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Fast CD-R Drives Make For Twice the Piracy
Bowie J. Poag notes this Register story about an RIAA copyright infringement bust in New York. The RIAA claims the operation had the equivalent of 421 CD-burners, which, translated from RIAA-speak, means "156 CD-burners but some of them were fast". How they expect anyone to take their statistics seriously is beyond me.
By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco Posted: 14/12/2002 at 00:31 GMT
"Perhaps the truth is less interesting than the facts?" asked Amy Weiss, the RIAA's Senior Vice President of Communications recently in this email to The Register.
It's a question which has baffled many of our readers, and us too. Perhaps it's a kind of Zen koan, which needs to be repeated many times before making sense. If so, we can't report any success.
But the RIAA seems to be having a few problems with the facts itself.
Yesterday it issued a press release announcing a piracy bust in New York which unearthed 421 CD-R burners.
Only there weren't 421 burners, but "the equivalent of 421 burners."
In fact, there were just 156. How did the RIAA account for this discrepancy?
"There were only 156 actual burners, but some run at very high speeds: some as high as 40x. This is well above the average speed," was the official line yesterday.
Apparently another example of the Association's difficulty grappling with new technology. After the RIAA's website was hacked, with large sections rendered inaccessible, spokespersons explained the difficulties were due to a sudden upsurge in popularity.
Well, that's one way of putting it.
The other curious aspect of yesterday's release is the use of Secret Service agents in the bust. The Secret Service, we naively presumed, was employed to protect high-ranking elected officials.
From the article:
The other curious aspect of yesterday's release is the use of Secret Service agents in the bust. The Secret Service, we naively presumed, was employed to protect high-ranking elected officials[*]. Perhaps this is a further indication of who's really in charge.®
Uhh... no.. actually, the Secret Service was created to track down counterfeiters.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I'm all for freedom of speech and lebensraum to use what I legally buy, but "35,000 finished CD-Rs, 10,000 DVDs" can hardly be concidered fair use. No matter how fast the drives used to make them were.
I don't appreciate the creative math of course, but 35k pirate cds is not something to stand up for (assuming no twiddling was done in that figure)
Holy obfuscation Flying-Mammal-Man!
;-)
First, congrats to the RIAA for shutting down a real piracy operation. However, if they wanted to get the idea across without messing with the facts, why didn't they say something like "...able to churn out X CDs a day..."? They obviously went through the trouble of doing some sort of calculation to come with that 156 burners = 421 average burners, why not put it in real world terms? Shouldn't be too hard to come up with really big numbers like:
(x_burners)(average_CD_burnt_per_minute)*24*60
Lets say average_CD_burnt_per_minute (aka burn rate) of a 20x burner burning a 70-minute CD is:
20/70min = 0.286 CD/min
You have a fascility churning out:
156*0.286*24*60 = 64,247 CDs/day
Now isn't that a much more impressive number? (assuming I've got me numbers correct; my brain only half-works on Sundays, which is how I average more than a whole brain during the week
--The more you know, the less you know.
"As such, there is no real creative "composition" that can be copywrited"
Tell that to the guy that had to go to court and give up a six figure settlement because Cage's estate sued for copyright infringement... for making his own version of that 'song'
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!