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Stop Online Piracy Act may be stopped
The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is viewed on Jan. 17, 2012 in Washington, D.C. Free online knowledge site Wikipedia will shut down for 24 hours beginning at midnight EST in protest at draft anti-online piracy legislation before the U.S. Congress, founder Jimmy Wales said Monday on Twitter.
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Kai Ryssdal: Tomorrow could be a long and trying day online. Try going to Wikipedia in the morning -- see what happens. Or the social news website Reddit, or posting a picture to TwitPic. It's not going to go so well.
They -- and as many as 5,000 other sites -- say they might just go black tomorrow. Shut things down entirely in protest over two bills now making their way through Congress. They'd give the government broad new powers to fight online piracy, which has raised claims in the tech world that Congress doesn't really get the Internet at all.
Marketplace's Jennifer Collins reports.
Jennifer Collins: Some congressmen practically brag about being out of touch with the Internet.
Melvin Watt: Chairman, I'm a pretty old-fashioned guy who still hasn't figured out how or even whether I want to use all the fancy technological advances that are out there.
That was North Carolina Congressman Mel Watt. He's one of the sponsors of the Stop Online Piracy Act known as SOPA. The bill, and a similar one in the Senate, includes broad new tools to thwart online piracy. One would force search engines like Google to stop linking to sites that post pirated content. Another would stop advertisers from doing business with those sites.
Jack Lerner: The ramifications are very complex.
Jack Lerner is a law professor at the University of Southern California.
Lerner: That complexity is not something that can be easily dealt with from a legislative standpoint.
The bills have created a war between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Big tech companies say the legislation would make it impossible for them to do business. Hollywood says, without the legislation, it's business is being destroyed.
Cynthia Sanders is with the law firm Ober Kaler in Baltimore.
Cynthia Sanders: Not everybody in the entertainment and media world agree.
The same is true in Washington. The Obama administration has opposed portions of the bill and the House has also pulled back. But with piracy costing up to $775 billion a year, virtually everyone agrees the bills in some form will survive.
I'm Jennifer Collins for Marketplace.
Sooo... the amount lost each year to piracy is roughly equivalent to the US Defense budget. Do your homework Marketplace. Or I'll do the math this way: It would be 15 billion trips of taking my family of 5 to a $10 per ticket movie. LMAO.
With a short amount of research found this excellent article. And even it didn't have the $775B figure: http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/how-copyright-industries-con-congress/
This morning Marketplace actually had an interview with Prof. Joel Waldfogel of the U of MN about the cost issue: http://www.marketplace.org/topics/tech/true-costs-online-piracy, but they don't throw out a number. An article in the Washington Post does: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/how-much-does-online...
FWIW - "it's business is being destroyed" should be "its business is being destroyed".
Dear Jennifer Collins,
Along with the readers above, I kindly ask you to fact check the $775 billion a year number. This number is considered a gross overestimation of an industry with a total annual revenue of tens of billions. The subject is covered in depth by multiple organizations.
I think a good followup segment or even a stand alone feature would be how numbers like $770 billion are widely used despite being outside the realm of reason. I'm don't even blame the media because it is so widely reported and used by everyone. Here is a recently written good article from a respected organization, Cato, on just how bad these numbers really are. http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/how-copyright-industries-con-congress
I second the call for the source, and not only that, but a fact-check on it. Most numbers like that I've seen coming from the entertainment industry, which — at best — arrives at them by multiplying the total number of authorized downloads by the price of, for example, a movie ticket. That's a meaningless number, as the notion that hundreds of billions of extra movie tickets (or digital downloads even) WOULD have been sold if not for free, illegal options is patently absurd.
Or, sometimes they just make the numbers up.
