

Report that fair use generates $4.7 trillion in economic activity - CoryOndrejka
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/04/fair-use-generates-trillions-in-the-us-alone.ars

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ctkrohn
Impressive, but doesn't pass a smell check. US GDP was $13.84 trillion. It
seems extremely far-fetched that copyright restrictions account for more than
a third of our nation's economic output.

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sjsivak
From the article: "Doing these kinds of analyses is notoriously imprecise, in
some cases amounting to little more than guesswork."

That is does not paint a very good picture, and when looking into the actual
report and what industries are considered: "...rise of the digital economy, as
fair use permits a range of activities that are critical to many high
technology businesses, including search portals and web hosting."

I would bet that any user-generated content website is considered, and who
knows what else.

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pmccool
Fair point. I still think it works as a kind of reductio ad absurdum of the
claims about the cost of so-called piracy, which rest on similarly shaky
foundations.

