Sales plunged from $14.6 billion down to $6.8 billion - a drop that I rounded to $8 billion in my talk. I used it to compare the industry’s revenues in 1999 (when Napster debuted) to 2010 (the most recent available data). The Recording Industry Association’s website has a robust and credible database that details industry sales going back to 1973, which any researcher can access for a few bucks (and annoying as I’ve found the RIAA to be on certain occasions, I applaud them for making this data available). There are definitely concrete and quantifiable piracy-related losses in the American music industry.
Ignoring improbabilities like pirated steaks and daffodils, I looked at actual employment and headcount in actual content industries, and found nothing approaching the claimed losses. In a February New York Times piece, an MPAA spokesman did his best by attributing the eye-popping $58 billion sum to “piracy’s impact on a range of tangentially related industries - florists, restaurants, trucking companies, and so on.” Florists? Really? Exactly how many bouquets go unsold whenever someone swipes a copy of My Sharona? But whatever their genesis, they’re not easy figures to support. This doesn’t necessarily mean that MPAA lobbyists paid the IPI to conjure up these numbers. These numbers originated at a think tank called the “Institute for Policy Innovation” – an organization that Businessweek once profiled in an article called “Op-Eds for Sale.” In it, an IPI analyst freely admitted to taking payoffs from disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff in exchange for writing “op-ed pieces boosting the lobbyist’s clients.” The IPI’s president supported this behavior, saying it was neither wrong nor unethical, and dismissing those who apply “a naïve purity standard” to the business of writing op-eds. So I thought I’d use this blog post to put my sources and calculations out there for anyone who’d like to nerd out on the details.įirst, the Motion Picture Association’s claims of $58 billion in actual US economic losses and 373,000 lost jobs came from this press release (which can also be found on Scribd ). But even my silliest numbers were derived from actual research, performed by an actual Copyright Mathematician (me, that is).
Since the talk was so short, I couldn’t dive deeply into the numbers and sources that I based it on (which would have shattered the whimsical tone anyway). And who DOESN’T want to deface a Leave-it-to-Beaver-like Christmas scene with pirate-and-Santa graffiti? Everyone can laugh at silly infographics. So I decided to make my talk playful, rather than sermonizing. But January’s brawl over the proposed SOPA law was a raw and recent memory. And Rob (whose comic novel Year Zero comes out in July) sent us this treatise, a master class in creative mathematics:Ī few weeks back, I gave a short TED talk about “Copyright Math.” Since TED draws both Hollywood and Silicon Valley bigwigs, I thought it would be a great venue for raising certain rights issues that have been a sore point between the two industries for years. Were you intrigued by “ The $8 Billion iPod,” Rob Reid’s short TEDTalk about the new science of Copyright Math (TM)? We were.
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