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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.
So, a 40x cd-r is far faster than average? What the hell are they using as a baseline? I can write at 40x myself. To me that is avreage. I went to the store, I saw 50something, 40, and 32 available. That makes 40x about average (average really would be something between 40x and 42x...seeing that the 50somethings were probably 52x)
Funny math. Next thing you'll see is that your PC is a few thousand times faster than the average computer! (ENIAC as basline? Maybe a 8mhz 286?)
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
As you should now be able to see, none of this applies to any of the CDs which were being burned at higher than average speed.
I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants
Worse still, if you have a script that generates an arbitrary number of 4:33 .mp3s of nothing, you can violate John Cages copyright in truly efficient fashion.
Now, if the product is a copyright violation, is the script itself a violation as well? What does the I-ANAL crowd think?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
These kinds of busts of people who willfully infringe on copyright is the kind of activity that the RIAA should be using, instead of attempting to encumber everyone's computers, regardless of the guilt of the computer user.
When the HRAA (home recording rights act) was passed, it set a dangerous precedent of being presumed guilty. No matter how one wished to use home stereo equipment which can copy audio digitally, one was treated like a media pirate.
For example, when I was burning a CD of my own music (which I own the copyright on) two years ago, I was not allowed to make a digital copy of one of my songs to the new CD. What happened was that a flag saying the song was a copy was set; my CD recorder does not allow me to make digital copies of copies. It assumes that all such activity is piracy, even though I use this equipment to make copies of my own songs.
In addition, the CD player forces me to pay extra for CD blanks because it assumes that my activities are copyright infringment activities. In other words, I have to pay the media companies royalties for the privledge of copying my own music. Fortunatly , there is a bug in the firmware which allows me to work around this issue and use far more inexpensive "computer" CDR blanks.
The RIAA and MPAA are trying to cripple computers in a similar manner, which such abominations as the SSSCA. They should stop treating honest computer users like criminials and start persecuting people who willfully engage in piracy.
People who do not think piracy is a problem are mainly in the US, where it is not the kind of problem it is in other countries. In México, for example, one can hardly walk down a street in a shopping district without noticing stands where people sell burned copies of music CDs, complete with inkjet printouts of the cover art for the CD. These kinds of sales do hurt the profits of the RIAA. Obviously not to the extent that every person who buys a burned copy is someone who would have bought a legitimate copy otherwise, but certaintly to a lesser extent.
The people who willfully pirate music and movies need to be persecuted to the fullest extent of the law; I will go so far as to say that the law needs to be set up to make persecuting these people easier. But only the guilty should be punsished; methods for duplicating and distributing music and movies, which are very helpful for promoting independent artists, should not be crippled by the media companies.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
156=421? Is this the new math? Even when they are busting real pirates, the RIAA fudges the numbers. Their dishonesty demonstrates that they are a criminal syndicate themselves. Read more about why no consumer should buy their products at dontbuycds.org
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
These are the same "statisticians" who think that the continual seizing of multimillions of dollars worth of drugs ("street value" of course) equates somehow to "winning the war on drugs." The RIAA's logic assumes that there is an infinite demand for pirated CDs and that, therefore, any increase in speed of reproduction equates to an increase in sales. No wonder, is it not, that they can't wrap their brains around the idea of increased sales through increased exposure? These characters cannot grasp the very simplest concepts of economics. Would anyone wish to speculate on whether this results from a perspective hatched in the very nest of monopoly conditions?
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.