It is clear that recent events surrounding SOPA do not represent the end of the war waged by the copyright industries; at most it’s a skirmish they will concede, albeit very grudgingly, as lost. Judging from the experiences we faced in the UK with The Digital Economy Bill (I covered some of those shenanigans here in Musing About Downloads In The UK) dealing with SOPA (and PIPA) is going to be a long hard war of attrition. A war where every one of us needs to understand the weapons being used against us, as well as the absolute flimsiness of the ammunition.

I intended to write another long post on this flimsiness, then found that someone else had done a far better job than I could’ve. So what I shall do instead is to link to the wonderful post on the subject by research fellow Julian Sanchez at the Cato Institute. Headlined How Copyright Industries Con Congress, it’s a must-read. While you’re at it, it’s also worth reading Julian’s earlier piece on the subject in Ars Technica. The elevator version is as follows: numbers related to the value of illegal downloads as well as numbers related to the number of jobs affected are at best wild unsubstantiated estimates, and at worst devious attempts to flim-flam a legislature crying out to be flim-flammed. The $200-$250 billion number, while it came from a sidebar in a reputable magazine, was actually an unsourced estimate of the value of all counterfeit and pirated goods worldwide, and was clearly stated in the magazine as such. And the 750,000 jobs lost number was taken from a 1986 speech by the then Secretary of Commerce, a number that has never been endorsed by the Department of Commerce.