A new report released today by the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) offers the following big headlines for FY2012: the copyright industries, for the first time, contributed over $1 trillion to the U.S. economy, accounting for nearly 6.5% of GDP; these industries represent nearly 5% of all private-sector jobs (5.4 million) in the U.S.; these industries grew at an aggregate ...
Last week, the National Music Publishers Association put the top 50 unlicensed lyrics websites on notice. President of the NMPA David Isrealite had a simple message to these top infringers: “Get licensed, get offline, or get sued.” And with two recent judgments in its favor, Isrealite has little doubt his organization would prevail in its pursuit of these cases. Identifying ...
First of all, name if you can the serious competitors of any of the following: Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, eBay, Twitter, Google. Go back ten years, name the biggest sites on the web, and you might notice that some of those names are either gone or really quite small compared to the dominant sites today. It isn’t even necessarily sinister, but it is a fact that the ...
In 1982, then president of the MPAA Jack Valenti said something really stupid; and today, pro-piracy pundits, some who weren’t even alive in 1982, rely heavily on the late man’s hyperbole to drive a wedge between creators and fans. Valenti said in testimony before Congress, “The VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston ...
Last week, a report emerged from the London School of Economics claiming that piracy is not harming the entertainment industries. One of my new Twitter pals, Jean-Phlippe Vergne (@pirateorg) sent me a link to the report calling it “scientific” rather than based on “moral claims.” I read the report, and there’s nothing scientific about it, particularly in that it lacks ...
