Friday, January 15, 2010

Pirates are...capitalists?

Here's some fascinating material on book piracy I saw reported on icv2:
An average of nearly 10,000 copies of every book published is downloaded from filesharing sites, according to a new study by Attributor. ... Fiction titles were actually among the least affected titles, with an average of around 6,000 copies downloaded per title; business and investing titles were the category most likely to be illegally downloaded, with over 13,000 per title.

I have to say, there's something amusing in this. Piracy, the great threat to the economy and livelihood of those who labour in arts & entertainment is strongly endorsed by those who labour in profit and development! If Gordon Gekko were online today, I guess he'd be pirating the Wall Street Journal? Perhaps Madoff invested in the Pirate Bay?

It's also interesting that non-fiction is what's being pirated most commonly. I would have thought that people seeking non-fiction would just go to a library, but I suppose the majority of people seeking to pirate fiction prefer the video medium over print.

Capitalism, you've made our world just a little goofier.

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