Misleading Data Undermines Counterfeiting Claims

An anonymous reader writes "Canada has been the home to a growing debate on counterfeiting with politicians, law enforcement, and copyright lobby groups all pushing for stronger copyright and anti-counterfeiting laws. Writing in the Toronto Star, Michael Geist reports that the claims are based on fatally flawed data. The RCMP, Canada's national police force, has been claiming that counterfeiting costs Canadians $30 billion per year. When pressed on the issue, last week they admitted that the estimate was not based on any original research but rather on 'open source documents found on the Internet.'"

Wikipedia?

[PaintyThePirate (682047)]

open source documents found on the Internet.

So... what are the chances they just browsed Wikipedia for it?

I hope not. Re:Wikipedia?

[Erris (531066)]

So... what are the chances they just browsed Wikipedia for it?

If they are browsing Wikipedia, it's to insert their own BS into it. They pulled "articles" from "news" sites and ignored their own GAO estimates based on random sampling of real markets. In other words, they pulled it out of some industry (International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition) press release and an "estimate" by the Chief Economist for the Canadian Manufacturing and Exporters.

These estimate "pirate" product as %20 of the entire Canadian economy and that's insane. When you consider real estate, cars, domestic food product, gasoline and non branded commodities that dominate any economy, you would be lucky if %20 of goods were branded at all much less "pirated". How many fake Rolexes do these people think can be sold in a given year? Does anyone really believe that one in five dollars spent goes to something "fake"?

Re:I hope not. Re:Wikipedia?

[CastrTroy (595695)]

Also, this sounds like RIAA logic in some ways. It seems like the number either assume that the people buying, for example, fake rolexes, don't know they are buying a fake, and are actually not getting the product they expect to, or it assumes that if they didn't buy the fake rolex, and the counterfeit product wasn't available, that they would have bought the real thing. For the majority of counterfeit products, people know that what they are buying isn't the real thing, and just want some cheap imitation. I know it sucks for the makers of the real things, but think about it this way, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Fake rolexes

[phorm (591458)]

I've got a fake Rolex that came from overseas. I know it's fake, but it still looks nicer, and the kinetic-motion part actually keeps a better charge than my previous authentic watch (which I think was a cardinal). I wouldn't take this one in the pool with me, but as a watch it works and looks better than my previous watches, despite costing less.

Re:

[chris_eineke (634570)]

Does anyone really believe that one in five dollars spent goes to something "fake"?

Computers water down the concept of "fake," since every copy is as pristine as its original. Surely they don't mistake a warez copy of a game or application as 'fake?'

Re:I hope not. Re:Wikipedia?

[Technician (215283)]

Does anyone really believe that one in five dollars spent goes to something "fake"?


I think they are counting lost sales based on any fake would have been a real sale. Just considering my daughters 30 gig Zen would lead to that conclusion. The Zen has 2,200 files on it (I know from making a backup). With the back-up copy also being a pirated copy, that at a dollar per song is about 5K dollars worth of pirated stuff. That counts just my daughters Zen, not my son's iPod. In the last year using those figures, they have collected together over 15% of my income for the year. I think this is the figures they are running with.

What they are failing to figure, is if all that music was paid for for each copy, is they could pocket that money. This is simply wrong. That money isn't there. At full retail with piracy eliminated the reality would be that neither kid would have any use for an iPod or Zen and they would be exposed to less music and would have bought far fewer CD's than they actualy did. With the portable music players and a large exposuere, they have become avid fans of some bands and buy CD's and go to concerts. Without the exposure, this would not have happend.

I grew up in the 1970s. Through those years, I didn't go to any concerts. The local AM station played country. In high school the next town over got a couple FM stations, one was rock. Piracy was mostly non-existant, but so was my involvement with any music industry product.

When I went into the Navy and spent time in the barracs, I was exposed to lots of neat music. I invested heavily in a very good stereo system including a linear tracking turntable and 2 cassette decks. I pirated a bunch of stuff and also bought a bunch of stuff. That was my peak music buying years. If Piracy didn't exist, I would have had little reason to get into stereo and invest in quality duplication decks in a big way. This is seldom figured in any anti-piracy study. For the new generation, the cassette decks has been replaced by PC hard drives and portable music players. The cost of duplication has gone down, the quality of copies has gone up and the media compainies still have way overpriced products.

The biggest roadblock to stopping piracy at the moment is simply overpriced product. This has not changed since I was in the Navy. I would have bought a lot more of my favorite music if it didn't cost so stinking much. I'm glad to see Nine Inch Nails make an issue of that. They are dead right.

Re:I hope not. Re:Wikipedia?

[enrevanche (953125)]

While their number is ridiculous (about $1000 per Canadian), the Canadian economy is over 1 trillion. So their estimate is less than 3%.

$1000 is not really plausible, especially since this includes a large part of the population (small children and the elderly etc.) who do not purchase any or very little media and who do not have the capability to "pirate".

Re:

[Gerzel (240421)]

>>Does anyone really believe that one in five dollars spent goes to something "fake"?

Certainly once genetic code can be copyrighted, trademarked or otherwise "protected" (as it often is in the form of plant seed), you can have consumers buying fake wheat, corn, oats even copyright infringing bananas.

Re:

[tibike77 (611880)]

Hey, "t3h intarwebs", and especialy wikipedia is always right !
Especially if the last edit was a few seconds ago ! :)

just in case...

[dohmp (13306)]

some readers might not realize that the phrase "open source" has a number of common uses.

besides the one most slashdot readers are familiar with, another is possibly equally interesting to slashdot readers:

click here [wikipedia.org] for an alternative definition.

cheers.

Oh, come on....

[Creepy Crawler (680178)]

Is it that big a surprise that government and reporting agencies bloat numbers .... or even just lie to get their agenda covered?

It's not just Canada. It's the USA, all the countries in Europe, Asia..

Any peoples with a government body lie.

Re:

[the_humeister (922869)]

That's not the issue. The issue is that we need to call them out on it every chance that we get. If you just dismiss it casually because they'll do it anyway, worse things will happen.

Re:Oh, come on....

[trolltalk.com (1108067)]

"Frankly Ottawa would be safer without Quebecer and OPP cars on the road..."

Hey, I resemble that remark, tabernac!

The reason Quebec drivers suck at it so much is because we're used to driving all over the road to avoid all the potholes of doom.

Actually, I agree with you ... between the speeding, cutting in and out of traffic, not signalling, (or signalling one way, and going another, or leaving the blinker on for the next 5 exits), the potholes, the craters, the detours, the badly planned road system (okay, it was never planned), the lack of street signs at a lot of intersections ...

Re:Oh, come on....

[tomstdenis (446163)]

The problem isn't that quebecers are the only ones with these driving faults. It's that you guys amplify them so darn much. I mean many ontarians cut in/out of traffic, speed, etc.

But it takes a quebecer to tailgate you 3 ft behind your car while doing 60 in a 60 (or 80 in an 80) for an entire 10 minute drive down carling ... At least the ontarians either back off or pass.

I so love driving the speed limit in the "fast lane." The looks on peoples faces are priceless. When they say "fast lane" they mean for going faster than the slow-pokes in the right hand lane who aren't doing the speed limit. They didn't mean for those wanting to speed.

Re:

[trolltalk.com (1108067)]

"But it takes a quebecer to tailgate you 3 ft behind your car while doing 60 in a 60 (or 80 in an 80) for an entire 10 minute drive down carling "

Didn't you get the memo - you're supposed to jam on the brakes and raise your middle finger. I'm usually in the right lane - if I get someone who's crowding my tush, I either take my foot off the gas or, if they're really aggresive (flashing their headlights at me) down-shift. Of course, since there's no brake light when you downshift, they "wake up" when they

Re:

[tomstdenis (446163)]

Well my argument would be you can't pass someone doing the speed limit (hint: you're not supposed to speed to pass someone). In which case, you can't be obstructing legitimate traffic by speed limit.

Great news for the U.S.

[MillionthMonkey (240664)]

As the Canadian dollar appreciates relative to the U.S. dollar, counterfeiters will make the transition from U.S. to Canadian money and Americans will save $30 billion per year. Not to mention that it's good for the Earth when counterfeiters find ways to cut down on their use of paper.

Obviously

[Original Replica (908688)]

Canada's national police force, has been claiming that counterfeiting costs Canadians $30 billion per year.

Umm no it doesn't cost Canadians anything, they're getting all that counterfeit stuff for free, that's kinda the whole point of piracy. It might be more accurate to say that $30 billion per year worth of wealth is more evenly distributed in Canada, thanks to counterfeiting. (I'm only being partially sarcastic)

Re:

[p0tat03 (985078)]

You're assuming that each pirated copy would never have been a sale. Consider, though, that much of piracy (both in terms of counterfeit branded goods and software) involves unwitting consumers (the man who gets suckered into a Rolex deal that's too good to be true, for example). These are a lot grayer, and it could very well be that the consumer who bought the counterfeit goods would have bought the legit item if given the opportunity and the knowledge.

So yes, while I agree that piracy numbers are severe

Re:Obviously

[TubeSteak (669689)]

Consider, though, that much of piracy (both in terms of counterfeit branded goods and software) involves unwitting consumers (the man who gets suckered into a Rolex deal that's too good to be true, for example).

Ummm... I'm going to have to disagree with you there, at least about the Rolex.

People in the market for a 10~100 dollar (fake) Rolex are not the same people who are in the market for a 5,000~10,000 dollar Rolex.

Re:Obviously

[pla (258480)]

People in the market for a 10~100 dollar (fake) Rolex are not the same people who are in the market for a 5,000~10,000 dollar Rolex

Bingo. I think only you, in this entire discussion so far, even read the FP, much less TFA.

Counterfeiting != Piracy, people.

The RIAA has a pretty good argument (even if they use massively inflated numbers) when they say that the average person who pirated popular-song-X might have bought it instead. That doesn't scale up to tens of thousands of songs, but as a one-off, they have a valid point.

When the IACC [iacc.org] tries to make the same argument, it falls completely flat. These jokers make the RIAA look reasonable by comparison. The average person simply will not ever buy a $1500 handbag or a $5000 watch. This organization doesn't protect the average Joe (they even admit the counterfeit goods usually have comparable quality to the real thing, making them harder to spot); They don't protect the manufacturers (since counterfeiting results in no lost sales); They don't help anyone but the mega-rich.

They make sure Paris Hilton doesn't need to run home and change because her cellmate wore the same (if $10k cheaper) shoes to the press conference.

There will never be accurate data on any of this.

[suv4x4 (956391)]

It's just too plain complicated process to come up with a simple number and claim "that's it", even for a team of neutral experts.
And that's the ideal case (people are never neutral, especially on a topic such as this).

The reason they need this number most is they want the government to put a law that artificially "restores the balance" by splitting the loss on blank media and players, taxing those.

The flaws of this approach are visible from a mile away, even if you had the perfect data in your hands.

So bottom line: we can't obtain proper data, but we shouldn't need it in the first place.

I wouldn't frame this as a "debate", exactly ...

[ScrewMaster (602015)]

Canada has been the home to a growing debate ...

From dictionary.com:

Debate: a discussion, as of a public question in an assembly, involving opposing viewpoints

There's plenty of opposing viewpoints, but really there's no "discussion" here ... the individuals and organizations in favor of these shenanigans have no interest whatsoever in debating anything with anyone. They simply want their way, and they'll do pretty much whatever it takes to get it. Nobody else's perspective but their own is of any consequence to them.

A couple of more appropriate words might be "rubberstamp", or perhaps "steamroller". But not debate.

Piracy is not the problem

[teh moges (875080)]

I would wager that moves like "Evan Almighty" cost the industry more then piracy.

Re:Piracy is not the problem

[pokerdad (1124121)]

I would wager that moves like "Evan Almighty" cost the industry more then piracy.

I know you were joking, but I thought that its worth pointing out, there is no longer such a thing as a bomb in Hollywood. Between the globalization of the film market(by which I mean that Hollywood is now king almost everywhere), DVD sales, PPV, broadcast rights, and merchandizing it is virtually impossible for a Hollywood film to lose money anymore. "Evan Almighty" made back $100 mil of its $175 mil budget just in domestic box office, and given that Hollywood films now generally make more money abroad than at home, its sure to show a profit before its done with theatres.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0413099/business [imdb.com]

Re:

[Aladrin (926209)]

I hear people say that X movie was bad, despite it raking in tens of millions of dollars in the first weekend... If it was REALLY that bad, they wouldn't have made that much money. In fact, I really enjoyed Even Almighty. I think it's a better movie than most movies 50 years ago. It may not be as good as the best movies, but it doesn't have to be. It just has to be entertaining.

I think we've been jaded by so many truly good movies that we've lost sight of what a 'bad' movie really is. I've a friend wh

Chilly, eh?

[cez (539085)]

TFA:

Similarly, this year the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which counts most industrialized countries as members, issued a comprehensive report on counterfeiting that placed the global cost at $200 billion annually. That analysis, which makes suggestions that Canadian counterfeiting costs $30 billion each year even more implausible, was less than a third of what some business groups had previously claimed.

In fact, the OECD report concluded that while counterfeiting w

$900 per person?

[Myria (562655)]

So, does anyone really believe that piracy costs Canadians about $900 per person per year?

Re:

[Joebert (946227)]

Sounds like a job for Geico.

It's invlated and here's why

[Anonymous Coward]

I know I probably personally pirate $900 a year worth of stuff.

But if I didn't have that opportunity, would I have spent that $900 on the same material? No. What would I have spent on it? $0.

This is because movies I really like I always buy the DVD copy of anyway to add to my collection. Movies that suck, well, I download because I have nothing else to do when I am bored. If the ability to pirate this stuff was taken away I would just find something else to do with my time (and would probably lose interest

Re:

[canuck57 (662392)]

So, does anyone really believe that piracy costs Canadians about $900 per person per year?

I do, in fact it is much more. Just that it is the total load government taxes that the pirates take from us. This is typical Canadian government misdirection. This sounds more like a ploy to make for an ever bigger government to fix a problem blown far out of proportion.

Think, 2 of 3 days each of us has to buy a CD for life, maybe full of DRM/trojans too.

Rick, I'm schocked, schocked...

[$RANDOMLUSER (804576)]

So a law enforcement agency overstated the threat/street value? I'm schocked, simply schocked...

Open source on Internet != untrustworthy

[davidwr (791652)]

It just means "consider the source." If Alan Greenspan edited a financial article on Wikipedia and authenticated himself on his user page, I'd take his edit as more authoritative than if 132.147.63.12 made the same edit.

On the other hand, if anyone including the folks at 132.147.63.12 made an edit and quoted Greenspan, the quote checked out, and the edit itself was written well, I would consider it just as authoritative.

You should ALWAYS consider the sources - and the original sources if it's not one - when using other people's data.

Re:

[Wingnut64 (446382)]

Leave it to Darl edit Wikipedia anonymously.

RCMP...

[Ecuador (740021)]

If you have to look it up like i did, I'll save you the trouble: Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

I mean, they are still riding horses, did you really expect an elaborate financial analysis on the impact of piracy from them? Jeez...

Re:

[ceoyoyo (59147)]

They mostly ride cars and helicopters these days, much like the US Cavalry.

The horses do come in handy occasionally though.

Re:

[Ecuador (740021)]

I know of at least one Canadian that has no sense of humour... :)

Nope, I did not know RCMP, and I did not grow up in LI (did Grad School there though) or even the US...

Meanwhile, in other news ...

[PPH (736903)]

... the RCMP announces the breakup of a massive counterfeiting operation based in Shivering Moose, Alberta.

Shivering moose?

[phorm (591458)]

You know, I'm Canadian (though not Albertan) and I still had to double-check that such a town didn't exist. We do get some weirdly named ones up here :-)

Reminds me of an old joke.

Two Americans - a man and his wife - become lost while driving around in Canada during their holidays. After wandering aimlessly for awhile, the man finally takes the advice of his wife and stop to ask for directions. They pull into a small gas station, and the man asks the burly attendant therein if he could tell them exactly

Who did the estimate for Google...?

[PSaltyDS (467134)]

Who did the estimates of the billions lost by Google?
Wasn't the RCMP, was it? [slashdot.org]

:-)

Well that is nothing...

[tgatliff (311583)]

Last year I lost 500000 Billion dollars to people stealing my "stuff"...By my own internal research of course...

In short, there is an old saying for this... You didnt loose what you never had... :-)

Re:

[warrigal (780670)]

This being slashdot everybody thinks in terms of warez or music. How would you feel about being treated by a counterfeit doctor (it's happened in OZ recently) with counterfeit drugs? Dollar costs are hard to calculate in these circumstances.

Re:

[tgatliff (311583)]

Counterfeit doctors, drugs have been around since the beginning of times. The success of the current medical industry dictates that they put processes in place to manage this type of issue, and they do this quite effectively...

What I dont hear the medical industry saying, however, is what Google is trying to say... And that is them trying to calcuate the business that these fraudulent vendors are taking away from them. Meaning, if they never made the money, then it does not belong to them in the first pla

Counterfeiting is more than cd's

[m0nkyman (7101)]

There is a growing problem with counterfeits outside of IP crap. There are the brand name knock-offs of stuff like designer goods, but there is more and more counterfeiting of things like tires and automobile parts. That genuine GM part might be a sub-par knock off out of a chinese factory.

It's cool to pretend stuff like this doesn't matter, but it does.

Re:Counterfeiting is more than cd's

[QuantumG (50515)]

What I've found really annoying lately is that bag, watch and clothes makers have started calling "look alike" products "counterfeits" even though they don't have the same logos or pretend to be originals.

And yeah, who couldn't see that coming.

Re:Michael Liberal Geist

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep.

Yawn.

Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Re:

[djmurdoch (306849)]

I wouldn't call him a Liberal: he helped a Liberal (Sarmite Bulte) to lose the last election [boingboing.net].

Re:

[billcopc (196330)]

What's so bad about liberals anyway ?

Last century it was communists, now liberals ?

Politics would make a lot more sense if people actually put a little thought into their choices, rather than spinning a wheel to choose who they hate this week.

Re:

[Lazarian (906722)]

In Canada when we say "Liberal", we are usually referring to the Liberal Party of Canada. They have been embroiled in some of the worst scandals in recent history here ("Adscam" and our infamous two billion dollar gun registry come to mind).

Elsewhere the word liberal usually refers to people with particular social and idealogical leanings. Here we are referring to a particular group of corrupt dirtbags. :)

I have no idea of Mr. Geist's political affiliations, and it doesn't matter to me. He's done a lot of g

Re:And...

[Kristoph (242780)]

If you read the article, they goggled and found some material that some guy made up. Subsequently they found a power point presentation by another guy where a single bullet point on a slide sort-of correlated with what the other guy made up. Two guys can't be wrong, eh?

Sadly, I am not making this up.

]{