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Business & Marketing Item of Interest

Someone Forgot to Tell Reality that the Entertainment Industry was Dying!

Not only did employment grow, but there’s no evidence of damage done to the economy by “piracy”.

Someone Forgot To Tell Reality That The Entertainment Industry Was Dying http://t.co/htUEeWBA

According to the Department of Labor statistics, employment in the entertainment industry has increased:

Why yes, that does show that the industry grew nicely from 1998 to 2008… all the while we were being told it was being decimated by piracy and no one could find work any more. Oh, and check out that last line. Independent artists, writers and performers jumped from 35.2k in 1998 to 50.4k in 2008 — the first decade of real mainstream internet infringement (Napster arrived in ’99). If you’re not quick with the percentages, that’s a pretty astounding 43.2% growth rate. And, it appears the BLS continues to think that jobs in that sector are going to grow over the next decade as well. Damn those pesky facts.

But surely all that “piracy” – that drives the MPAA/RIAA to lobby for truly bad laws like SOPA/PROTECT IP – has done some harm? None that’s apparently provable. This article - How Much Do Music and Movie Piracy Really Hurt the U.S. Economy – quotes the figures of “harm” that are propounded by the usual suspects and finds:

The good news is that the numbers are wrong — as this post by the Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez explains. In 2010, the Government Accountability Office released a report noting that these figures “cannot be substantiated or traced back to an underlying data source or methodology,” which is polite government-speak for “these figures were made up out of thin air.”

More recently, a smaller estimate — $58 billion – was produced by the Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI). But that IPI estimate, as both Sanchez and tech journalist Tim Lee have pointed out, is replete with methodological problems, including double- and triple-counting, that swell the estimate of piracy losses considerably.

These figures were made up out of thin air. That’s not from a pro-piracy lobby group, that’s the US Government Accountability Office, who categorically state that there is no basis for any of the scare mongering figures of “damage” done. No evidence. In fact there has NEVER been any peer reviewed studies that show ANY harm from unauthorized distribution.

And yet the idiots at the MPAA and RIAA – and their bought-and-paid-for stooges in Congress – insist on lying to the Government, their artists and the public. Ironic, since they’ve been so totally wrong about technology in the past.