Channels News

There are plenty of instances of misleading and otherwise bad stats being used by anti-piracy groups, like the recent BSA numbers from Canada that were basically made up. Now, a group from the UK is saying that piracy costs that country's economy tens of billions of pounds. It makes the same mistake as plenty of other studies before it: counting every instance of piracy, or perhaps even just the availability of copyrighted material on file-sharing networks, as a lost sale. It's fallacious to assume that every single person that downloads a piece of content, or simply has access to it for free, would pay for it if the free version wasn't available. Furthermore, any study like this that says an entire economy is being harmed by X amount of money because of piracy is pretty much bogus. This money that's supposedly being lost because of piracy isn't being lost by the economy, as undoubtedly it's being spent elsewhere. It's not being flushed down the toilet or turned into ether, it's just not ending up in content companies' bank accounts.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Walter Shapiro: "Dodd, who is one of the last of the old-style Ted Kennedy liberals in the Senate, still has the potential to eke out another term. Connecticut is such a Democratic state that its last orthodox Republican senator was (it is worth waiting for) Prescott Bush, the father of one president and the grandfather of another. (To be technical, erratic liberal Lowell Weicker was also a GOP senator, but certainly not an orthodox one.) Attorney General Richard Blumenthal -- the one powerhouse Democratic statewide official who could theoretically challenge Dodd in a primary -- is apparently prepared to wait and hope that Joe Lieberman (remember him?) does not run for re-election in 2012."

MOO-ED OFF THE STAGE?

After Faux Waterboarding, Mancow Appears To Lose DC

How's this for interesting timing? Less than a week after an ill-advised "waterboarding" stunt led to a supposed ideological conversion, shock jock turned syndicated talk host Erich 'Mancow' Muller has apparently lost a key radio affiliate.

According to DCRTV, as well as one of your Radio Equalizer's own sources, the Chicago-based Mancow will be removed later this month from his morning drive slot on DC's WTNT-AM (Freedom 570):

DC Times Radio Show To TNT? - 6/1 - DCRTV hears that the most likely spot on the DC radio dial for the new Washington Times morning radio show is Red Zebra righty talker WTNT (570 AM).

The WTNT morning slot is currently occupied by the Chicago-based Mancow. The nationally syndicated Times news and political talk radio show debuts on 6/15 from studios at the Times' New York Avenue headquarters.

Expected to take Mancow's place in DC is a new program featuring former KSFO / San Francisco morning host Melanie Morgan teamed with John McCaslin of the Washington Times:

Longtime radio personality Melanie Morgan and award-winning newspaper columnist John McCaslin have been named the anchors for The Washington Times' new morning-drive radio show, set to debut nationwide June 15.

"America's Morning News" will hit the airwaves from 6 to 9 a.m., five days a week, showcasing The Times' investigative and accountability journalism. The new team will hash out politics, defense, security, policy, culture and entertainment from a newly built, state-of-the-art broadcast facility inside The Times' newsroom.

"Melanie and John will leverage every ounce of expertise, energy and gumshoe reporting out of The Times' investigative newsroom. They know how to break stories that matter to the American public, are passionate about holding the powerful to account and are committed to unearthing the stories that matter most to Americans - at the dinner table, by the water cooler and inside their pocketbook," Executive Editor John Solomon said.

Both Mancow and the new program have a syndicator in common, the Oregon-based Talk Radio Network.

Whether there's a direct connection between the sudden station loss and last week's waterboarding stunt, widely derided as a stunt despite (or because of) Keith Olbermann's ringing endorsement isn't known. But the backlash over what may have been an outright hoax certainly hasn't helped his career, that's for sure.

FOR New England regional talk radio updates, see our other site.

Amazon orders originating with clicks here benefit The Radio Equalizer's ongoing operations.

Your PayPal contributions keep this site humming along. Thanks!

http://cache.blogads.com/196594757/feed.js

by Amanda Marcotte

Because fuckheads who don’t know what they’re talking about are beginning to blather about how they think they know better than actual doctors about the realities of late term abortion, I thought I’d put up a video that we made explaining the facts.

RH Reality Check: Late Term Abortions from RH Reality Check on Vimeo.

It’s interesting that Republicans have used the occasion of a new Supreme Court nomination to denounce the quality of empathy.  You know, the quality that genuinely decent and brave people like Dr. George Tiller had in spades, while moral cowards like Megan McArdle suffer a massive deficit.

Rewatching that, I feel particularly weird about the line I wrote about how using late term abortion as a political football is dangerous.  In my head, I was thinking about the women who need to have safe abortion available for dangerous pregnancies.  Now I realize that it’s also dangerous in terms of riling people up so they commit hate crimes.

John Nance, the former FAA administrator, and now an aviation consultant to ABC News, says that there's a 50-50 chance that the missing Air France jet went down in an explosion. The story was just on ABC. They tended to downplay Nance's comments, but I have to admit, i was wondering about the possibility of terrorism as well. Obviously, it's too soon - and it's suspicious that no terrorist group is claiming credit, since they're usually not very shy about such things.