Once Again, Using Industry's Own Methodology Shows That Copyright Exceptions Contribute More To The Economy Than Copyright

Copyright

from the using-their-methodology dept

The Copyright Industry absolutely loves to trot out its “numbers” about how much copyright contributes to the economy in terms of both dollars and jobs. The problem, as we’ve discussed, is that these studies have a counting problem. They simply list out every industry for which you can get copyright, then sum up all the revenue… and pretend that all of that revenue is because of copyright. This is, frankly, ridiculous and stupid. And yet, because Congress and reporters don’t bother researching this, they take the numbers at face value. What pisses me off about things like this is that it automatically counts my own revenue as being in support of copyright laws today, when I’m obviously anything but that. Even worse, the industry uses this argument to claim that they need more and stricter copyright laws, as if there’s any causal relationship between that and the revenue in those industries.

For a few years now, CCIA has countered these claims from the copyright industry with its own study, using the exact same methodology, but counting up how much “exceptions to copyright” contribute to the economy, and showing that it’s actually much larger than copyright. It’s not hard to figure out that they’re doing this to point out just how ridiculous the numbers from the copyright industry are. What’s really funny is when totally clueless copyright maximalists, such as the folks at The Copyright Alliance, attack the methodology of the CCIA fair use/exceptions report, not realizing that they’re attacking their own methodology at the same time. Amazingly, after having been called out on this, the Copyright Alliance still tosses out its own version of the study with the methodology that its own “founder” debunked when it was in a different report. In fact, despite the fact that we totally mocked the Copyright Alliance for this last year… this year they’re right back at it mocking the CCIA’s methodology. And, it looks like the MPAA has joined them in whining about the methodology. Apparently both groups are so clueless they don’t even realize they’re mocking their own methodology.

To drive this point home, the MPAA complains that the CCIA’s report includes the movie industry as part of its “fair use industries.” Indeed. But the studies that MPAA uses includes the exact same methodology, and includes companies like my own as a “copyright industry.” The whole point — which the MPAA and Copyright Alliance are apparently too clueless to recognize — is that both methodologies are totally bogus and significantly overcount, but why is it that the MPAA gets to continue using its totally bogus study results, while slamming CCIA for using the identical methodology? It would be funny, if politicians didn’t repeatedly fall for this crap.

Thankfully, not all of them do. When CCIA released its latest version of this copyright exceptions report showing, yet again, just how much exceptions to copyright law contribute to the economy and jobs using the exact same methodology as the famed “copyright” report. And, once again, if we use this methodology, copyright exceptions contribute more to the economy. The numbers are also growing really rapidly. So, based on the Copyright Industry’s own logic… shouldn’t we be adding more exceptions to copyright law?

The other good news is that Rep. Jared Polis showed up at the event where CCIA released the report and noted how it was important, and spoke out against PROTECT IP. We keep hearing from supporters of the law that only Rep. Lofgren and Senator Wyden are worried about PROTECT IP, but we’re learning that a growing number of our elected representatives are, indeed, concerned about the law.

Honestly, I think that any time the Copyright Industry tosses out its numbers, it should be required that people point out CCIA’s numbers as well. If you see anyone repeating the Copyright Industry’s claims about how much copyright “contributes to the economy,” demand that the same politicians and reporters also use CCIA’s exceptions to copyright numbers which, again, result from the identical methodology.

Filed Under: copyright, exceptions, fair use
Companies: ccia