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The recent debate over copyright laws like SOPA in the United States and the actor
Graming in Europe has been very emotional, and I think some dispassionate quantitative reasoning
could really bring a great deal to the debate.
I'd therefore like to propose that we employ we enlist the cutting-edge field of copyright
math whenever we approach this subject.
For instance, just recently, the Motion Picture Association revealed that our economy
loses $58 billion a year to copyright theft.
Now rather than just argue about this number, a copyright math-matician will analyze
it, and he'll soon discover that this money could stretch from this auditorium all the
way across Ocean Boulevard to the Westin and then to Mars.
If we use pennies, now this is obviously a powerful, some might say dangerously powerful
insight, but it's also a morally important one, 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.
But identifying the actual losses to the economy is almost impossible to do unless we use
copyright math.
Now, music revenues are down by about $8 billion a year since Napster first came on
the scene, so that's a chunk of what we're looking for.
But total movie revenues across theaters home video and pay per viewer up, and TV
satellite and cable revenues are way up, other content markets like book publishing and
radio are also up, so this small missing chunk here is puzzling.
Since the big content markets have grown in line with historic norms, it's not additional
growth.
The piracy has prevented, but copyright math tells us it must therefore be for gone growth.
In a market that has no historic norms, one that didn't exist in the 90s, what we're
looking at here is the insidious cost of ringtone piracy.
$50 billion of a year, which is enough at 30 seconds of ringtone that could stretch from
here to neanderthal times.
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 viewer of labor statistics
indicated that the motion picture in video industries were employing 270,000 people.
Other data has the music industry at about 45,000 people, and so the job losses that came
with the internet and all that content theft and therefore left us with negative employment
in our content industries.
This is just one of the many mind-blowing statistics that copyright mathematicians have
to deal with every day and some people think that string theory is tough.
This is a key number from the copyright mathematicians toolkit, 150,000 dollars per copy
slash per song.
It's the precise amount of harm that comes to media companies whenever a single copyright
song or movie gets pirated.
Hollywood in Congress derived this number mathematically, back when they last sat down to
improve copyright damages and made this long.
Some people think this number is a little bit large, but copyright mathematicians who
are media lobby experts are merely surprised that it doesn't get compounded for inflation
every year.
Now in this law first pass, the world's hottest MP3 player could hold just 10 songs, and
it was a big Christmas hit because what little hoodlum wouldn't want a million and a half
bucks worth of stolen goods in his pocket.
These days, an iPod classic can hold 40,000 songs, which is to say $8 billion with a stolen
media, or about 75,000 jobs.
Now you might find copyright math strange, but that's because it's a field that's best
left to experts.
So that's it for now, I hope you'll join me next time when I will be making an equally
scientific and fact-based inquiry into the cost of alien music piracy to the American
economy.
Thank you very much.
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