Tuesday, July 07, 2009

Comedian Bishop sees the power of YouTube?

A close friend has pointed me at American Irish comedian Des Bishop's new website. I find Bishop to be very funny but I guess you have to be Irish to get some of his material, especially the stuff on the catholic church in Ireland.

What's of interest to the b2fxxx sphere, however, is not that Bishop does Irish humour exceptionally well but that he actively points people from his website to freely available videos of his gigs on YouTube. He's been known to joke about the less well off members of the Irish diaspora in the US passing copies of his DVDs amongst themselves and not paying for them. Yet here he is on the web linking to free versions of the same materials.

Perhaps he subscribes to lesson 1 of Tim O'Reilly's notion of piracy as progressive taxation: obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy?

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