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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.
not the individual consumers. Not that individual consumers are pirating cd's any less, but these are the guys you can catch outright without creating new laws that restrict our rights.
What you are missing is that these silly statistics aren't designed for the general public--they are designed for POLITICIANS.
The **AA doesn't give a damn what the general public thinks--this is all PR for bought-and-paid-for politicians. The lobbyists will show up, wave around these silly statistics, flash some money and boom! suddenly there will be more laws/levies/taxes on recordable media faster than you can type 'cdrecord'.
Actually the Secret Service has 3 very specific jobs. One of those jobs is to bodyguard and protect important people. That is the most commonly seen job. Their second job is cathing people who counterfeit money. Their third job is catching h4x0rz and pirates.
If you are a computer criminal, depending on the exact circumstances of your offense you will either be visited by customs, secret service, FBI, or local police.
As for this whole 156=421 thing. Does this mean I can sell my burner on ebay? It's pretty fast can I say 2 CD burners! only takes up one drive bay!
There's nothing wrong with burning CDs for personal/fair use. However, despite the number of burner discrepancy, this was an actualy piracy operation. It's not only illegal but not right. People like that should get busted.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Sure it is, and I agree 100% -- but when they try to pull this kind of crap with the numbers, they are losing even *more* credibility among the tech-savvy crowd (if that's possible).
If they keep this stuff up, eventually everything they do will be dismissed as wrong -- no one will even bother to look for the merits.
why exactly is copying bad?
because it is illegal?
because the music industry makes less money?
because we won't have as nice music if the music industry struggles?
because someone is making money doing things that are illegal?
I have come to the point in my life where (right and wrong) and (legal
and illegal) are now completely separate, and surprisingly, not even
aligned completely.
Should we have laws that support a bloated industry that controls
access to information -- simply because they have existed in the past
and have enough money to have laws passed that perpetuate their
existence? I think not. after the repeal of some law in 1996 that
limited media channels to 40 stations, clearchannel now owns like 1400
stations (estimate) and have has one of the top 4 stations in like 90%
of all metropolitan areas. One source.
In fact, I think people like music, and people will always make nice
music and it will be available. we have the ability to make it
happen. simply fuck the money part. for all of you who start jumping
on me about how naive that idea is -- ask yourself first how much you
depend on the 'current context' of "it's just the way things work now"
to judge that idea.
However: regardless of legality, should we even have a centralized
organization that, in effect, makes decisions about what music is
popular and available, and at what price? I think not.
And if you think about it long enough -- and this one will draw flak
I'm sure -- I've also come full circle on the social contract for
intellectual property. In most cases, the contract is no longer
helpful to society, it's just benefitting the ip holders. In effect,
without much explanation here, I conclude we should scrap/eliminate
the majority of our IP protections, or at least change them
significantly.
If people are interested I'd be glad to share my views on why IP has
come so far its generals bad -- but that is much longer post.
As for my initial question -- I reject ALL of my hypothetical
answers. In fact, if you go even a very little bit outside our current
context, it's pretty easy to see that copying is NOT bad at all, at
least in the (right and wrong) sense.
The Secret Service, we naively presumed, was employed to protect high-ranking elected officials.
This is the big problem with Federal law enforcement -- there's so many different law enforcement arms, and few of them like to cooperate with the others. I heard on NPR that they want to form yet another to combat terrorism! Why not have:
(1) FBI -- Enforce federal criminal statutes, including counterfeiting and narcotics, as well as felon apprehension. This gets rid of the DEA, the non-protective Secret Service roles and the Marshalls Service. Essentially focuses on criminal acts comitted in the United States.
(2) Homeland security. Immigration, border security, customs, counter-terrorism, counter-espionage and government protection, including Presidential Security. Eliminates border patrol, customs service, and the rest of the Secret Service function. Essentially focuses on crimes involving extra-national activities and government security.
The constitutional standards for (1), which would mostly involve US citizens, could then be kept higher without a risk to national security.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The curious thing is that they could have come up with a completely legit figure: the production capacity of the operation in terms of some number of copies per unit of time (say, discs per day) based on the speeds of the burners and perhaps loading/latency issues.
Why would they issue some half-assed stat like the one given when they could have done this?
Two answers:
1) They're not competent enough to do that
2) They are, but have a motive that precludes them from presenting a clear picture.
It's alot like the Iraq isssue. I've read convincing arguments for an Iraqi invasion from German Marxists... and the stuff our right-wing hawkish administration presents "has a certain syrup, but just doesn't pour." (Gertrude Stein phrase, I believe). Why is it so hard to make a convincing case when there's a convincing case to be made? I think it's the wrong motives. They keep even otherwise adequately intelligent people from seeing the obvious.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
Yes, but the story here is that the RIAA would rather charge them with having more CD burners than they actually did, rather than charge then with distributing n pirated CDs.
CD burners are not a unit by which you can measure piracy, nevermind inflated "equal to" units of CD burners. The RIAA's purpose was to put the confusing math in the press release, so that hopefully dumb reporters would report that they had "over 400 CD burners" in their operation, rather than print the rather unimpressive number of CDs they distributed.
But having the ability to make 64,247 CDs per day is not illegal. Making 64,247 CDs per day is not illegal. Making 64,247 copyrighted CDs per day is not even against the law. It's only illegal when you are making CDs to which you do not have copyright permission and then distributing them.
It seems like the RIAA wants the CD burner to be equated with piracy, because they want to be the only ones who can legally make CDs of any kind, forgetting that other people can create and release music content too.
Maybe they should measure an operation based on something that is actually illegal...like, say, illegally copied CDs. The number of CD burners is about as relevant as the number of orange peels in their garbage can.
It's logic like that that allows the DEA to prosecute people for playing techno music and selling bottled water (something the DEA has officially classified as "Drug Paraphernalia")
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
It's real maths, all right, it's just that it happens to be a counting system used by politicians called 'bollocks', in which anything + adequate funding = anything else
You may not agree with what I'm saying but I'll kill you for my right to say it
I know everyone hates statistics, but that's not really the issue here -- it's basic arithmetic. I mean, they can't add and multiply properly, either by accident or design, but as soon as they're caught at it they undermine their already limited credibility.
:)
... anyone have a cite? The biggest problem is estimating the returns from schemes that have never been tried. In other words -- statistics and, worse, speculation.
This reminds me of virtually any tax debate in Congress, excpet there it is at least partly statistics -- trying to extrapolate from known values and economic relationships to determine future revenue. WIth the RIAA, at least in the present example, we see simple nonsense. Of course, this sould be the work of the PR people, a group not known for math skills.
As for "the idea of increased sales through increased exposure" that's a matter for speculation, and a decision I feel that is wholly up to sellers to determine, not the consumer. I imagine the relationship of publicity (earned at the sacrifice of some profits) to ultimate profits (the number they really care about -- not sales) is a curve of some sort, with diminishing returns beyond a certain point of giveaway music. More efficient piracy will not advance the game, rather it may give the beneficiaries an added sense of entitlement, and reduced obligation to pay the big bad record labels for anything. This is not so much civil disobedience as yielding to temptation while feeling justified for just desserts or educating the greedbags.
On the publicity point, recall that Napster and P2P are pull not push mechanisms; you have to request what you want, thus you already know something about it and probably like it. This is less likely to spur sales than push, where the studios would promote music that is not yet established, and which they believe need promotion.
Someone MUST have done a decent study of this question
As an ethical matter marketing should be left to the sellers, with input from consumers but not pressure in the form of piracy. They have a right to be stupid; we do not have a right to coerce. If I were the seller, losing music to piracy would not immediately dispose me to start giving "samples" away for free -- I might go the RIAA route, even if it were illogical. Psychologically, it has to be a decision they feel they made on their own, or that upstarts demonstrate to be viable. Also, if the sellers can make more money not giving out free music, I can't blame them for a second.
Acutally, infinite isn't correct. The number of violations would be limited to the number of people in the world - 1. Oh wait, I forgot, they need a seperate license for the song for at work, in the car, and at home. Oops, wrong again, everyone needs a seperate license for each device they use at work, in the car, and at home. Woops, would they also need a seperate license for the song if they ran a dual boot and wanted to play the song on each OS but on the same system?
I guess you were right, an infinite number of copyright violations are possible!
My next Slashdot post will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
If the RIAA fudged the numbers on the count of burners seized, they could very well have fudged the numbers on the seized media count.
Perhaps the "35,000" CD's that were recovered were really 32,500 700MB CD's, but since they have a greater capacity, they "qualify" as being 35,000 650MB CD's.
Good and bad need to be quantified. They're inarticulate words for such maters. Let's substitute those for moral and amoral. Let's also consider "copying" to mean "propogating of idea or art", as this is the subject being discussed. We'll also ignore the fact that every action a computer takes is a copy.
Immediately with this defintion, most slashdotters will think "copying is good!" The reasoning is that all sciences and arts benefit when their practicioners are exposed to new ideas. Programmers and engineers are intimate with this notion, as their occupations firmly rooted in and built upon the idea. The paradoxal result is that value is attributed to information; information becomes valuable. These are seperate things.
So, here we have the two sides of the coin: Scientists and Artists can further their crafts by being exposed to new works. On the other side, the copyright side, Science and Art is furthered when its practicioners are given incentive to create and explore. Copyright, and Copyleft; Only one of them has federal backing.
The copyright side says that any copying diminishes the incentive to create new works. The RIAA says this penalize artists and society, but the RIAA also calls decreasing profit growth rates (market saturation) a loss. The first part is true, but only some times.
And there is your answer. Copying is "bad" as long as it removes the incentive to create new works. The great divide is between the letter and spirit of the law. The letter leaves interpretation open that the incentive for new works should come from the author, while the spirit is simply that "new works" be incented (not a Bushism). Progress is the spirit, and the spirit doesn't give a damn about ancestral authors, so long as they are given their due.
Society always builds on the works that came before. Cultural progress is retarded when access to previous works is restrained. Because these new works are built upon previous works, they compete with the ancestral work. Because this competition diminishes the author's incentive over time, the past always tries to control the future.
I feel this is evidence of a strong imbalance in the current system. The drive for survival is normal, but when it is given force over the struggling newborn, something is sick. Free societies must restrain the past from controlling the future.
I'm as mimsy as the next borogove but your mome raths are completely outgrabe.
In 1984, they kept trying to get Winston to believe that 2+2=5, if it suited the Party's purposes to make that assertion. We now have the RIAA trying to get us to believe that 156=421, if it suits the RIAA's purposes to make that assertion. Coincidence?
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.