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protecting American jobs is important too, particularly in these difficult economic times for our nation Bullshit. The film industry is boasting record profits

protecting American jobs is important too, particularly in these difficult economic times for our nation Bullshit. The film industry is boasting record profits, piracy has had a negligible effect on American jobs. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/piracy-once-again-fails-to-get-in-way-of-record-box-office.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/piracy-once-...

thetrendycyborg 15y ago
Doesn't matter. What matters is that they mentioned a keyword (jobs) and that means they're a job-creator and everyone who opposes the bill hates jobs.
- joshuahedlund 15y ago
  Good thing the tech industry can play the jobs game too. Surely Google, Facebook, Twitter, and a thousand other web companies have hired more people than the entertainment industry in the last ten years...?
  - herge 15y ago
    That is what I do not understand about how the SOPA debate has proceeded. Google is one of the fastest growing, most profitable and innovative companies in the world, and a clear example of american innovation and economic dynamism, and yet its name is slandered as "thieves" and as profiting from crime, by a U.S. congressman no less. If the same allegations were laid against any other industry in the United States like the automotive industry or Wall Street, there would be more indignation.
  - mkr-hn 15y ago
    I tried to get numbers on the RIAA and MPAA. I didn't go deep enough to get specific employee counts from RIAA and MPAA companies, so most often I went a level up to parent companies. There's a lot of overlap. It also gets murky quick when you try to decide whether a job is destroyed, created, or moved. So this was a lot of wasted time because first we'd need to agree on a methodology for measuring this stuff, and that's a hard thing to do. MPAA The Walt Disney Company 156,000 Time Warner 32,000 General Electric 287,000 Comcast 102,000 News Corporation 51,000 Viacom 10,900 Sony 168,200 RIAA Big 4 Citigroup (!) 260,000 Vivendi 54,560 Total: 1,121,660
- vectorpush 15y ago
  Indeed. The PR outlook for SOPA is grim and as more individuals contemplate the efficacy of attempting to regulate the reproduction of bits, the MPAA can only rely on shallow populist rhetoric to win minds.
- CWuestefeld 15y ago
  It's absurd to claim that this is costing American jobs, even if it were directly causing significant harm to the Content Industry. The pirates aren't taking the money they would have spent on content and burning it. Instead, they're spending that money on something else. So it's not that jobs were lost, or even that the total GDP was reduced. It's simply that the money was spent elsewhere: it flowed into coffers other than those of the MPAA or the RIAA. So at the very worst, from an economic perspective, the damage is that resource allocation is happening somewhat inefficiently, with money being directed to the consumer's second-higher priority relative to Content. There's no reason to think that in the big picture this is harming total employment or GDP any more than a thousand other inefficiencies that regulations have created in the market.
yason 15y ago
And if you were MAFIAA, would you tell the truth? Especially if you're already well-aligned on the "we deserve more" tangent.

thetrendycyborg 15y ago

Doesn't matter. What matters is that they mentioned a keyword (jobs) and that means they're a job-creator and everyone who opposes the bill hates jobs.

joshuahedlund 15y ago
Good thing the tech industry can play the jobs game too. Surely Google, Facebook, Twitter, and a thousand other web companies have hired more people than the entertainment industry in the last ten years...?
- herge 15y ago
  That is what I do not understand about how the SOPA debate has proceeded. Google is one of the fastest growing, most profitable and innovative companies in the world, and a clear example of american innovation and economic dynamism, and yet its name is slandered as "thieves" and as profiting from crime, by a U.S. congressman no less. If the same allegations were laid against any other industry in the United States like the automotive industry or Wall Street, there would be more indignation.
- mkr-hn 15y ago
  I tried to get numbers on the RIAA and MPAA. I didn't go deep enough to get specific employee counts from RIAA and MPAA companies, so most often I went a level up to parent companies. There's a lot of overlap. It also gets murky quick when you try to decide whether a job is destroyed, created, or moved. So this was a lot of wasted time because first we'd need to agree on a methodology for measuring this stuff, and that's a hard thing to do. MPAA The Walt Disney Company 156,000 Time Warner 32,000 General Electric 287,000 Comcast 102,000 News Corporation 51,000 Viacom 10,900 Sony 168,200 RIAA Big 4 Citigroup (!) 260,000 Vivendi 54,560 Total: 1,121,660
vectorpush 15y ago
Indeed. The PR outlook for SOPA is grim and as more individuals contemplate the efficacy of attempting to regulate the reproduction of bits, the MPAA can only rely on shallow populist rhetoric to win minds.
CWuestefeld 15y ago
It's absurd to claim that this is costing American jobs, even if it were directly causing significant harm to the Content Industry. The pirates aren't taking the money they would have spent on content and burning it. Instead, they're spending that money on something else. So it's not that jobs were lost, or even that the total GDP was reduced. It's simply that the money was spent elsewhere: it flowed into coffers other than those of the MPAA or the RIAA. So at the very worst, from an economic perspective, the damage is that resource allocation is happening somewhat inefficiently, with money being directed to the consumer's second-higher priority relative to Content. There's no reason to think that in the big picture this is harming total employment or GDP any more than a thousand other inefficiencies that regulations have created in the market.

yason 15y ago

And if you were MAFIAA, would you tell the truth? Especially if you're already well-aligned on the "we deserve more" tangent.