Via TechDirt, we find something very clever from Tim O’Reilly. Here’s the core bit:

I found myself profoundly disturbed by something that seems to me to go to the root of the problem in Washington: the failure to correctly diagnose the problem we are trying to solve, but instead to accept, seemingly uncritically, the claims of various interest groups. The offending paragraph is as follows:

“Let us be clear—online piracy is a real problem that harms the American economy, and threatens jobs for significant numbers of middle class workers and hurts some of our nation’s most creative and innovative companies and entrepreneurs. It harms everyone from struggling artists to production crews, and from startup social media companies to large movie studios. While we are strongly committed to the vigorous enforcement of intellectual property rights, existing tools are not strong enough to root out the worst online pirates beyond our borders.”

In the entire discussion, I’ve seen no discussion of credible evidence of this economic harm. There’s no question in my mind that piracy exists, that people around the world are enjoying creative content without paying for it, and even that some criminals are profiting by redistributing it. But is there actual economic harm?

Seriously. Show us. Remember, O’Reilly is a publisher. He makes his living in the content business. But all the hollering about piracy assumes that every pirated copy is a lost sale, and that’s never been the case. Assuming that the entertainment industry is correct about its supposed losses, or even that it’s being honest at all, is just a bad idea — this is a group that has fought every innovation tooth and nail going back a hundred years or more. They hated player pianos, they hated radio, they hated cassettes, they hated the VCR. Why should we think they’re on the level now?