Julian Sanchez has an excellent
post
at the CATO website debunking claims in the U.S. on the financial
impact of counterfeiting and piracy, which is being used to promote the
dangerous Stop Online Piracy Act. The post focuses on the fake $250
billion per year claim that is frequently invoked by copyright lobby
groups, noting that the number is not based on an actual study but
rather a 1991 sidebar in Forbes that took a guess at the global
market. In 2010, the U.S. Government Accountability Office examined
the counterfeiting data claims and found that they could not be
substantiated and last year the Social Sciences Research Council released
a massive study on counterfeiting and piracy that thoroughly debunked
the claims.
Given the return of fake counterfeit data, it is worth remembering that
the same ploy has been used in Canada for many years. In 2007, I took a
closer look
at RCMP claims of $30 billion in losses in Canada, a number that was
based on a single bullet point in a powerpoint presentation from an
industry association that was a
guess based on 3 to 4 percent of Canada's two-way trade. The RCMP has
since distanced itself from those claims, but the Canadian Chamber of
Commerce revived
the fake figure last year in its lobby effort for new IP-related
border measures (its response to being called out involved pointing
to more unsubstantied data). As Sanchez notes:
The movie and music recording
industry have gotten away with using statistics that don’t stand up to
the most minimal scrutiny, over and over, for years, to hoodwink both
Congress and the general public. Wherever you come down on any
particular piece of legislation, this is not how policy should get made
in a democracy, and it’s high time they were shamed into cutting it out.
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TorrentFreak reports
on a Pirate Party of Canada finding that links BitTorrent downloads to IP addresses assigned to the House
of Commons. Similar findings using the YouHaveDownloaded.com site have
occurred in France and the United States. The findings raise questions
about possible infringement and - given questions about the reliability
of the data - using IP addresses in infringement claims or as the basis to issue warnings that can lead to loss of Internet services.
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