An alarming new report from the non-profit Digital Citizens Alliance (DCA) calculates for the first time the sheer advertising revenue improperly gathered by online thieves who pirate copyrighted material: a quarter of a billion dollars in 2013 alone.
These content thieves flagrantly steal others’ artistic creations and offer them on low-cost sites, making for a low-risk/high-reward crime that deprives creators of the fruits of their efforts and imagination. It’s a large and growing racket, and the advertising revenue at the center of this study is merely one way that online thieves obtain profit. Content theft sites in many cases also profit from subscription fees that often dwarf ad revenues illicitly obtained (the illegality sometimes unbeknownst to the advertisers).
Among the new study’s findings:
Content theft sites reaped an estimated quarter of a billion dollars in ad revenue alone in 2013.
The largest content-theft sites in the sample made more than $3 million in ad revenue in 2013
The 30 largest sites that make revenue exclusively through ads averaged $4.4 million in 2013.
The most heavily trafficked BitTorrent and P2P sites, which rely exclusively on advertising revenue, averaged a projected $6 million per year in 2013.
Even the smallest content theft sites were projected to average $100,000 in ad revenue in 2013.
30% of the most heavily trafficked content theft sites carried premium brand advertising and 40% carried secondary brand advertising
The sites studied in the sample had a profit-margin of 80-94%. Content thieves rely on stealing the rights-protected work of others, and distributing on low-cost sites. It’s a low-risk, high reward business.”
Fortunately, solutions exist. Legitimate advertisers can boost their existing best practice standards, as the technology used to identify and stop rogue sites already exists. After all, legitimate companies and brands don’t place ads on pornography or racist/hate websites, and they can similarly increase efforts to ensure that they’re not advertising on thieves’ sites. Although no single, simple, foolproof, immediate solution exists (just as no such solutions exist to any other crime afflicting society), well-meaning and legitimate Internet participants should unite and implement voluntary, reasonable and technologically-feasible efforts to cut into online piracy.
As the new DCA report demonstrates, copyright thieves profit enormously from improper ad revenue. The harm they inflict, however, stretches far beyond that particular method ill-gotten gain. The works they steal cost billions to create, and such crimes deprive the innovators who pour their time, resources and hard work into creating them of the rightful rewards for their labor. Hopefully, DCA’s new data can help bring an end to that.
Back in 1968, Congress and President Lyndon Johnson agreed to move Veterans Day, Memorial Day and George Washington’s birthday to designated Mondays to ensure three-day weekends throughout the year. Since the change would mean that Washington’s birthday (February 22nd) would never be celebrated on the prescribed third Monday of February, the new holiday became known as Presidents Day.
The motivation was primarily economic.
“The three-day weekend was favored by federal workers, private sector labor unions, the National Association of Manufacturers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and an array of tourist-related industries and trade associations,” writes Carl Cannon. “It was even pro-family, its backers proclaimed. It was a win-win-win.”
The results were predictable. Today, many people don’t know that we celebrate the living on Veterans Day and the fallen on Memorial Day. Others don’t realize that some presidents – like George “Father of His Country” Washington and Abraham “Savior of His Country” Lincoln (born Feb. 12th) – deserve more attention and appreciation this time of year than their Oval Office brethren.
One way to overcome this misconception in the future is to acquaint one’s self with some of the best works on Washington and Lincoln. Ron Chernow and Richard Brookhiser have well regarded biographies on Washington. Harry Jaffa has two outstanding books on Lincoln.
Reading any of these ahead of next year’s edition of Presidents Day will go a long way toward reclaiming part of what makes America exceptional – Her exceptional leaders.
In an interview with Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly that aired on Super Bowl Sunday, President Obama declared that there was “not even a smidgen of corruption” with regard to the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative groups.
The American people are not buying it.
According to a Fox News poll released last week, a whopping 64 percent of registered voters, including a majority of Democrats, think the targeting scandal does suggest corruption at the IRS. A mere 27 percent don’t view the IRS’s targeting as corrupt.
When questioned about whether Congress should continue to investigate the IRS scandal, an even greater majority says “Yes!”
Majorities of Republicans (83 percent), independents (72 percent) and Democrats (60 percent) agree lawmakers should persist until they ‘feel they know the truth.’
In an interview with CFIF, Peter Roff, contributing editor at U.S. News & World Report, discusses the Obama Administration’s use of the IRS to silence its critics by limiting the First Amendment rights of tax exempt groups.
In this week’s Freedom Minute, CFIF’s Renee Giachino discusses the disturbing level of civic illiteracy in the United States and offers some advice on what all of us can do to help spread the word about the basic principles of American government and why it makes our country so special.
And it comes from the most unlikely of places, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Just over the AP wires from San Francisco:
A divided federal appeals court on Thursday struck down California’s concealed weapons rules, saying they violate the Second Amendment right to bear arms.
By a 2-1 vote, the three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said California was wrong to require applicants to show good cause to receive a permit to carry a concealed weapon.
“The right to bear arms includes the right to carry an operable firearm outside the home for the lawful purpose of self-defense,” Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain wrote for the majority.
Judge Sidney Thomas dissented, writing that the good cause requirement limited the number of people carrying concealed handguns in public to those legitimately in need.
This represents a massive shift in California, long home to some of the nation’s most restrictive gun control laws.
The Ninth Circuit’s ruling conflicts with those from three other federal appellate courts, which means this issue could eventually make its way to the Supreme Court . For today, anyway, Second Amendment rights are stronger in the Golden State than they have been at any time in recent memory.
In an interview with CFIF, Marc Scribner, Research Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, discusses “talking cars” and the significant challenges that remain to insure that security and privacy issues related to the technology have been addressed.
Do America’s copyright protections stifle artistic innovation?
Obviously, that question answers itself. After all, no nation in human history even approaches the United States in terms of sheer scale of musical, film and other creative innovation. And that’s due precisely to our strong copyright laws that reward creativity and incentivize more. Moreover, Americans’ ability to access a greater amount of artistic content, more easily, more cheaply and via more outlets increases daily.
Bizarrely, however, the contrary assertion remains regrettably fashionable even among some self-proclaimed “libertarian” and “conservative” circles. Fortunately, voices of reason rebut the pernicious anti-intellectual property (IP) movement’s myths, and bring clarity to the debate. One such voice of reason is Ben Sheffner, the MPAA’s Vice President of Legal Affairs. In this abbreviated and this full-length debate video recently released, Mr. Sheffner clarifies the realities and refutes the curious claim that copyright laws inhibit innovation. Quite the contrary, he makes clear, strong copyright laws not only preserve the fruits of creators’ labor, they incentivize the risk-taking and investment critical to spark additional creativity now and into the future.
Mr. Sheffner does an excellent job, and absolutely schools Derek Khanna multiple times on both the broader and finer points of intellectual property generally, and copyright more specifically.
Join CFIF Corporate Counsel and Senior Vice President Renee Giachino today from 4:00 p.m. CST to 6:00 p.m. CST (that’s 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. EST) on Northwest Florida’s 1330 AM WEBY, as she hosts her radio show, “Your Turn: Meeting Nonsense with Commonsense.” Today’s guest lineup includes:
4:00 (CST)/5:00 pm (EST): Marc Scribner, Research Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute: Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications;
4:30 (CST)/5:30 (EST): Leighton Steward, Chairman of Plants Need CO2: Global Warming and the Supreme Court;
5:00 (CST)/6:00 pm (EST): Slade O’Brien, Florida State Director of Americans for Prosperity: Why ObamaCare is Harming Florida; and
5:30 (CST)/6:30 pm (EST): Peter Roff, Contributing Editor at U.S. News & World Report: The IRS “Smidgeon” of Corruption Keeps Growing.
Listen live on the Internethere. Call in to share your comments or ask questions of today’s guests at (850) 623-1330.
Here in Southern California, the biggest development in recent weeks has been the announcement that hyper-liberal congressman Henry Waxman — who’s held a House seat from the Los Angeles area for 40 years — is finally stepping down at the end of the current session.
Given how long Waxman has dominated the politics of the area, it’s no surprise that there’s a long list of candidates lining up to succeed him. There’s another reason, however, for the glut of competition: this is an enormous district of wildly divergent communities. In my weekly column for the Orange County Register, I argue that this stems from a mistake in how we’ve organized the lower chamber for the past 85 years:
The physical distance between the northwestern edge of Waxman’s 33rd District, in Malibu, and its southeastern terminus, in San Pedro, is more than 40 miles. The cultural difference can only be measured in light years. The South Bay, the Westside, the Conejo Valley, and the coastal refuges of Pacific Palisades and Malibu are all worlds unto themselves, populated by citizens who view themselves as distinct from one another. The idea that they should all be represented by one person in Congress makes a mockery of the notion that House districts represent discrete, coherent communities.
That sort of absurdity is inevitable, however, given the fact that the House was severed from its original purpose 85 years ago, when Congress passed the Reapportionment Act of 1929. That law fixed the number of seats in the House of Representatives at 435, dictating that the available seats would be redistributed among the states based on population changes in each census, instead of adding new ones, which had been the historical practice (the House had grown to 435 from its original number of only 65). As a result, the average House district now consists of over 700,000 people – a far cry from the original system, where there was one representative for approximately 33,000 souls.
Whoever inherits Waxman’s seat will represent more people than the U.S. senators from the states of Wyoming or Vermont. Were the ratios employed by the founders still in use today, California’s 33rd Congressional District would actually be split into 21 discrete House seats.
Returning to that standard may be overkill; it would swell the ranks of the House of Representatives to over 9,500 members. Some expansion, however, is surely justified to create House districts small enough to actually represent something like the will of a coherent community. Until such changes are made, the notion of the House as the “people’s chamber” will be little more than a touch of historical nostalgia.
I’ll also note that having an enlarged House would (A) make it harder for special interests to capture critical masses of legislators and (b) have the practical effect of making it cheaper to run for Congress and allowing more true citizen-legislators to emerge. In short, it would make it harder to consolidate power in Congress—which is precisely why most sitting lawmakers won’t support it…and why it’s the right thing to do.
In an interview with CFIF, George C. Landrith, President and CEO of Frontiers of Freedom, discusses how there is no benefit to red light cameras, the government’s reluctance to allow the use of drones in commercial settings, and whether drones or other security measures will enhance safety at major events like the Sochi Olympics.
Following on Ashton’s post below (many of the themes of which appear in my column for this week), it’s crucial to note that the hazards presented by Obamacare’s incentives for lower-income Americans to stay out of the workforce are compounding a pre-existing problem. As noted by Mark Peters and David Wessel in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal:
More than one in six men ages 25 to 54, prime working years, don’t have jobs—a total of 10.4 million. Some are looking for jobs; many aren’t…
… The trend has been building for decades, according to government data. In the early 1970s, just 6% of American men ages 25 to 54 were without jobs. By late 2007, it was 13%. In 2009, during the worst of the recession, nearly 20% didn’t have jobs.
To the crisis amongst men, we can add the crisis amongst youth. As noted earlier in the week by Zara Kessler at Bloomberg:
According to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data, 36 percent of the country’s 18- to 31-year-olds were living in their parents’ homes in 2012 — the highest proportion in at least 40 years. That number is inflated because college students residing in dorms were counted as living at home (in addition to those actually living at home while going to school). Still, 16 percent of 25- to 31-year-olds were crashing with mom and pop — up from about 14 percent in 2007 and 10 percent in 1968.In a Pew survey conducted in December 2011, 34 percent of adults aged 25 to 29 said that due to economic conditions they’d moved back home in recent years after having lived on their own.
Every trend line is pointing in the wrong direction. Yes, there are structural issues (technology, offshoring) that complicate the employment picture, but free markets generally resolve such issues given enough time. Markets can’t resolve, however, the pathologies imposed on the economy by government — whether Obamacare’s perverse incentives or the consistently anti-growth policies of the White House.
If nothing changes, the upshot will be the Europeanization of the American economy: fewer workers toiling to support a growing class of government beneficiaries.
Future generations may note the irony of Mitt Romney being so thoroughly pilloried during the 2012 election for his infamous 47 percent comment. While you can quibble with the statistics, the underlying theme is correct: we’re headed towards an economy with fewer makers and more takers. Changing that trajectory will be the responsibility of the next president — and it won’t be an easy one.
A new report by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office predicts the Affordable Care Act (i.e. Obamacare) will cause up to 2 million lower-income workers to leave the labor force over the next decade because they will make more in government benefits than as a private employee.
“CBO estimates that the ACA will reduce the total number of hours worked, on net, by about 1.5 percent to 2.0 percent during the period from 2017 to 2024, almost entirely because workers will choose to supply less labor – given the new taxes and other incentives they will face and the financial benefits some will receive,” the agency says in Appendix C, Labor Market Effects of the Affordable Care Act: Updated Estimates (pdf).
The incentive to drop out of the workforce is one’s eligibility for a government subsidy to help pay for an insurance plan bought through an Obamacare exchange. Since eligibility for a subsidy phases out as a person’s income rises, people who will receive subsidies will have to factor in whether to take a job that makes more money, but will likely reduce or eliminate eligibility. In this scenario, taking the job may actually result in a net loss of income as the person must now pay for the full cost of health insurance.
The disincentive to work also applies to those hanging between Medicaid and Obamacare subsidies. Eligibility for Medicaid means the cost to the beneficiary is nothing (at least not directly). In this scenario, qualifying for a subsidy increases one’s out-of-pocket expenses, making it financially smart (for the individual) to work less and stay on Medicaid.
It’s important to emphasize that deciding to work less to receive more in government benefits is a financially rational decision for individuals to make, and one that any economist would readily predict. My hunch is that at least some of Obamacare’s architects knew this and designed their programs accordingly.
The problem, of course, is that convincing millions of people not to work is not financially sustainable for the country as a whole.
CFIF’s Renee Giachino explains how President Obama’s push for higher taxes, bigger government and expanded welfare programs is the wrong approach to help the greatest number of people climb the economic ladder.
In an interview with CFIF, Peter Roff, contributing editor at U.S. News & World Report, discusses the Obama Administration’s use of the IRS to silence its critics by limiting the First Amendment rights of tax exempt groups.
In an interview with CFIF, Marc Scribner, Research Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, discusses “talking cars” and the significant challenges that remain to insure that security and privacy issues related to the technology have been addressed. 
In an interview with CFIF, George C. Landrith, President and CEO of Frontiers of Freedom, discusses how there is no benefit to red light cameras, the government’s reluctance to allow the use of drones in commercial settings, and whether drones or other security measures will enhance safety at major events like the Sochi Olympics.
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