FBI warnings on DVDs waste Canadians millions of dollars
DVD FBI warning (source: antypography.com)
Richard Ackerman (@scilib) tweets: “I wonder how many Canadian person-hours are wasted each year by us being forced to watch FBI piracy warnings on DVDs & some iTunes content“?
I decided to take a stab at estimating an answer. Note that this is a total back-of-the-envelope calculation that is likely on the right order of magnitude but otherwise wildly inaccurate.
There are a number of things we need to know:
| Thing | Quantity | Source | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Number of DVDs watched in a year | 50 | Harris Interactive via Video Business | This figure is for Americans in 2006. Assume it holds for Canadians. |
| Length of warning on a DVD | 10 seconds | Sin City DVD and a stopwatch | This may not generalize to all DVDs. Assume it does. |
| Number of Canadians | 32,927,400 | Statscan | 2007 figure |
| Median Wage | $18.00/hr | Stascan | 2007 figure |
Doing the math, we can estimate that Canadians spend about 4.6 million hours watching the copyright and FBI warnings on DVDs. If we want to put a dollar figure on it in the laziest way possible, just multiply by the median salary and we get $82 million dollars in wasted time.
See also my critique of the Toronto International Film Festival’s copyright warning.