This week the Chamber of Commerce's Global Innovation Policy Center (GIPC) and NERA released a new report titled, "Impacts of Digital Piracy on the U.S. Economy." Anyone interested in protecting intellectual property rights, especially including copyrights, should read this important, if somewhat alarming, study.
The report chronicles the extraordinary growth of digital streaming video services just in the past few years. Now, according to the report, there are more than 500 licensed online video portals. And more streaming subscribers than paid TV subscribers. Not only are all the proliferating video streaming services providing consumers with an abundance of choices for enjoying an incredibly wide variety of content, but, not surprisingly, they have contributed significantly to economic growth and produced hundreds of thousands of new jobs.
All that is good.
But there is a dark side too – an alarming increase in digital piracy – which largely is the focus of the new GIPC/NERA report.
It's worth reading the entire report, but here are some of the key findings:
· 80% of digital piracy is now due to streaming, largely encouraged by the widespread proliferation of piracy devices and apps that make pirated content easier to access.
· Overall, approximately 26.6 billion viewings of U.S.-produced movies and126.7 billion viewings of U.S.-produced television episodes are digitally pirated each year, mostly from outside the U.S.
· Digital video piracy deprives the U.S. economy of a minimum of $29.2 billion in reduced revenue each year.
Enough said to demonstrate that the losses resulting from digital piracy – the harm suffered by the artists and creators who labor to produce the pirated works, and the harm to the overall economy – demand attention from U.S. policymakers and those abroad.
My Free State Foundation colleague, Seth Cooper, and I have addressed the scourge of digital piracy many times in the past, and we've offered various proposals to combat it. Here are two FSF Perspectivesthat contain proposals for addressing digital piracy at home and abroad:
· Modernizing Criminal Copyright Law to Combat Online Piracy, June 18, 2018
· Modernizing International Agreements to Combat Copyright Infringement, November 16, 2018
I submit that along with the new GIPC/NERA report, these Free State Foundation papers are worthwhile reading too.
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