The inevitable backlash over the online uprisings that foiled controversial pro-copyright bills SOPA and PIPA earlier this year is slowly rising to a boil. Last week, the content industries managed to strike a backroom deal that will have major Internet Service Providers monitor and police their customers as early as July. Under the agreement, ISPs such as Verizon, Time-Warner and Comcast will work under a "6 strikes" system of graduated response to discourage alleged violators from transmitting infringing material, striking at the core of "net neutrality," which has aimed to keep service and content separate.The industries, headed up by the lobbyist powerhouses of the RIAA and MPAA, claim their increasingly controversial actions are justified, citing billions of dollars in yearly losses and hundreds of thousands of jobs at stake. But with some empirical investigation (and a little bit of humor) Rhapsody founder and self-proclaimed "Copyright Mathematician™" Rob Reid shows that the numbers simply don't add up.The MPAA, for example, is claiming that they're losing $58 billion a year to copyright theft. Taking into consideration the uninhibited growth patterns of some of these industries, however (movies and TV have been doing especially well) Reid shows that a huge piece is missing from the puzzle — about $50 billion dollars of this supposed loss remains, mysteriously, unaccounted for.The data on offer for employment in the content industries also contains some suspicious figures. If the 373,000 jobs the MPAA claims are being lost annually thanks to illegal downloading were accurate, these industries would actually have negative employment when put up against Bureau of Labor statistics recorded since 1998.Or how about this one: Following the value that has been placed on a single pirated MP3 back in 1999 ($150,000, as decided by the Napster-era Copyright Damages Improvement Act) your average iPod nowadays can be filled with about $8 billion worth of pirated media, as far as content industries are concerned.Reid's take on the various data distortions perpetuated by Big Content is humorous, but it's also increasingly worrisome. Industry lobbyists that float hyperbolic figures without proper analysis or objection stand to influence unsubstantiated adoption of over-reaching copyright laws abroad as well, such as in Canada, unless Copyright Mathematics continues to be called out for what it is.
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