The $8 billion iPod | Rob Reid

The recent debate over copyright laws

like SOPA in the United States

and the ACTA agreement in Europe

has been very emotional.

And I think some dispassionate, quantitative reasoning

could really bring a great deal to the debate.

I'd therefore like to propose

that we employ, we enlist,

the cutting edge field of copyright math

whenever we approach this subject.

For instance, just recently

the Motion Picture Association revealed

that our economy loses 58 billion dollars a year

to copyright theft.

Now rather than just argue about this number,

a copyright mathematician will analyze it

and he'll soon discover that this money

could stretch from this auditorium

all the way across Ocean Boulevard

to the Westin, and then to Mars ...

(Laughter)

... if we use pennies.

Now this is obviously a powerful,

some might say dangerously powerful, insight.

But it's also a morally important one.

Because this isn't just the hypothetical retail value

of some pirated movies that we're talking about,

but this is actual economic losses.

This is the equivalent

to the entire American corn crop failing

along with all of our fruit crops,

as well as wheat, tobacco,

rice, sorghum --

whatever sorghum is -- losing sorghum.

But identifying the actual losses to the economy

is almost impossible to do

unless we use copyright math.

Now music revenues are down by about eight billion dollars a year

since Napster first came on the scene.

So that's a chunk of what we're looking for.

But total movie revenues

across theaters, home video and pay-per-view are up.

And TV, satellite and cable revenues are way up.

Other content markets like book publishing and radio

are also up.

So this small missing chunk here

is puzzling.

(Laughter)

(Applause)

Since the big content markets

have grown in line with historic norms,

it's not additional growth that piracy has prevented,

but copyright math tells us

it must therefore be foregone growth

in a market that has no historic norms --

one that didn't exist in the 90's.

What we're looking at here

is the insidious cost of ringtone piracy.

(Laughter)

50 billion dollars of it a year,

which is enough, at 30 seconds a ringtone,

that could stretch from here

to Neanderthal times.

(Laughter)

It's true.

(Applause)

I have Excel.

(Laughter)

The movie folks also tell us

that our economy loses

over 370,000 jobs to content theft,

which is quite a lot when you consider that, back in '98,

the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicated

that the motion picture and video industries

were employing 270,000 people.

Other data has the music industry at about 45,000 people.

And so the job losses that came with the Internet

and all that content theft,

have therefore left us with negative employment in our content industries.

And this is just one of the many mind-blowing statistics

that copyright mathematicians have to deal with every day.

And some people think that string theory is tough.

(Laughter)

Now this is a key number from the copyright mathematicians' toolkit.

It's the precise amount of harm

that comes to media companies

whenever a single copyrighted song or movie

gets pirated.

Hollywood and Congress derived this number mathematically

back when they last sat down to improve copyright damages

and made this law.

Some people think this number's a little bit large,

but copyright mathematicians who are media lobby experts

are merely surprised

that it doesn't get compounded for inflation every year.

Now when this law first passed,

the world's hottest MP3 player could hold just 10 songs.

And it was a big Christmas hit.

Because what little hoodlum wouldn't want

a million and a half bucks-worth of stolen goods in his pocket.

(Laughter)

(Applause)

These days an iPod Classic can hold 40,000 songs,

which is to say eight billion dollars-worth

of stolen media.

(Applause)

Or about 75,000 jobs.

(Laughter)

(Applause)

Now you might find copyright math strange,

but that's because it's a field

that's best left to experts.

So that's it for now.

I hope you'll join me next time

when I will be making an equally scientific and fact-based inquiry

into the cost of alien music piracy to he American economy.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)

Thank you.

(Applause)