The Institute of Big Scary Numbers
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.
6 comments
I’ve heard… possibly just conjecture… that MPAA, for example, is simply multiplying the estimated number of unpaid movie downloads by the list retail price of a DVD, and asserting that’s the money they lose. Not hardly! Most people doing illegal downloads would NOT go out and buy the movies they steal; instead, they’d do what I do… point their new, expanded broadcast TV converter box to a local movie channel and watch, on average, a far better selection of old movies than most of the new crap being released these days… no illegal behavior necessary.
I don’t care if they can multiply, and want to show off that fact. The resulting number is surely from the IBSN. (Wikipedia just redirects to ISBN, which everyone who’s spent time in libraries knows is International Standard Book Number. Or maybe it’s the Yahoo group “International Bible Study – Nijmegen.” Or perhaps a tax preparation company that apparently gets bad online reviews. Or…)
First of all, even if the Scary Big Number were real, the argument that the world economy is “losing” $650B/year is utter nonsense. What, the money just gets embarrassed and curls up and dies and goes to money heaven? No. It gets spent on something *else*, like big-a** hard drives and high speed Internet services to deal with handling all these downloads. Money doesn’t go away, it just gets spent on something else. I.e., the world economy lost *nothing*. Hollywood did, but other people gained, so it’s all a wash from the standpoint of the world economy.
Of course the $650B/year is balderdash anyhow, since the vast majority of illegal downloaders will *not* buy legal copies of those goods if somehow you managed to make it impossible to download illegal copies on the Internet. They’re downloading because it’s free, not because they desire the goods enough to pay money for it.
I’m betting in the Indian tax preparers – they are in an outsourcing hot bed and they deal with numbers, that apparently are not corresponding to the objective reality that their customers are made aware of by the ‘taxman’, so they seem like a natural fit … but there is no actual evidence to currently support that guess.
Oh, and he is talking about all counterfeit goods, not just DVDs and CDs.
Given what my Mother pays Netflix, I can’t see even owning DVDs. She has the second cheapest plan they offer, and the things appear overnight. If she watches them the day they arrive, she would be getting a DVD every other day.
I got the Blu-ray of the ‘Sound of Music’ and it cost enough for three months of Netflix. I assume that the Blu-rays are more expensive at Netflix than the ones she gets, but they still have to be a better deal than buying them.
She is annoyed about having someplace to store them, because people are sending her DVDs for her birthday and other holidays.
Reality is that they have made no effort to understand the ‘Net and its potential to increase their profits and expand their markets. Apple had to show them how to sell music, and Netflix et al. are showing them how to make money from DVDs, but every time they attempt to do anything, they screw it up. That Sony rootkit was one of the dumbest thing to come down the pike. That was guaranteed to piss people off, because it was injecting a virus into your computer and threatening the stability.
It is the MBA CEO mentality that is destroying American business. Xerox had the ‘keys to kingdom’ at PARC and did nothing with it. Eastman Kodak did much of the basic research and holds many critical patents for digital cameras, and did nothing with it. They refuse to think beyond the current quarter, and fail to plan for the future.
We were posting at the same time, Badtux.
Maybe it joins the trillions that ‘business’ has stuffed in its mattress and is no longer part of the economy. There is no figure for the wage deflation caused by outsourcing and the resulting decrease in demand by the loss of income among US workers. That must be another BSN.
Yeah, there are a lot of costs associated with being a major ‘pirate’ that no one considers. The kind of raw power and storage required for a major operation isn’t cheap if it is supposed to have 24/7 availability.
Hell, they can’t even get agreement from my Local Puppy Trainer, which ran an editorial against SOPA/PIPA and included negative comments from the Cato Institute. That sort of argues that the ‘consensus’ was that these bills were FUBAR.
That “MBA CEO mentality”? “After all, the chief business of the American people is business.” But even Coolidge got a bad rap on that; he also said, in the same speech,
Even Coolidge must be spinning in his grave today.
“I got the Blu-ray of the ‘Sound of Music’ …”
So now you have the original of that right-wing nutjob anti-Islamic song,
Even my resident occasional troll… you’ve never met her, because I never let her posts go through… was opposed to SOPA/PIPA, so it’s not really a left-right issue either. It’s an industry stupidity issue. In the old days, I purchased probably $1000 of new CDs a year; now, out of sheer resentment, I purchase $0 in new CDs/DVDs, with the exception of a couple of gifts requested by friends. All my favorite forms of music are available in quantity on used CDs; yes, they tried to stop the sale of those a few years back, but failed. They seem to have the absurd notion that when you purchase an item of media, you are marrying it for life.
I don’t know if it’s still the case, but at one point, Amazon refused to sell Kindle media to public libraries. “When will they ever learn…”
The only thing ‘creative’ about the media companies is their accounting. They rip off the really creative people in a system that, from multiple descriptions, sounds like share-cropping. Successful artists have to tour to cover their expenses and pay off the ‘loans’ the media companies gave them when they were signed.
For a very long time the only way I have bought CDs is that shows and performances of people I like.
I really get annoyed thinking about all of the play logs I filled out as a DJ, and the artists got diddly from what the station paid to license the music. A lot of ‘one hit wonders’ had to get jobs to pay their rent – they couldn’t afford to be creative in the system that existed.
Now you can at least buy the music from the artists directly.
The radio is all pre-programmed, the media companies do everything they can to block listening to new music, and music/record stores have disappeared. So much for promoting creativity.