FBI warnings on DVDs waste Canadians millions of dollars

Paul "640k" — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 21:18:09 +0000

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.

Paul V's blog » estimate

FBI warnings on DVDs waste Canadians millions of dollars