Furthermore, insofar as households are forced to pay more money for watching movies or listening to music, it means that they will have less money for buying other things.

Exactly. Any economist is familiar with the Paradox of Crook Price Elasticity where higher prices for legal goods wipe out all the crooks and lower illegal prices create more of them.

Crook Price Elasticity is always greater than one because crooks never pay full price for anything then purchase huge quantities for illegal lower prices that drives up revenue for counterfeit - not unauthorized - copies.

The paradox kicks in when all the crooks are driven out of the legal market with high prices but so are all the legal sales since there's no one left to buy them. At that point everyone has become a crook.

We all have our personal Crook Price Tipping Point that allows market segmentation to prevent crooks from reselling to non-crooks and rob legal sales of $58B a year. They just have to know what it is to achieve third degree perfect price discrimination so keep it to yourself.

Support SOPA so all the crooks can be priced out of the market.

Stupid liberals.

You repeat your claim that: "[t]he impact of greater copyright enforcement on the economy would be similar to a huge tax imposed on watching movies and listening to music. This would lead to less economic growth and fewer jobs."

But isn't the impact of the status quo (meaning lax copyright enforcement) equivalent to a massive tax on those who work in the entertainment industry? So whether or not stricter copyright rules would increase or decrease jobs depends on whether the copyright "thieves" (for lack of a better word) are currently spending their money in industries with lower general salaries than the entertainment industry (since people with less money will then spend this money right away rather than invest it, which in a short term liquidity trap will increase jobs), and whether or not the thieves' windfall money is being spent in industries that have less sticky workforces than the entertainment industry (since this would mean that more money being spent in these industries would increase employment by a large amount, while less money being spent in the entertainment industry would decrease employment by a low amount) and so on and so on.

My point is that the analysis for determining whether or not stricter copyright rules will increase or decrease employment seems really complicated and empirical, so why do you keep making this simple unsupported assertion that SOPA will cost the U.S. jobs? Am I missing something? Your track record is immaculate so I likely am, but I think you should explain yourself more thoroughly.

Our local paper put the amount at $500 million for Megauploands (which I'd never heard of). I raised this issue with the software "piracy" debate some time ago, but I guess it's worth restating. The assumption is that if all unauthorized copying were stopped, all of the people who were downloading this stuff would then buy it. A lot of people don't buy it because they don't think it's worth the price being charged, and if they couldn't obtain an unauthorized copy, they'd play Free Cell instead.

PeonInChief is correct.

Clearfield and the NYT bizarrely assume the person who consumes something at $0 MAGICALLY has the cash to pay full price for it.

There is no "tax" on the entertainment industry, there's just the industry petulantly deciding to assume their audience just has to be larger than it actually is.

ThesePeonInChief is correct.

Clearfield bizarrely assumes the person who consumes something at $0 MAGICALLY has the cash to pay full price for it.

There is no "tax" on the entertainment industry, there's just the industry petulantly deciding to assume their audience just has to be larger than it actually is.

The $58 billion figure must have been from the same brilliant analysts who sent us to war in Iraq.

Surely it must be admitted that some (probably many, though I agree certainly not all) of the people who spend the time to watch MadMen for free would be willing to pay to watch MadMen if the free option was eliminated. So under the status quo, money that would otherwise go to the MadMen people is instead going to the "thief" (and then to whatever industry the thief chooses to spend it on). Therefore, the status quo is a "tax" on the MadMen people the same way that SOPA is a "Tax" on the "thief." I fail to see what's incorrect about my analysis. It seems to me that Dean and now the above commenter are simply asserting that a redistribution of money from "MadMen" to the "thief" will magically create jobs - this could be true, but as I mentioned above, it depends on a lot of factors for which it is clear that no one has done the calculations.

and by the way - if your argument is that people who watch for free won't be willing to pay post-SOPA, then you can't also say that SOPA acts as a tax on these people. In your scenario, everyone keeps the same amount of money as they currently have, the only difference is that the "thief" doesn't get to watch his free programming anymore.

The $58 billion may be estimated economic losses overall, IN ALL INDUSTRIES, because the NYT article doesn't specify that Dodd is only talking about the entertainment industry when they say he cites that figure in his speeches.

Of course, that's still probably inflated somewhat by Dodd's clients, but not to the ridiculous extent it would be if he were claiming that those were only entertainment industry losses.

It's funny - if I was a publicly-traded company that was apparently experiencing "losses" in excess of 500% of my actual revenue I'd probably want to report that to the SEC. If they want to stick to that number, send 'em all to the slammer for securities fraud.

It's very easy to blame your business failures on an an external, unquantifiable "other".

It allows you to not only cover your losses but brag about imaginary profits.

Media industries are killing themselves by refusing to deal with the reality that they must compete with online sharing.