In a great TED talk – short, funny and sharp as a tack – comic author Rob Reid reveals the maths behind claims made by the copyright lobby – figures which are being used to justify SOPA, PIPA, ACTA and their stripe.
Ars Technica’s Ken Fisher sez of Reid’s philosophy:
The brilliance of Reid’s talk is that he thoroughly skewers the content industry’s dubious appeal to quantitative reasoning. We’ve all see the headlines proclaiming huge numbers of dollars, jobs, and patents lost to piracy. The appeal to quantitative measures is supposed to undermine counterarguments by doing two things: slyly stepping into a (pretend) world of objectivity, and raising the alarm with big, scary numbers. It’s hard to look at those kinds of headlines in the same way after Reid’s elegantly hilarious skewering.
Copyright Math: a quantitative reasoning master class by Rob Reid (Ars Technica)
