b.cognosco

The trouble with pesky data.

chaos II -- these numbers are AMAZING!. Jason Schultz has done more amazing work calculating any "chaos" that would come from striking the 1976 Act. Using the Internet Movie Database, he confirmed the Copyright Office's numbers that about 37,000 movies were released in the period 1927-46. (IMDb reports 36,386). Of those, only 2,480 are currently available in any formay, or 6.8%. 93.2% of the films during that period are are commercially dormant. Another way to put this: Jack Valenti's crowd says exclusive rights are the only way to assure content get's distributed. So we have a nice experiment: For the films between 1927-46, exclusive rights fails to make available 93.2% of the content produced. Does anyone really doubt the public domain wouldn't do better? Jason's email is here. [Lessig Blog]

Don't you just hate it when the data gets in the way of such a nice rhetorical argument? Arguments over the impact of Napster and its offspring on music sales are in the same vein .

One of the most useful little books I've read in the past few years has been Filters Against Folly: How to Survive Despite Economists, Ecologists, and the Merely Eloquent by Garrett Hardin. Hardin is an emeritus professor of ecology at UC Santa Barbara and is perhaps best known as the originator of the Tragedy of the Commons meme. In Filters, Hardin argues eloquently himself that we're all responsible for thinking critically about the incomplete arguments put forward by those claiming to be experts, whether those arguments are wrapped up in words, numbers, or systems. 

It probably wouldn't hurt to spend a few minutes with Darrell Huff's How to Lie with Statistics and John Allen Paulos's Innumeracy : Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences as well. Or you can simply decide to trust what the experts tell you. [McGee's Musings]