Somewhere there must be an Institute of Big Scary Numbers that provides corporations and wingnuts with the figures that they use to attempt to push through their latest cranial flatulence. These are numbers that often have no basis in any known reality, or would be extremely time and money consuming to derive, but they are always available from IBSN [not associated with anything else known as IBSN].

For example, in his BBC Viewpoint segment Steve Tepp of the US Chamber of Commerce provides the following ‘facts’:

“How big is this problem? Rogue sites garner over 53 billion visits a year.”

“What cannot be done is to do nothing. Indeed, there is broad consensus that something must be done to address online counterfeiting and piracy, which already costs the global economy $650bn (£432bn) annually.”

There is no definition of what constitutes a ‘rogue site’ or how many sites are included, and that’s before you get into the various ways of counting ‘visits’ to web sites. There is also no indication as to why visiting a web site is a ‘problem’.

That $650 billion figure is just created. There’s no way of knowing if it costs the ‘global economy’ anything. It might reduce the profits of some companies, but even that isn’t known for sure. The reality is that few of those who buy knock-offs or counterfeits would ever consider paying for the ‘real thing’. The ‘rogue sites’ might be a plus for the ‘global economy’ as they are generating activity where none existed before. The ‘global economy’ couldn’t care less about laws, it is based on business activity. [A former Florida agriculture commissioner used to annoy the hell out of certain people by including the state’s marijuana crop in estimates of the value of Florida agriculture.]

His claim of ‘broad consensus’ obviously didn’t include major communities on the Internet.

Soaking Up The Rays

Warmth again …

[Editor: This is a better shot of Underhouse in the late afternoon sun. We’ve had frequent cold fronts move through, and Wednesday night’s storm featured a thunderstorm.

Friday Ark