For months, Canadian coppers have been claiming that software piracy costs the country $30 billion. The figure has been used by countless lobby groups to get the Canadian authorities to bring in some tougher anti-piracy laws.
However blogger Michael Geist thought there was something fishy about the figure and asked for the sources behind the Royal Mounted Police’s $30 billion claim.
The letter came back from red-faced coppers confessing that they made up the figure based what they had read on the Internet.
Soon they’ll try solving cases by looking ‘em up on Wikipedia.
Thanks, Justin
Finally – they’re meeting US standards.
YEP,
Monkey see, monkey doo.
#1
Methinks these officers have been smoking too much weed.
The RCMP most likely believed that their estimate would not be actually used for any significant purpose. Just planning numbers, eh?
#3 – Or not enough
Like you mean everything you read on the intertubes isn’t true? Oh my what ever shall we do?
I always take police reports with their budget requests in mind… Can’t get more funding unless (insert vice here) is at record / panic levels.
Oh well the copyfight Nazis have been laughed out of court up here already and Dvorak featured the story where they’ve officially said file sharing is legal.
http://tinyurl.com/37sju7
Another thing about these types of numbers that bothers me is the assumption that a pirate would have purchased something if he could not obtain it otherwise. Just because a CD was downloaded 500,000 times doesn’t mean all those 500,000 pirates would have purchased it were it not available at the Pirate Bay.
Last night, I downloaded a collection of old TV music themes so I could let a young friend hear what the Underdog theme music sounded like when I was a kid. Does that mean the music company lost $10 bucks because I didn’t buy the CD? If I hadn’t downloaded it, the kid would have had to listen to my singing.
Actually the quote is
“its 2005 Economic Crime Report pegged the counterfeiting cost at between $10 to 30 billion dollars annually.”
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/2243/135/
But I have to admit, I made up these figures based what I had read on the Internet.
I don’t know about you, but when I see figures that include a range of 300% from bottom to top number, I seem to receive a message that suggests a certain amount of understood uncertainty.
Here’s one of the sources the cops read on the internet:
http://www.iacc.org/
And here are some of the white papers citing original sources and research on that same site:
White Paper & Fact papers
http://www.iacc.org/resources/resources.php
Geist prefers to show the cops figures are erroneous based upon the low percentages of inspected cross-border trade shipments that showed actual counterfeit content.
Of course what this doesn’t show, nor does Geist acknowledge, is the amount of home-grown piracy that exists. If 5 -7 % of software trade is considered to be an unsubstantiated counterfeit and piracy figure, I now ask you from your own experience and knowledge, what % of the software that you or your friends own is not original and paid for product?
And then tell me you didn’t make up this story based on what you read on the internet.
RBG
9 Nimby: “SPEED OF LIGHTNING, POWER OF THUNDER!….
I love driving my daughters crazy singing it in over-the-top operatic baritone.
RBG
9 Nimby. And so what would they be listening to that they paid for if they weren’t listening to what they hadn’t paid for?
RBG
#10 – the IACC is a “non-profit organization”? But it represents all the for-profit corporations. Now how exactly does that work?! Sounds like a tax dodge, so the corporates (and IACC) don’t have to pay any taxes to defend their intellectual properties. Unlike the rest of us, who have to pay taxes to have our own properties defended. Cops don’t work for nothing, ya know. But our taxes often pay to defend the RIAA’s. While they misuse the “non-profit organization” tax status to represent their highly profitable interests.
The real piracy story here should have been the RCMP pirating someone else’s phony stats, and not doing their own research. The school students get punished for using Wiki and other internet sources for the bulk of their school papers’ content. But then the governmental authoraties set a fine example themselves, by doing exactly that. So how do they expect the rest of us, and the school kids, to “do the right thing”, when they’re often copping out and taking the easier (and cheaper) way out? I quess that’s a rhetorical question.
At least they got the truth. Here they would just lie and lie and lie…..
I’m a little bewildered by this. The RCMP has a lot of very intelligent people working for them. Why would they have stooped to such a low tactic? To have this on your record is a career ender for most. I’m wondering if there isn’t something behind the scenes we aren’t being told?
#15, MF, there’s probably more to the story, but incompetence, sloppiness, and indiscretion seems, in my experiences, to be the norm in all professions these days.
13 Glenn E. If everybody in academia and industry had to do their own research, that would make for a hell of a lot of expensive redundancy to say nothing of charges of bias. Seems you can’t even hire researchers or pollsters at arms-length without such criticism.
RBG