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How To Stop Piracy: Raid CD-R Moguls
An anonymous reader writes "In what appears to be a not-so-legal move, Mexico's equivalent of the RIAA used federal police to raid the installations of Grupo Mekong, responsible for 200 of the 400 million virgin CDs imported each year, accusing them to be "capos" of the Piracy bussiness in Mexico.
What is the rationale? Record companies buy only 20% of Mekong merchandise, so the other 80% must be going to pirates! Yeah, Never mind computer users ,independent labels or other legal uses.
You can see the article here but what amazes me is the behaviour! What will the next step be? Raid the truck companies who deliver the CDs? "
English translation
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Yeah, Never mind computer users ,independent labels or other legal uses.
It looks more like these are CD's that have to be pressed, not CDR's useable by computer users.
Don't these CD's have to be pressed in a factory?
Anyway, it's inexcuseable, but probably something the RIAA would do too if they could get away with it.
I speak and read spanish rather fluently,
these were CD-R's
The government agency APDIF (the association protecting the intellectual property of musical recordings) raided this company,
the company says its illegal because they aren't doing anything wrong, the APDIF is using statistics similar to those used by the RIAA to substanciate their claims that Mekong is aiding the piracy industry ( leaving out all legal uses of CD-R's including data, and other legal uses), Mekong suspects that the APDIF has bribed government officials, or is in some other way in bed with them, and they are specifically attacking Mekong, the article states that there are at least 50 other CD-R importers none of which have been hassled at all, while Mekong has been interferred with 10 times in the last year.
"Capo" in Italian is used to refer to "head", "top" and "boss"; in all circumstances those words can appear in English.
I know in Canada, for example, that all CD-Rs are taxed, and part of the money goes to the recording companies. If a Canadian importer was only sending 20% of the CDs that they imported to stores that collected the tax, they would probably be doing something illegal there, so perhaps there is a similar situation in Mexico... i.e. only 20% of the CD-Rs that are sold have the record-tax collected with the sale. If that was the case, then there would certainly be a legal reason to go after these people, if not a moral one.
(btw, It probably goes without saying, but I think these kinds of laws are ridiculous. In the US taxes are collected on blank tapes, and special CD-Rs that special music-only CD burners can record onto)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
BabelFish, and other systems based off of the SysTran system use a literal translation algorithm, also called Word-for-Word translation. Thus, it doesn't search for phrases or sentence structure; it's not uncommon to see "su" (the Spanish equivalent of his/her/its) simply translated as "his". And as Spanish would have it, "Ciudad de Mexico" literally translates to "City of Mexico". ("White House" is "Casa Blanca", by the way)
As for the Mekong group, with a quick search you'd find their website. Note that it's "Grupo Mekong".
News flash: Not everything is based off of English. Nor does everything get passed on to American sites.
(Let's hear it for the karma whores! WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP!)
Ok, another translation by a person who kinda knows Spanish (I do fine in conversation) but I am bound to get a few things wrong where you need to know the culture. Those who know better -- please feel free to correct me. When I'm uncertain, I put the actual literally-translated Spanish word in parentheses after my guess at the best-fit (actual meaning) English word. Here goes nothing:
UEDO (Special Unit against Organized Crime) detains (roots?) head(?) pirates
They (the pirates?) say they don't know/don't care about the way that their blank disks are used.
The UEDO spent 90 days detaining (rooting?) Efrain and Rafael Solis Heredia, owners of the Mekong Group and considered by the music indistry the "heads" of record piracy, since they alone bring into Mexico about 200 of the 400 million blank disks that are imported each year.
Idelfonso, Solis Heredia, brother of those detained (rooted?), acting as proxy, announced yesterday that the next week he will denounce PGR and the Secretariat... for the "illegal" nature of a December 18th operation where the Solis brothers were detained and 7 million CDR disks were confiscated (secured?).
"This operation turned into a search, but they had no warrant, with these situations as our basis, we are performing a legal analysis to figure out what kind of charges (demands?) will be brought, in the next week we'll have it." (run-on sentence present in original Spanish, making it hard for me to figure out what he was really trying to say...)
"They (the PGR?) were requested to release them (the Solis brothers), but the PGR detained (rooted?) them so that they could start their investigations, from that comes our concern because in the style of earlier administrations (Governments?) they are trying to make up some nonexistent crime or plant something to make us guilty of something that was never found," said the lawyer.
The Solis brothers are (SIC-were?) detained during the previous investigation PGR/UEDO/397/02, since its business, which has branches in 4 parts of the country, sells blank disks to the legal record industry as well as to pirates.
According to the calculations of the APDIF (Association for the Protection of Recording/Music IP), the legitamate industry (i.e. the record industry) purchases 20 million disks per year, but that is only 10% of the 200 million that the Solis family imports and sells each year. For this reason, they are flagged as the principle instigators of piracy in Mexico.
Among the accusations he refuted (among the supposed irregularities denounced?), Ildefonso Solis noted that in the December 18th operation, among the 7 million disks confiscated were 2.8 million units that were taken for a second time, since they had already been returned since the merchandise was legal.
"60% of these disks were produced in Mexico, 20% were disks that had been seized the previous time, and 20% are disks for which we have the necessary invoices and papers, so we can't see any reason why they make these illegal seizures," he said.
In fact, Mekong's proxy (Idelfonso) presented copies of documents from the Tax Administration Service, in which is recorded the return of 2,852,523 blank CDR disks and 3 CPUs on August 27.
Solis said that it is not their problem that some of their customers are producers of unauthorized music, and accused the AMPROFON (Mexican Association of Producers of Records and Videos) and the APDIF (Association for the Protection of Record IP) of being behind the "defamations" and operations of the PGR.
"They claim that these disks can be used for illegal activities, which is something that doesn't really concern us -- we know what we are doing, but we don't know what other industries are doing."
"We know that behind them (PGR) is the AMPROFON componay, that they (AMPROFON) have turned (taken? I'm guessing the m should really be an rn, in which case "turned" is correct) them against us, as well as APDIF, because they feel it is illegal (they feel illegal?), but we only sell original blank materal, and we sell it to the industry, we don't understand the rationale behind these accusations and defamations against us," he claimed.
In addition, he asked the PGR for "talk, not repression," since he complained that the federal authorities have only acted against ("grabbed at it") the Mekong company and not against a single one of the 50 other companies -- including international companies -- that are involved with importing and selling CDR disks.
Between December 19th 2001 and December 18th 2002, there have been 10 operations and 10 visits to 10 branches and warehouses of this company that supposedly supplies half of the pirates in Mexico.
"We know that we are not the only ones, there are about 50 companies that are involved in importing disks, and among these 50 there are many international ones that have not been bothered and that are involved in the same activities as are we, I won't name names."
"We want the authorities to talk with us and we want to not have repression, the operations that are being made are totally illegal, we want there to be dialogue, that the authorities explain to us why they are doing these illegal actions," said Solis.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Ummm no...
Read this:
http://neil.eton.ca/copylevy.shtml
The levy is set to increase on Jan. 2003
CDRs - 53 cents / disc
Hard Drives on portable MP3 players - $ 21.00 / GB !!! 21 dollars!
They are also going to institute levys against removable and non-removable memory cards.
This is hardly 'a few cents per CD'
Well, that is your position anyway. If you look at the Audio Home Recording Act ("AHRA"), you'll see that there is an immunity to making some types of recordings. One cannot be prosecuted for making those types of recordings. However, the RIAA's position (as seen here) is that CD-R drives on computers are not covered by the Audio Home Recording Act:
All this may mean, however, is that, instead of looking at the Audio Home Recording Act to see if making a personal copy is legal, one would have to look at the traditional Fair Use factors. It is very arguable that the AHRA was originally intended to prevent perfect digital copies of CDs, and an MP3 is not a perfect digital copy. In fact, one may argue that distributing MP3s is a "noncommercial use," as those who place music on Kazaa are not seeking renumeration, so are thus within the spirit (though possibly not within the letter) of the AHRA.My sister's company does business in Spain (in fact a niece to the king of Spain was my sister's office assistant for a while, having been sent out to "learn about the world"). Before anyone from my sister's office was allowed to talk to Spanish officials, their Spanish liaison gave them a crash course in the art of bribery: Even tho offering or accepting a bribe is highly illegal and WILL get you jailed on the spot, bribes are nonetheless expected (indeed, *required*) if you intend to actually get any work done. But no one will up and tell you "now is the time to offer a bribe." The trick is noticing the point in the negotiations where the bribe IS expected, and responding appropriately and generously -- while making damn sure everyone can regard the bribe as a "gift", thus legal.
The fact is, every system ultimately runs on grease, whether that's preferential business deals, political favours, or outright bribes.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Nah, sharpies are too fat. I prefer Staedtler Lumocolor permanent markers. The black super-fine of course, model 313-9. Very fine, very permanent, and also lightfast and waterproof.
Sharpies are for labelling your underwear when you go to camp.
Carpe Cerevisi - Seize the Beer