NBC/Universal general counsel Rick Cotton suggests that society wastes entirely too much money policing crimes like burglary, fraud, and bank-robbing when it should be doing something about piracy instead. Our law enforcement resources are seriously misaligned, Cotton said. If you add up all the various kinds of property crimes in this country, everything from theft, to fraud, to burglary, bank-robbing, all of it, it costs the country $16 billion a year.
But intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions [of dollars] a year. Cotton s comments come in Paul Sweeting s report on Hollywood s latest shenanigans on Capitol Hill. There are two obvious rejoinders to such a ridiculous statement.
The first is that hundreds of billions of dollars a year is a myth. The MPAA s own cherry-picked study from Smith Barney in 2005 put their annual loss at less than $6 billion, and while the music and software industries also like to publish trumped-up claims, the figures are nowhere near hundreds of billions of dollars NBC/Universal general counsel Rick Cotton suggests that society wastes entirely too much money policing crimes like burglary, fraud, and bank-robbing when it should be doing something about piracy instead.
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