[Infowarrior] - Piracy problems? US copyright industries show terrific health

[Richard Forno]

Piracy problems? US copyright industries show terrific health

By Nate Anderson | Published about an hour ago
       
Pity the poor people who work in the US "copyright industries." Battered by a decade of digital piracy and facing even more of it thanks to cheap computers, fast Internet, P2P file-sharing, and online file lockers, the US creative industries teeter on the verge of collapse. You can tell because the industry:

	• Pays better than most American jobs
	• Has outperformed the US economy through a horrific recession
	• Sells record-setting amounts of product overseas, earning more foreign revenue than the entire US food sector or US pharmaceutical companies

Things are going so "badly" that a major new report commissioned by copyright holders says that these "consistently positive trends solidify the status of the copyright industries as a key engine of growth for the US economy as a whole."

Bad never looked so good

The International Intellectual Property Alliance unveiled the new report today in association with the Congressional International Anti-Piracy Caucus at an event in Washington, DC. The report doesn't even try to quantify losses to piracy anymore--last year, an official US government report concluded that such estimates were all deeply unreliable. Instead, it simply asserts without evidence that "piracy inhibits… growth in the US and around the world."

"Inhibits growth" doesn't quite equal "causes staggering job losses," the traditional anti-piracy rallying cry. Indeed, copyright industries are being "hard hit" by piracy in the way that plenty of other US industries are desperate to get "hit." (In this sense, the report is bit like the MPAA's routine announcements of record-setting box office revenues even as the movie studios conjure visions of apocalypse.)

During the recession of the last few years, the report shows that copyright-based businesses have far exceeded the US economy as a whole.

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http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/11/piracy-problems-us-copyright-industries-show-terrific-health.ars

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Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it.