MUST-WATCH TED TALK: RHAPSODY CO-FOUNDER ROB REID ON “COPYRIGHT MATH”

This is SO FUNNY and SO GREAT, and it will take you all of five minutes to watch.

During a talk at the most recent TED conference (and if you’re not hip to TED Talks, you should be — they’re friggin’ great), Rob Reid, co-founder of Listen.com/ Rhapsody, discussed what he calls “Copyright Math” — that is, the statistics groups like the RIAA and MPAA use to argue in favor of SOPA and other such anti-piracy legislation. Reid points out some pretty damning discrepancies and exaggerations in such math, including:

• If the music industry is losing as much money to piracy as they claim to be, an iPod Classic could be holding as much as EIGHT BILLION DOLLARS in stolen material which seems, y’know, highly unlikely.
• If as many jobs in the music and film businesses have been lost to piracy as the MPAA claims there have been, then these “content industries” have now forfeited MORE JOBS THAN EVER EXISTED IN THE FIRST PLACE. In other words, there are now negative people working in theses industries. I know some people at various labels and movie studios who are going to be very surprised to find out they haven’t really existed for the past twelve years.

I’m not posting this to make a pro-piracy argument, by the way — just to point out that, as /Film puts it, “the figures cited by the entertainment industry may not be quite as objective as they appear.”

Watch:

-AR