Friday, February 16, 2007

Piracy and the Los Angeles Economy

According to the Los Angeles Times, there are about 100,000 people in the Los Angeles area who might like to have words with Cory Doctorow if they knew where to find him.

According to a study by the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp, piracy costs 100,000 people across 9 industries there jobs because of lost sales in 2005. I know that Mr. Doctorow thinks that DRM and other measures to protect that antiquated idea known as copyright are evil. God forbid you actually claim ownership of something you create. You see once you make something it belongs to the collective interwebconsciousness and not to you. You are merely a part of the Species Being and once you accept that your concepts of individual rights are mere selfishness made manifest you will be as free from slavery as your pirated creations are from cost.

If only all 100,000 of these people knew that Cory was a visiting professor at USC. They could just march to campus to protest his opinions. Of course, his employment at the University (and as editor of Boing Boing) means that piracy only costs 99,999 jobs. He is, after all, employed to advocate piracy.

I doubt that any of the 100,000 people who are unemployed because "information wants to be free yo" will bother to march to USC in protest. That would require them to know who he is.

No comments: