For Every Entertainment Industry Job ‘Lost’ To Infringement, – 12 Jobs Be Created Elsewhere? http://tinyurl.com/4vtott2
It’s an interesting piece of research particularly int he light of the discredited (by the US Government Accounting Office) “studies” by the RIAA and MPAA, which never take into account any potential positive of unauthorized distribution, aka free publicity.
A few years ago, the folks at CCIA smartly took the copyright industry’s exact methodology and showed that for all the claims of how much copyright contributed to the economy, exceptions to copyright contributed even more. While the copyright maximalists totally missed the point and attacked the methodology — not realizing that, in doing so, they had undermined their own methodology — the point was made. If you believe the claims from the copyright industry, then you also have to believe that the exceptions are more important. The methodology is the same, so either neither are right or both are right.
It looks like Rick Falkvinge, of The Pirate Party, has now done something similar on the “job loss” side of things, and concluded that, using similar methodology to the industry reports, for every job “lost” by copyright infringement, the positive ripple effects in the other direction mean that 11.8 new jobs are created. So if we accept the claim that 1.2 million jobs can be lost due to infringement, it would mean that a separate 14.2 million jobs were created elsewhere.
That is not to say that “content wants to be free” (at best a misquote and misunderstanding of the original point). But it is relevant when the copyright maximalists want to clamp down on the freedom of the Internet and criminalize activities that should be addressed with better business models. Â Elected Representatives need to realize that the inaccuracies being fed to them by the copyright maximalists could be costing the economy new jobs, and new industries.