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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.
...does that mean I have half a cd burner?
This is the equivilant of 40 first posts, isn't it?
If we pirate 1,000 songs but all of them were crap, we're innocent?
that gave us 2002-1900 = 100th Anniversary of Quantum Physics
Fsck the millennium, we want it now.
Millennium Crisis Line: 0890 900 2000 [calls cost 50p/min]
This first post is being sent over a cable modem and is like 15 regular first posts!
Sex - Find It
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.
How they expect anyone to take their statistics seriously is beyond me.
Who, the RIAA's or The Register's?
(ba-dum-bum-cha!)
sin(6cos(r)+5A)
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.
Wholesale pirating and distribution is BAD. This is the kind of thing the RIAA SHOULD be pursuing and is the reason for them actually exsiting.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
It is mathematics like this that allow companies such as Worldcom and Enron to cook their books.
...All I can say is that my life is pretty strange...
So does this mean that if I pay twice as much as I should for a CD (as we all do with the industry's fixed pricing) that I've really bought the equivalent of two CD's?
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.
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'.
In accordance with the RIAA logic, I can now beat any speeding ticket by claiming to have the equivalent of more than one car! For example, if I were busted doing 60 in a 20, I can claim I have three cars. After all, it's 3x faster than the average driver travels through such a zone. Stands to reason that I simply have the equivalent of 3 cars driving at a legal speed and therefore I am innocent.
Yeah... I think that'll work...
Would someone PLEASE bust them for lying. I can't even consider this "spin doctoring." You can't make a claim with any amount of seriousness that a "fast" cd writer is the equivalent of two or more "average speed" drives. I can't decide which is worse: Scientology or the RIAA.
So now if I gnutella on a T3 am I suddenly stealing 28x the music because it's "really fast"?!
Just another sign of these idiots' attempts to ignore the progress of technology out of sheer stupidity and too much laziness to develop new business models that embrace it.
I would think /.ers already knew our four letter friends (MPAA, RIAA, etc) lie through their teeth at every avaliable opportunity. They keep saying how p2p is running them into the ground (yet keep posting remarkable profits) and how nobody buys CDs anymore because of it (yet they manage to sell hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of carefully marketed trash from Dion and Spears).
The fact that they count funny when doing a "bust" of evil pirates is exactly what I'd expect. I'd be surprised if they came out with an announcement stating that
-- MG
RIAA says the damage could be as high as 90million.
These groups, I'm sure, don't use take into account "Opportunity cost". Just because I bought a pirated CD for $2 (or obtained it for free), doesn't mean I would also pay $20 for a legimate copy if no pirated copies existed.
They have 800 CD burners, but most of them are slow.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
At least not until the price of buying 421 CDs has come down to the price that 156 CDs would cost you retail right now.
As Benjamin Disraeli said, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics". We all know which kind were looking at here.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
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
Maybe the same thing will happen to the RIAA that happened to WorldCom and Enron.
I know this sounds redundant, but how did they get 421? If one CD-R drive is 40x, does it count as 40 CD-R drives? If they did it that way, then it would seem like most of the drives being used were fairly slow, because otherwise the number would have been higher. It was a professional pirating business, so I'm guessing many of the drives would have been at least 24x. If each drive is at least 24x, then 156*24 = 3744. With the numbers they gave (and the speed of a CD player counts as many times), the average CD-R speed is just over 2. But that seems hard to believe, because these are (were) professionals, and they would have had the money to get faster CD-R drives.
The only reason the RIAA published this number is to make the media grab it more. This is the same thing they did with "Everyone using Napster is pirating music", which wasn't exactly true (many were, but not all). The media ate up the RIAA's headline, and ignored the real truth behind it.
Doesn't add up. RIAA's math skills should be used to power interstellar space ships.
0110100100100000011000010110110100100000011000100
I have a Ferrari F40 so really I have 4 Ford Sedans.
According to the RIAA press release - in the footnote:
"The Recording Industry Association of America is the trade group that represents the U.S. recording industry."
Indeed. Well, their supporting facts to indicate that they represent the entirety of the recording industry includes this:
"RIAA® members create, manufacture and/or distribute approximately 90% of all legitimate sound recordings produced and sold in the United States."
So, you've heard it here, folks. 90% = 100%.
The proof of the corollary theorem, 1 = 2, is left as an exercise to the reader.
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.
I thought this sort of math was only applied to drug busts.
"We estimate the marijuana had a street value of 4.5 million dollars."
(Yes, if you sold it one eighth at a time to desperate, confused rich people.)
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
A man who fucks for 15 minutes before delivering the cream to the woman, result in a baby.
Therefor, a man who fucks for 5 minutes before delivering the cream to the woman, must result in triplets.
Of course, we're just talking about successful cases here... and I don't want to think about the poor guys who comes after 30 seconds...
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.
Glad I did, they are awesome.
Are you serious?
mstyne: real name, no gimmicks
From http://www.secretservice.gov/mission.shtml
I don't see anything there about IP law, Fraudulent CD's, or other Piracy or theft laws. The Secret Service protects the president, and investigates Counterfeit CURRENCY, Securities Fraud, Bank Fraud, and other Financial Crime Thats why they are part of the Department of the TREASURY
So what were they doing at RIAA's latest Bust exactly? Though the Register did get the SS's role wrong, they were right in presuming that they really shouldn't have been part of this bust.
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
does MP3/P2P equal (1.5M)/P ?
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.
And those three individuals were actually fifty four guys but they have rights equivalent of three normal citizens.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
The important difference with these guys is that they are pirating music to make money off of it. Consumers who make copies and distribute them are doing it for free. Actually, more acurately, consumers are PAYING to pirate the music since they have to have a broadband connection to be able to do it, a decent CD ripper/burner, etc.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Hilary Rosen is the equivalent of 22 regular greedy corporate whores
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.
...at midway through a burn, is your cd half empty or half full? If you are burning it in an empty house, and the burn hoses up, and you scream, does anybody hear? Honestly, I think those RIAA folks are doing the more of the good drugs their talent does.
3) They believe the public is too stupid to understand (or care about) a useful metric. Given their behavior so far, I think it's the most likely scenario.
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.
We want some answers and all that we get
Some kind of shit about a terrorist threat
- Ministry
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.
Woof!
(I know. It's bad. I'm sorry.)
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
Ooo, and cars, don't forget cars - after all, it's possible to commit a crime with a car. Add baseball bats to your list too. And chainsaws. And axes. And duct tape. And knives. And pencils. And hammers. And piano wire. And cement. And syringes. And ...
Guns don't kill people any more than spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
Hokey statistics and ancient misconceptions are no match for a good thought in your head, kid!
go download a bunch of illegal music
what does illegal music sound like? i'm not familiar with that particular genre...