Misleading Data Undermines Counterfeiting Claims 91
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.'"
just in case... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
MediaDefender (Score:1, Interesting)
They also made sure to tell their guys when they wanted stats on some album that "we're not protecting this one, so the higher the better" (paraphrased).
Hell, they also admitted to trying to sanitize their own Wikipedia page [wikipedia.org] (click the discussion tab), so if they did get bad numbers from Wikipedia, I wouldn't be surprised if MediaDefender or someone like them put them there in the first place...
Obviously (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
There will never be accurate data on any of this. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:I hope not. Re:Wikipedia? (Score:4, Interesting)
$900 per person? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I hope not. Re:Wikipedia? (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Counterfeiting is more than cd's (Score:4, Interesting)
And yeah, who couldn't see that coming.
Re:Piracy is not the problem (Score:3, Interesting)
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 who regularly finds movies on IMBD that get like 2 and 3 stars, and he watches them... And reports that they were indeed as bad as people said. Those movies are so bad that they couldn't get investors to advertise them. And yet, the few I've watched are comparable to most of the ones in the 50s... Horrible acting, bad sound effects, bad or no visual effects, and totally transparent plot.
In other words, to find movies as bad as a typical 50s movie, you have to look hard these days. The industry has come a long way.
It's invlated and here's why (Score:3, Interesting)
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 in movies altogether and therefore stop buying even the DVDs I do buy!)
Hollywood really needs to take a strong look at what they are trying to accomplish because I am just one of many people who fit in this boat... There are way more ways to entertain yourself than there were 30 years ago. Television, movies, and the RIAA, who used to have a monopoly on home entertainment, now have to compete with video games and the internet, which itself is all of those mediums combined plus more. If they keep alianating their audiences, they will just leave.