The IT industry’s US lobby group has released a report calculating the size of the “fair use economy” in the US — all the businesses that rely on fair use, including web hosting companies, private schools, search engines and many others. The total for 2007 (the last year for which stats are available) is a whopping $4.7 trillion — one sixth of US GDP — with over 17 million people employed.
The report is a counterpoint to those crazy Hollywood stats that show that every job in America will disappear unless copyright is extended to infinity, all network connections are surveilled, and every infringer is fined her entire net worth and stuck in jail.
Industries benefiting from fair use have grown dramatically within the
past 20 years, and their growth has had a profound impact on the U.S.
economy.8 The development and spread of the Internet as a medium
for both business and personal use has been creative and transforma-
tive. The creation of new businesses (e.g., Google and Amazon) and
business activities has in turn fueled demand from other sectors of
the U.S. economy (e.g., fiber optics, routers and consumer electronics)
and transformed a host of business processes (e.g., communications
and procurement).The advent of the Internet and networking technology also has been
widely credited with reviving U.S. productivity growth after two-decades
of below-trend productivity.9 As higher productivity is an important
source of income to labor and capital resources, the “new economy”
has helped spur overall growth and offset structural declines in other
sectors of the economy.
FAIR USE IN THE U.S. ECONOMY (PDF)
(Thanks, Ryan!)