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Entertainment

The MPAA's Gaping Hole

They overestimated their copyright loss by $50 billion. Here's the math that describes how.
Janus Rose
New York, US

Remember when we found all those pesky copyright violations on SOPA daddy Lamar Smith's website? Well, the inevitable backlash over the online uprisings that foiled controversial pro-copyright bills SOPA and PIPA earlier this year is slowly rising to a boil. Last week, content industries managed to strike a backroom deal that will have major Internet Service Providers monitor and police their customers as early as July. Under the agreement, ISPs such as Verizon, Time-Warner, and Comcast will work under a “six strikes” system of graduated response to discourage alleged violators from transmitting infringing material, striking at the core of “net neutrality,” which has aimed to keep service and content separate.

The industries, headed up by the lobbyist powerhouses of the RIAA and MPAA, claim their increasingly controversial actions are justified, citing billions of dollars in yearly losses and hundreds of thousands of jobs at stake. But with some empirical investigation (and a little bit of humor) Rhapsody founder and self-proclaimed “Copyright Mathematician™” Rob Reid shows that the numbers simply don’t add up. In fact, he found the MPAA overestimated about $50 billion in their claim of loss.

Read the full story over at Motherboard.