The core copyright industries - including music, movies, gaming, books and newspapers - together made a $2.09 trillion contribution to the US economy in 2023, according to a new report from the International Intellectual Property Alliance.
That’s a “record high’, according to IIPA Executive Director Kevin Rosenbaum, who adds that the copyright industries are also “outpacing the US economy’s total growth almost threefold”. These stats, he says, “highlight the importance of copyright protection and enforcement, particularly in the digital marketplace, for the health of the US economy and job market”.
The report, which stresses that significant challenges remain for the US copyright industries, in part because of inadequacies in copyright law, was published just days after Congress member Zoe Lofgren proposed introducing web-blocking as an anti-piracy tactic within the US.
Her Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act would allow US copyright owners to secure injunctions through the courts ordering internet service providers and DNS resolvers to block access to piracy sites. Web-blocks against ISPs are already available in many other countries, although recent attempts in Europe to also secure web-blocking injunctions against DNS resolvers have proven controversial.
Expanding on the big headline stat from the IIPA, its new report explains that “in 2023, the value added by the core copyright industries to US GDP reached $2,096.31 billion, accounting for 7.66% of the US economy”.
It also adds that the combined copyright industries “employed almost 11.6 million workers in 2023, accounting for 5.43% of the entire US workforce, and 6.10% of total private employment in the US”. The core copyright industries also account for 51.39% of the US digital economy, the report claims, and “contributed 49.1% to US digital economy employment”.
Honing in on the challenges, the report says that “problems such as outdated copyright and related enforcement laws, inadequate or ineffective enforcement (especially against online piracy), unlicensed uses of copyright materials, and market access challenges inhibit the growth of digital markets in the US and abroad”.
The stats elsewhere in the report, it adds, “underscore the stakes and provide a compelling argument for improved laws, enforcement and market access to promote and foster the growth of the copyright industries throughout the world for the benefit of consumers, as well as the creators, producers and distributors of copyrighted materials and their workers”.
Although just one proposed reform to help copyright owners tackle online piracy, the music and movie industries have been pushing for web-blocking to be made available in the US for years now.
The last time it was considered in US Congress, in 2012, there was a massive backlash from the tech sector, which predicted that adding web-blocking to copyright law would result in legitimate websites that inadvertently distribute some copyright infringing content being blocked. So high profile was the backlash, all the web-blocking proposals were quickly dropped by lawmakers.
More recently, lobbyists for the copyright industries have suggested that web-blocking should be considered once again in Washington, stressing that the doom and gloom predictions of the tech sector in 2012 haven’t come true in the many other countries where web-blocking orders are now routinely issued against piracy sites.
Launching her Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act last week, Lofgren stressed that she fought against the web-blocking proposals in 2012, but that her proposed new law will tackle “copyright infringers located overseas” while not disrupting “the free internet” for Americans.
Piracy sites based outside the US, she added, “present a massive and growing threat - costing American jobs, harming the creative community, and exposing consumers to dangerous security risks”. Her proposed act, she went on, “is a smart, targeted approach that focuses on safety and intellectual property, while simultaneously upholding due process, respecting free speech, and ensuring enforcement is narrowly focused on the actual problem at hand”.
Despite all those reassurances, tech sector lobbyists are already lining up to fight Lofgren’s proposed act. Responding, Re:Create - which includes tech sector organisations in its membership - said that Lofgren’s proposals “would give ‘big content’ the internet killswitch it has sought for decades”, adding that “copyright is hotly contested and infamously easy to use as a cudgel against free speech online”.