Congress Launches New Fight Against Global Piracy

In a hearing on Monday with music and movie industry executives in Los Angeles, Representative Howard Berman discussed how badly file sharing is affecting the economy as a whole, and planned to work more closely with other governments to fight international piracy.

To justify the push for stricter enforcement, Berman cited statistics from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He also said that the music industry estimates more than 40 billion illegal downloads in 2008. All of the numbers read the same: millions of dollars lost, and Americans losing their jobs as a result. Can this be true?

Even though piracy is a real issue for the movie industry, they made record profits in 2007 and 2008. Berman says the film industry lost $6.1 billion in 2005, four years ago, due to piracy, but the methodology for arriving at that number is as of yet unreleased. It looks like they’re using the recent leak of X-Men Origins: Wolverine as an excuse to raise the issue.

The IIPA stated that copyright infringement in 43 countries caused an estimated $18.3 billion in trade losses in 2007, but that is for all piracy of different types of information, including, most importantly, business software, which is the most heavily pirated. Furthermore, it is implicit that one download equals one lost sale, which is very dubious.

As for music downloading, 40 billion illegal downloads may well be true, but if you recall the IFPI’s report (on page 22), only 16 percent of European internet users regularly shared files, so those who do infringe copyright do a lot of it. But should the other 84 percent be subjected to stricter laws for it?

It makes sense that the industry loses money whenever someone downloads an album they would have otherwise purchased. But where does that money go? It goes back into the pocket of the file sharer, to be spent somewhere else. So when Berman says “curtailing piracy and counterfeiting (…) would preserve almost a million jobs,” he’s forgetting that other jobs in other industries are getting saved by the very same money lost from piracy. The money goes into the economy one way or another.

Is the call for more legislation against piracy reasonable? I can imagine that internet anonymity would be the first thing to be taken away from users, and that the only way to stop piracy would be to spy on internet users. Would that sort of measure be acceptable if it actually saved jobs? Do you want more government control over file sharing?

Photo via news.cnet.com
Source: CNET, arstechnica, Bloomberg