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.

Comments

Re:The register needs to check its facts

[nukem1999]

Did you read what the [*] referenced?


*Bootnote: In fact the task of talking into one's sleeve at a press conference only came 28 years after the Service was founded in 1865, to combat counterfeiting. Back then, there was no FBI, or equivalent federal agency, and the Presidential protection role was formalized in 1913.

Why not quote a "burn-rate" instead?

[Tekmage]

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 ;-)