BRILLIANT video by comic author Rob Reid, showing how ridiculous the calculation of economic losses due to content 'piracy' is. Absolutely amazing how he strings the facts and hypotheses together - must watch for anyone in the content industry.
Read more here: Comic author and Rhapsody C-Founder Rob Reid unveils Copyright Math (TM), a remarkable new field of study based on actual numbers from entertainment industry lawyers and lobbyists. Rob Reid is a humor author and the founder of the company that created the music subscription service Rhapsody.
Snippets from the transcript:
"The recent debate over copyright laws like SOPA in the United States and the ACTA agreement in Europe has been very emotional. And I think some dispassionate, quantitative reasoning could really bring a great deal to the debate. I'd therefore like to propose that we employ, we enlist, the cutting edge field of copyright math whenever we approach this subject. For instance, just recently the Motion Picture Association revealed that our economy loses 58 billion dollars a year to copyright theft. Now rather than just argue about this number, a copyright mathematician will analyze it and he'll soon discover that this money could stretch from this auditorium all the way across Ocean Boulevard to the Westin, and then to Mars ... (Laughter) ... if we use pennies.
Now this is obviously a powerful, some might say dangerously powerful, insight. But it's also a morally important one. Because this isn't just the hypothetical retail value of some pirated movies that we're talking about, but this is actual economic losses. This is the equivalent to the entire American corn crop failing along with all of our fruit crops, as well as wheat, tobacco, rice, sorghum -- whatever sorghum is -- losing sorghum. But identifying the actual losses to the economy is almost impossible to do unless we use copyright math. Now music revenues are down by about eight billion dollars a yearsince Napster first came on the scene. So that's a chunk of what we're looking for. But total movie revenues across theaters, home video and pay-per-view are up. And TV, satellite and cable revenues are way up. Other content markets like book publishing and radio are also up. So this small missing chunk here is puzzling..."
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