IP Democracy: What's "Fair Use" Worth? Apparently $4.5 Trillion

A report by the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) is generating a lot of buzz because it puts a value on the "fair use" exception to the copyright law, and that value is $4.5 trillion. Fair use allows people to reasonably excerpt or reproduce or otherwise use copyrighted material, assuming that the use of the material isn't wholesale reproduction or simply theft.

CCIA, a group backed by Silicon Valley powerhouses such as Microsoft, Google and Yahoo, among others, says that fair use amounts to $4.5 trillion in annual revenue in the U.S., representing one-sixth of the country's GDP.

Clearly the goal of the report is to counter the "studies" produced by big copyright holders, which argue that piracy of intellectual property costs billions and billions per year, or something to that effect. The MPAA, the RIAA and other proponents of stricter content control laws are not big fans of fair use, which they view as a loophole that needs to be narrowed because, they argue, so many new businesses leverage fair use at the expense of content creators.

Techdirt's Mike Masnick is a little exercised because he thinks this report is just as "bogus" as the countervailing studies. Welcome to Washington, a town where a lot of bogus stuff is flung around, and almost nobody believes the crapola that self-interested parties produce.

Even so, bogus reports are very important because they are incredibly useful in justifying particular courses of action. That's why the MPAA and the RIAA shovel their reports out the door -- to give policymakers something to cite when moving forward with legislation or new regulations.

Now that CCIA says that fair use is worth $4.5 trillion, foes of legislation or regulation backed by copyrightholders will have their own statistics and research to cite. Doesn't matter if the numbers are real or not. It just matters that the numbers exist.

Or as Mike puts it:

..if the copyright industry is going to keep publishing its bogus reports, it's hard to fault the CCIA for using the same methodology to show how much more important fair use is. The next time anyone cites the bogus piracy numbers, they should at least be forced to acknowledge these numbers on the value of fair use as well as a counterweight. They may be bogus, but they're equally bogus to the piracy numbers.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on September 13, 2007 3:41 PM to IP Democracy