When Entertainment Industry Numbers Are More Suited To Comedy Than Analysis

from the sorry-MPAA-but-nobody's-buying-it dept

We've often criticized the entertainment industry for their use of utterly bogus math to claim massive, completely unrealistic losses from piracy. As Mike once noted, "it would actually be kind of funny... if policy makers and the press didn't actually believe those numbers and pass bad legislation based on them."

That said, it can still be pretty damn funny, as this brilliant 5-minute TED talk by Rob Reid demonstrates:

If you didn't watch the video (you should), it's a sarcastic take on "©opyright Math™" in which Reid plays along with the industry's numbers in order to expose how ridiculous they are:

The movie folks also tell us that our economy loses over 370,000 jobs to content theft, which is quite a lot when you consider that back in '98 the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicated that the motion picture and video industries were employing 270,000 people. Other data has the music industry at about 45,000 people. And so the job losses that came with the internet and all that content theft have therefore left us with negative employment in our content industries. This is just one of the many mind-blowing statistics that copyright mathematicians have to deal with every day. And some people think that string theory is tough.

Reid doesn't do any actual debunking, because he doesn't need to—the numbers are so plainly false that just putting them in the spotlight is enough to get the audience laughing. It's a lot of fun, but it also underlines the bigger question: why do journalists and policy makers still blindly accept and repeat those same numbers? Hopefully, as more and more people recognize the industry's claims for the comedic fiction that they are, that will begin to change.

Filed Under: bad math, piracy, rob reid, ted talks
Companies: mpaa