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!]
