Hey, remember how I said that copyfighters “use over-the-top language”? Well, I give you BoingBoing founder Cory Doctorow, telling us “Why I Copyfight” and sincerely claiming that if we don’t reform intellectual property law, culture itself will cease to exist. (”What’s at stake? Everything.”) This assumes that the letter of the law is actually followed and every person who infringes copyright is prosecuted. As we all know, most people are not. In fact, very few are. How few? Well, in 2005 there were 4,494 cases of copyright infringement filed. To put this in context there are 220,141,969 internet users in America. Let’s say that, very conservatively, 50% of these engage in copyright infringement. So your chances of getting prosecuted for copyright infringement in a given year are about 1 in 25,000. In contrast, your chances of dying from a plane crash are 1 in 20,000. In other words, it’s riskier to get on a plane than it is to break copyright, and despite Doctorow’s rhetoric, people continue to do both every single day. [Locus / Pic via sml!]
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It’s only related tangentially, but so loathsome I had to share - see this interview with Seth Godin for more of this garbage.
“First, the market and the internet don’t care if you make money. That’s important to say. You have no right to make money from every development in media, and the humility that comes from approaching the market that way matters. It’s not “how can the market make me money” it’s “how can I do things for this market.” Because generally, when you do something for an audience, they repay you. The Grateful Dead made plenty of money. Tom Peters makes many millions of dollars a year giving speeches, while books are a tiny fraction of that. Barack Obama used ideas to get elected, book royalties are just a nice side effect. There are doctors and consultants who profit from spreading ideas. Novelists and musicians can make money with bespoke work and appearances and interactions. And you know what? It’s entirely likely that many people in the chain WON’T make any money. That’s okay. That’s the way change works.”
@exposition: uggggh.
@exposition: for fuck’s sake. that dude is serious? i’d listen to chris farley’s ‘van down by the river’ guy before i listened to that idiocy.
@exposition: He’s say you have no right to make money from new media and the Internet, but he reassures that people who like your work will repay you. And back up this claim, he talks about The Grateful Dead, some speaker-guy and Barack Obama. But none of these people are doing anything commercially interesting with the Internet… Am I missing something?
Tell that to the people who are getting sued out of their pants (or the undisclosed numbers who chose to settle out of court with the RIAA’s thugs.) I bet they’ll feel a lot better knowing the odds were in their favor.
@relaxing: tell that to plane crash victims, you insensitive fuck.
@relaxing: uh, I mean, that’s a good point.
@tristax: “he reassures that people who like your work will repay you”
but that’s a fallacy, don’t you think? it’s just not a sustainable model at all, and it results in the divide between the haves and the have-nots becoming even more pronounced.
@tristax: Yes, you forgot to turn your logic off.
I bet all the (aspiring) novelists out there are so grateful to hear that royalties from their work are just a minor side benefit to eventually holding public office. After all, books are for just Great Ideas and Your Brand and never for entertainment or any artistic reasons.
@Maura Johnston: Oh there’s definitely an LSAT-worthy fallacy in there. The most obvious I see is a false analogy. The examples of success he provides are all old media while he’s advancing a claim about new media. To which the critical thinker might ask, “do the dynamics of old media necessarily carry over to new media?”