Copyright Math: The $8 Billion iPod

The music industry has constantly bellowed about how much money it's been losing to piracy since 1999 or so, and the numbers they've thrown around have been nothing short of outrageous.

The one I love is that for each download that's legally purchased, 20 more are downloaded illegally. They've somehow determined that the worth of each illegal download is $150,000, which is the initial number that the RIAA used in all it's lawsuits against file sharers until they realized the futility of using that number.

Rob Reid, author and founder of the company that created Rhapsody, had an interesting and humorous take on what he termed "copyright math" in a presentation at a recent TED Conference.

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