The Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) released a report yesterday that could very well change the conversation about copyright. They attempt to measure the economic impact of fair use, using the same terms and techniques suggested by the World Intellectual Property Organization for measuring the economic value of copyright itself. This means considering various industries that depend on some way on fair use, and calculating the impact of that industry in terms of jobs, productivity, etc. This seems to be a phenomenally difficult thing to measure, of course, though probably no more difficult than measuring the value of copyright either. I haven’t had an opportunity to read through the report, so I can’t speak to the validity of its methods. But the punch line is that the industries that depend on fair use (in their sense of it, this includes consumer electronics manufacturers, educational institutions, software developers, and online service and search providers) bring in $45 trillion dollars of revenue, contributed $2.2 trillion to the U.S GDP, or 16.6%. They employ 1 out of every 8 U.S. workers, and export $194 billion in goods.

These are all measures of the total economic value of industries that in some way depend on fair use, not the value of having fair use to those industries, so it doesn’t speak very clearly about what would happen if fair use were more or less robust. These industries would not disappear if fair use did; their economic impact would likely change, though to what degree and even presumably in what direction cannot be determined. What this research does, I think, is two things. First, in a lobbying sense, the industries that depend on robust copyright protection have made a convincing argument that their business have real economic value for the nation. This puts back on the table that these other industries, the makers of tools and the keepers of information and the educators, also have a real and sizable economic footprint. Second, the fair use defense has always been a squishy one: yes, copyright has economic value, but what about cultural freedom, semiotic democracy, the right to remix, free culture, making copies… it starts to fritter away when faced with the economic heft of the content industry. It has often been pointed out that the film, music, and publishing industries have more sway in Congress than their economic scope warrants, that the computer industry is much larger in sheer dollar amounts, and could probably shift the debate if they wanted to. Maybe the CCIA is trying to do just that. (They also recently filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission about copyright statements, like the ones made by the NFL during every broadcast, overstate the rights they actually have and try to erase things like fair use.)

(The CCIA includes Sun, Oracle, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and Fujitsu, among others.)