Scattered Ashes

For some reason, I was thinking today about this article I read in Wired Magazine some time ago. It is called "The Free and the Unfree" and it touches on the issues of piracy, IP rights and patents, amongst other things. In it, the author shows a direct correlation between piracy and underdeveloped economies; for example, it takes an average Chilean worker 94 hours of labor to earn the purchase price of a legal copy of Windows XP while for the average American worker it takes 13 hours. It is possible to derive all sorts of numbers from that figure; indeed, if the average price for a copy of Windows XP is about 200 dollars, and the average price for a music CD is about 15 dollars, then it takes that same Chilean worker about 7 hours to earn the money that it costs to buy a CD versus less than one hour for the American worker.

I think the article perfectly reflects the geopolitical tensions between the North and the South, the West and the Rest.

You may find it here:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.06/free.html