I’ve been having this nightmare. A real swinger of a nightmare, too.

A great piece of investigative journalism from Julian Sanchez at Arstechnica (see below) about the dubious provenance of the numbers the U.S. government trumpets re: jobs and revenue lost to crimes against intellectual property (750,000 and $200 to $250 billion). First, I was reminded of John Iselin (as Joe McCarthy) in The Manchurian Candidate, pulling the latest number of DoJ Communists (57) from a bottle of Heinz ketchup. Then, obviously, this sprung to mind. But of course, duh, when I stopped to think for just a hot second, this sadly recent and all-too-real example reminded me that even In Real Life, Big Numbers don’t have to Mean Anything when you need to Convince People to Do Something.

Some choice moments from Sanchez’s digging, with added boldness on the best bits:

“These statistics are brandished like a talisman each time Congress is asked to step up enforcement to protect the ever-beleaguered U.S. content industry. And both, as far as an extended investigation by Ars Technica has been able to determine, are utterly bogus.
…
we dove into press archives, hoping to find the earliest public mention of the elusive 750,000 jobs number. And we found it in—this is not a typo—1986…The Christian Science Monitor quoted then-Commerce Secretary Malcom Baldridge, trumpeting Ronald Reagan’s own precursor to the recently passed PRO-IP bill. Baldridge estimated the number of jobs lost to the counterfeiting of U.S. goods at ‘anywhere from 130,000 to 750,000.’
…
All the projections we’ve discussed, the rigorous and the suspect alike, calculate losses in sales or royalties to U.S. firms. This is often conflated with the net “cost to the U.S. economy.” But those numbers—whatever they might be—are almost certainly not the same. When someone torrents a $12 album that they would have otherwise purchased, the record industry loses $12, to be sure. But that doesn’t mean that $12 has magically vanished from the economy. On the contrary: someone has gotten the value of the album and still has $12 to spend somewhere else.
…
both numbers are seemingly decades old, gaining a patina of currency and credibility by virtue of having been laundered through a relay race of respectable sources, even as their origin recedes into the mists. That’s especially significant, because these numbers are always invoked as proof that the piracy problem is still dire—that everything we’ve done to step up international enforcement of intellectual property laws has been in vain.
…
Neither figure is terribly plausible on its face. As Wired noted earlier this week, 750,000 jobs is fully 8 percent of the current number of unemployed in the United States. And $250 billion is more than the combined 2005 gross domestic revenues of the movie, music, software, and video game industries.”