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Korean Brothers Arrested For File-Sharing Site
HarlanC writes: "This story discusses the arrest of two Korean brothers who run a website [warning, page requires Korean language support] that allows peer-to-peer file sharing. Note that the Recording Industry Association of Korea reports local companies lost $154 million in sales in 2000 due to use of the program, even though sales increased to $31.5 million in total sales in 2000 from $29.2 million in 1999."
Just because sales went up does not mean that sales would not have gone up *more* without this "interference." Of course not a popular thing to say here.
/. posters who justify their theft with "Well I wouldn't have bought it anyway."
You're absolutely right, but just because 300 CDs worth of songs were downloaded doesn't mean that sales would have gone up by the total sales price of that 300 CDs.
The record industry's absurd claims about how much money is being lost to piracy is just as ridiculous as
-- "Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage." -Naomi Littlebear
I will gladly exchange some of the lame songs I'm forced to buy on the CD's they offer for more of the cool songs I bought the CD for in the first place. The lack of a system for delivering their music electronically is the primary source of the problem.
Would you buy a cheesburger if all you really wanted was the pickle on top? If that's your only option, you might, but all the time you would resent having to pay for a burger just to get a pickle and you'd wonder why they couldn't just offer the pickle separately.
... and I bet Horse and Buggy sales dropped quite a bit when the automobile was introduced.
It's called PROGRESS.
Well, technically, I think it would go something like this:
Let's say they sell 2 million CDs, at $15 a piece.
Now let's say there's 10 million copies of the CDs floating around in Korean cyberspace.
Ergo, to the marketdroids, those 10 million copies at $15 each equal $150 million in CDs they should've sold.
Not that they would ever sell that quantity of CDs in the first place, but then marketing and logic don't always go hand in hand these days.
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Learning to fly, Pink Floyd.
What possible connection could there be between the Mahatma and a bunch of kids downloading free music?
One was willing to fight, suffer, starve, and die for his beliefs. The others are just opportunists.
Find a better metaphor, eh?
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
Even so, the Recording Industry Association of Korea has no right to publish patently false damage claims. I don't think any person in their right mind can possibly believe that national record sales would have been 535% higher without this web site.
Media and software companies have been publishing ridiculously implausible damage figures for years, and it's time they put a stop to it. The reality of copyright infringement is bad enough; there is no need to falsely inflate the damage.
Two wrongs don't make a right.
We are on that long, scary road of analogies and straw-men arguing... ;-)
If Smith and Wesson sold weapons that were intentionally engineered to be convertable to full-autos, then yes they should up against in the wall. If Smith and Wesson set up shop on the corner of Gangsta & Hoodville and started selling guns called "The Killaz Choice" and "The Smoke 'em 10000" to drug dealers, and they marketed them to hold-up crews, and they knew that >98% of them were used in murders, then yes they should be held against the wall.
It is offensive when corporations hide behind laws and rights, and it is equally offensive when people hide behind rights to allow them to pursue anti-social activites: Saying "Gosh darnit, I'm just letting people share files!" doesn't wash when the overwhelming majority of users are using your site to trade copyright infringed material. See Napster as a great case in point.
And people HAVE been arguing that one is less morally offensive than the other for as long as copyright laws have existed in this country. You clearly read
Information has the unique property that you *can* copy it without "destroying" the original. Why not harness this property, rather than make it look like a limited good?
The purpose of an economy is to distribute a limited good fairly and equitably as possible. Information is NOT a limited material resource. At worst, it is a common good (in the economic infrastructure sense), and at best it is a completely unlimited resource. In both cases, it has zero mariginal cost.
In short, the following is a valid *opinion*: "Copying information is not as morally offensive than stealing my physical property, or depriving me of my freedoms."
You may argue that this opinion is false, but you certainly can't tell me it is NOT a topic for debate.
Are you unaware that our founding fathers debated this topic as well?
I still have a problem when people try to cite facts like these as being evidence that pirated music improves sales. Now, throw out of your mmind all of teh number fudging and erroneously reported numerical values. The fact is that their sales increased from 1999-2000. But did this happen despite the piracy, or in spite of? In other words, who here can say how much their sals should have changed without the piracy? Would the lack of piracy have meant more sales jthus increasing their improvement? Or would the lack of piracy have meant less exposure so people would buy less new music thus having a neagtive impact on their potential sales growth.
You can't simply look at one tiny piece of data and say "uh yup, folks, lookie thar... that thar proves I should steal music."
Don't get me wrong, I'm in favor of sharing music (especially from the standpoint that current copyright terms are unconstitutional and harming the public domain). But if you're going to complain about it, don't use fuzzy math. Leave that to the politicians.
I sometimes wonder why moderators like comments like this one.
This is not a matter of opinion; it is a simple fact that the injustices the parent comment is referring to is not
"making copied cd's illegal"
it's "arresting people for writing software".
The fact is that these guys were not arrested for copying cd's illegally. They were arrested for writing a program that people CAN use to pirate music. I can use FTP, IRC, or even Apache and a web browser to do this.
The exploding point for the issue is when people who write web servers and ftp servers are legally responsible for what people use them for - and the authors of Apache are arrested for "sharing illegal content".
I'm not disagreeing that there's a chance this program hurt record sales to some degree. However, I see no reason to believe that sales would have been quintupled without the presence of this program. At the very least, this would likely have been accompanied with a corresponding increase in CD player sales, for instance...
Well, most suits like that are called frivilous, hence the nature, make outrageous statements, that will mark the 'offending' side as automatically guilty - in eyes of the public that is. Read Mitnick case, he was thrown into jail, for corporate losses, by public companies. I sure as hell would like to see the losses show up in the end of the term reports to investors. I bet these losses will not show on the credibility of the company or industry as a whole. :wq
Note that the Recording Industry Association of Korea reports local companies lost $154 million in sales in 2000 due to use of the program, even though sales increased to $31.5 million in total sales in 2000 from $29.2 million in 1999.
So they're claiming that they were expecting $185.5 million in sales in 2000? A 535% increase over the previous year? And I thought the RIAA was stupid...
Quoting from reply:
i had 183 confirmed kills in korea and i'm proud of every one of themOh, you're running the script which shuts down Code Red / IIS-infected machines, huh? Sounds like fun. Judging from my log files, the Koreans don't seem to be really keen on patching their servers.
Quoting from article:
Note that the Recording Industry Association of Korea reports local companies lost $154 million in sales in 2000 due to use of the program, even though sales increased to $31.5 million in total sales in 2000 from $29.2 million in 1999.To paraphrase the ever-illustrious American National Drinkin' Buddy, George Dubya Bush, that sounds like some fuzzy math.
Ever have someone give you a CD that you'd have never bought, and you threw out or gave away because you didn't want it occupying the real estate on your CD rack?
Then, there's music that you keep for the sole purpose of mockery. Emimem. Madonna singing American Pie. Name your boy-band or rap "artist" du jour.
Why can't the RIAA, etc. understand that the MP3 simply liberates music that they'd have *never* sold anyway? Of course, they'll count every file transferred as another dollar/yen/peso/lira/mark/franc/whatever lost, even when it probably falls into either one of the above categories or is a duplicate download to find a specific version of a song.
I've boycotted all forms of purchased music until the recording industries start to recognize that this isn't the end, it's the beginning. And that Napster was only the first.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
does anyone even look at the fact that (yea maybe I have some software that I didn't buy) but I don't use everyday to make money, I personally would only use it to learn it and if I did want to use it for business I would buy it why would I buy something that I can't return for 500 dollars without knowing how to use it and if I like it enough to buy it and use it for business in the first place
YOU CAN'T FIX STOOOPID