Rob Reid:The 8 Billion Dollar IPod- TED talk(Reid skewers the numbers behind the copyright lawsuits)
This may just be the best TED Talk video I've seen: listen.com/Rhapsody founder and extremely funny person (and soon-to-be debut science fiction author) Rob Reid examines the math behind the claims made by the copyright lobby and explains the mindbending awesomeness of the sums used to justify SOPA, PIPA, ACTA and the like. Here's Ars Technica's Ken Fisher discussing Reid's philosophy:
Reids goal was to capture and represent some of the rhetoric from that past decade and a half in a way that would fill the hall with laughter, even if some of it came at the expense of some clearly ridiculous industry arguments. Everyone can laugh at silly infographics, Reid opined while silently crushing the serious journalism dreams of hacks everywhere. And who doesn't want to deface a Leave-it-to-Beaver-like Christmas scene with pirate-and-Santa graffiti?
The brilliance of Reids talk is that he thoroughly skewers the content industrys dubious appeal to quantitative reasoning. Weve 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. Its hard to look at those kinds of headlines in the same way after Reids elegantly hilarious skewering.
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http://boingboing.net/2012/03/15/copyright-math-the-best-ted-t.html
TED is great! Check out some of their talks. They have fairly short presentations about hundreds of subjects.
http://www.ted.com/
Riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world