Lies, Damned Lies, and the UK Copyright Industry

artg writes "Ben Goldacre writes about invalid and misleading 'science' in the Guardian. Here's his report on the statistics behind a recent press story that reported illegal downloading to involve 120 billion pounds worth of material."

Comments

Re:Hypocrite alert!

[freedom_india]

organisms you own.

If you think you "own" your wife in any way it shows:
a) You are living in 1940s and 1950s
b) You are a male chavunist.
I wanna buy the latest Akon hits from iTunes. Sadly Apple doesn't allow me because of "geographical" restrictions. So, i buy it from legalsounds.com
That doesn't mean i don't pay. And FYI i used to download backstreet boys and britney from Napster. I bought every one of their CDs when it became available.
Same is the case now.

mod parent down

[cheftw]

lern 2 inglish - I could barely understand that.

If I can block Idle I should surely be able to block badly written posts.

But then we don't even have unicode here..

Re:Oh, really?

[jthill]

Let's ignore the manipulative changes in that analogy, shall we, and focus on the substantive point. So we'll skip over how you substituted uneducated laborers for college-educated finance and marketing and legal professionals, and put them in a low-income low-mobility location with no comparable alternative means of support anywhere rather than at the centers of the most vibrant and varied cities on the planet, full of enterprises that need related skills.We'll just pass over those in relatively merciful relative silence, 'kay? Let's focus on the real situation.

Once upon a time, media distribution required dedicated bricks and mortar and real estate and special-purpose precision machinery and manufacturing and transport and untold infrastructure and the management competence to orchestrate them all so enough of everything was in all those physical retail outlets in amounts that roughly matched their popularity.

The *AA argument is apparently that all the people who used to be needed to do that should still be paid what their jobs used to be worth for some unspecified length of time after what they do has stopped providing any inherent value at all, even though everyone on the planet with enough brains to breathe saw this coming long ago.

But even that isn't absurd enough for these welfare queens. They don't just want to be paid for nothing, they want to be paid double and triple and ten times the amount. It used to be they got money when that product they worked so hard to manufacture and distribute was bought. Now they want money every time that product is used, even though their marginal effort for each use is the same as it ever was: zero.

From each according to his now- and predictably-worthless means, to each according to his ridiculously- and predictably-inflated needs? Let them get real jobs. Copper's still really valuable; maybe they could work in the copper mines?