Without going into too much detail, let me just assure you that this is a Big Deal. I think I’ll just let Nelson express how I really feel about it. (via Engadget)
750,000 lost jobs? The dodgy digits behind the war on piracy
Any time the army of lobbiests employed by media conglomerates attach congress demanding stricter IP laws, their two biggest weapons are a pair of numbers. They claim that IP piracy costs the US 750K jobs and $250 billion per year. Ars Technica dug into the history of those two statistics, and discovered that (unsurprisingly) they were essentially pulled out of thin air. They are both based on studies that are decades old, and extrapolated using methods that are dodgy at best, and downright facetious at worst.
“There [was] no sign saying ‘please do not steal the computers,’” Richard Charkin wrote on his blog. “If you don’t want Google to digitize your books, you must tell them not to do it,” Charkin told The Register. “With our heist, we were merely doing to Google what they’re doing to us.”
While I personally think book publishers are being a bunch of crybaby luddites about the Google Library Project, I must award points for this creative (if inequitable) turn of play.
