ReasonedResponse.com

As a kid, I watched the TV series "I Led Three Lives," very loosely based on the book by Boston ad executive Herbert Philbrick, who in the Forties infiltrated the American Communist Party and later helped send leading members of that party to prison.  He led the lives of citizen, communist, and counter-spy for the FBI.

I also led three lives.  In the Nineties, I was marketing director for a software development company, major software pirate on the Zero-Day Warez Boards (systems that specialized in putting pirated copies of software online on the day of their release, thus making them "Zero Days"), and a paid consultant to the Software Publishers Association.  I tracked the handful of major software theft rings, collected evidence, and at the end turned our files over to the FBI.  I think those files are in a government warehouse somewhere, right beside the Arc of the Covenant from "Indiana Jones."

The point is that I spent several years working with the folks who estimated the losses of content to online piracy in order to lobby Congress and the White House, and I learned this critical fact:  they make it up.

I don't mean that they are not well intentioned, or that they are reprehensible criminals.  It's just that after they add up all the possible losses if every single person online downloaded a copy of their copyrighted work, then calculate the value of that work at full Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price, they then round it upwards as high as possible, throw in whatever is missing from the petty cash account, add a bat's wing and eye of newt, and then add a zero or two at the end for good measure.  And viola!  Billions of dollars of losses to the software/music/film/fill-in-the-blank industry each year.  Yegads!  Congress must act!  Trade Agreements must force other countries to adopt US copyright laws!  Technologies must die!

So I was a little more than amused when the Motion Picture Association of America admitted this week that it had inadvertantly overstated their losses to downloads by college students.  My first reaction was to giggle hysterically.  My second was to wonder who finally took a close look at their numbers and called them nonsense.

I do credit the MPAA with 'fessing up to the error, though their "revised" esitmate is still what I would label "Bovine Excrement."  But the larger story here is what should happen next.

Here's my advice.  The Congress, before it passes one more draconian and unnecessary copyright act; the Office of the US Trade Representative, before it forces one more country to adopt our laws; and the US department of Justice, before they allow themselves to become the private enforcement police for the entertainment industry; should demand that all online piracy figures be audited by an independent outside accounting firm for accuracy.  Make them show that the losses are real.

Okay.  That won't happen.  If it ever did, we might be inclined to start questioning the other wildly inflated claims about high crimes and misdemeanors that allegedly occur online.  Or asking why we keep flogging network neutrality as an issue when there is no evidence that a neutrality violation has ever taken place.  Or why...oh, heck, we might just look at Congress and ask, "Why?"

But it's fun to conjecture.