Report that fair use generates $4.7 trillion in economic activity

arstechnica.com

24 points·CoryOndrejka··4 comments

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.

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.

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.

I agree parts are sketchy, but lots have some basis if you take a hardline no-fair-use-at-all scenario as the alternative. It's not clear that, absent fair use, Google's index would be legal: you can't generally make your own local copies of copyrighted texts, even for private use, and even only for the purpose of searching them. Certainly the snippets they display on results pages rely on fair use. And you can reasonably say that, if indexing the web were illegal, that would have a significant negative effect on the economy.

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