What do you get when you have Silicon Valley’s best and brightest sitting before you, elbow-to-elbow with Hollywood moguls, New York elite, and some incredibly cool Bostonians (along with a thousand other inspirational souls from around the world)? If you’re Rob Reid, you multiply wit with cynicism, divide by 5 minutes, and express it in a hilarity set normalized to π+1. Behold, ©opyright MathTM, the best short talk at TED 2012 as determined by yours truly. Video of his talk is now available thanks to our friends at TED. So you can fully appreciate it, allow us to give you some background.

Rob Reid understands copyright math because he has the compass cuts and rubber eraser burns of an experienced mathematical optimist grappling with a five-headed label hydra. "The music industry became a frustration for me on October 8, 1998," he told me, "the day that the RIAA sued Diamond Multimedia for releasing the first true mass-market MP3 player, the Rio." Pondering the late '90s, Reid noted, "Their goal was to make open MP3 players completely illegal in this country. So, assault weapons, yes; iPods, no."

Undaunted, Reid went on to found a company called Listen.com, which built the Rhapsody music service. Rhapsody became the first music service to sign all five major labels—but it took until 2002 to get the last grudging approval. The music marketplace was frustrating, as we can all remember. “By refusing to sell their music online for years, the labels gave piracy a monopoly on all of the great things that the Internet can enable for music lovers,” he told me. “This meant that hundreds of millions of people discovered music downloads through pirate services, so piracy was utterly entrenched by the time we were finally allowed to compete with it, years later.

"In embargoing their music from legal services, and greeting almost every element of today’s online music experience with lawsuits—not just MP3 players, but locker services, interactive radio services, and much more—the labels gave piracy a half-decade monopoly on awesomeness. I believe that the music industry would have something close to double its current US revenues today if it hadn’t blasted itself in the foot, shin, hip, torso, and chest by doing this.”

Instead, what the entertainment industry has right now is gall. Recent years have seen the positive growth of legit online music and videos services flanked by ever more ridiculous legislation, such as the recent repugnance known as SOPA. With those recent bad vibes in the air, I asked Reid what it was he thought TEDsters would get out of the presentation. After all, he didn’t hold back.

Reid’s optimism came through. “TED is a convivial, idea-centric environment,” he noted, "an event replete with players from all sides, all walks of life... including the warring families of LA and Silicon Valley. The key is that word 'convivial'—the SOPA brawl got quite vitriolic, which can make it hard to have a constructive conversation.”

Reid’s goal was to capture and represent some of the rhetoric from that past decade and a half in a way that would fill the hall with laughter, even if some of it came at the expense of some clearly ridiculous industry arguments. “Everyone can laugh at silly infographics,” Reid opined while silently crushing the serious journalism dreams of hacks everywhere. “And who doesn't want to deface a Leave-it-to-Beaver-like Christmas scene with pirate-and-Santa graffiti?”

It’s time to learn about Negative Employment, the crisis of ringtone piracy, and a threat on the horizon: aliens pirating music! Without further ado, here’s the talk:

TED is an amazing event for a number of reasons, but my personal love affair with TED is centered squarely on the stage, where we see unpredictable and often eye-opening presentations. And they happen so fast.

The brilliance of Reid’s talk is that he thoroughly skewers the content industry’s dubious appeal to quantitative reasoning. We’ve all see the headlines proclaiming huge numbers of dollars, jobs, and patents lost to piracy. The appeal to quantitative measures is supposed to undermine counterarguments by doing two things: slyly stepping into a (pretend) world of objectivity, and raising the alarm with big, scary numbers. It’s hard to look at those kinds of headlines in the same way after Reid’s elegantly hilarious skewering.

Reid’s examination of Copyright Math began when he started working on his soon-to-be published debut science fiction novel, Year Zero, which Random House is publishing in early July (we’ll be reviewing it). Year Zero tells the story of how the toxic legal byproducts of some overly litigious lawyers cause problems that make global warming seem downright cozy. Not to give it away, but could you imagine how pissed off an alien music lover might get if he was sued into bankruptcy for pirating a few lousy Rick Astley songs?

In closing, I asked Reid if he thought his talk, well received as it was even by music industry lawyers at TED, signaled that the hysteria is now over. “By Hysteria I assume you’re referring to The Human League’s disappointing 1984 follow-up to their multiplatinum album Dare. I think Hysteria was over the day it hit the shelves. I’m amazed that this still interests you. Why are you asking me about The Human League anyway? Don’t know you know it’s 2012?”

Editor's Note: In asking this question, I was of course referencing Def Lepard's 1987 studio album of the same name. Clearly, Mr. Reid was a tad Euro when he was growing up.

Stay tuned, as we have more information on Reid’s upcoming work shortly.