Civility and Economic Debate

by on October 2, 2006

I got an email from Tom Giovanetti chastising me for the tone of my previous post about his organization’s study. And he has a point: the rhetoric of my post was unduly inflammatory, and for that I apologize. I should have thought twice before hitting the “post” button.

Mr. Giovanetti urged me to re-read the study, and I’ve done so. After further reflection, my opinion of the substance of the study remains unchanged: the study is poorly reasoned and its conclusion is misleading. The headline-grabbing $20.5 billion number is meaningless.

Also, this ought to go without saying, but since Mr. Giovaenetti brought it up: I believe that piracy is a serious problem, and I applaud the MPAA’s vigorous action to combat it. What I object to isn’t their anti-piracy agenda, as such, but the use of misleading statistics to promote it.

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Tim Lee / Timothy B. Lee (Contributor, 2004-2009) is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. He is currently a PhD student and a member of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. He contributes regularly to a variety of online publications, including Ars Technica, Techdirt, Cato @ Liberty, and The Angry Blog. He has been a Mac bigot since 1984, a Unix, vi, and Perl bigot since 1998, and a sworn enemy of HTML-formatted email for as long as certain companies have thought that was a good idea. You can reach him by email at leex1008@umn.edu.

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