US Chamber of Commerce claims counterfeiting is responsible for the loss of 750,000 US jobs per year.
The problem is that Berman’s information is mostly just plain wrong. The IIPA claimed losses of US$20.1 billion in 2007 (.pdf; 24Kb). Last year’s claim is US$18.4 billion.
Almost all of the IIPA loss claims involve business software and assumes that every instance of business software piracy is a loss. This claim is simply untrue.
The MPAA claim was disputed by the MPAA itself, when the trade group eventually admitted that its number of college student pirates was off by a factor of three. Critics note that MPAA’s methodology was never released. Meanwhile, the movie producers represented by MPAA posted record box office revenues in both 2007 and 2008.
The music industry can “estimate” illegal downloads all it likes. 40 billion may even be conservative. The point is no one knows.
As for the Chamber of Commerce’s claim of lost jobs, Ars Technica revealed this as completely fabricated back in October 2008.
When are we as a culture going to get past this nonsense and just when is the US Congress going to step up and slap down the music and movie cartels and their insane demands?
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