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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? "
A large percentage of their inventory is used for satellite piracy! Com'mon RIAA, can't you help out the poor satellite companies!
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
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.
I'd like to see 'em raid the trucks The Fast and the Furious-style. Imagine Hilary Rosen driving one of those Civics and cursing in Spanish at the truck driver. Imagine Jack Valenti hanging from the side of the truck getting his arm cut off while his lobbyist pals in some more black Civics try to save him.
Or...
"I'd like to live, just long enough, to see them put your head on a pike as a reminder to the next ten generations that some boy band music comes at too high a price. I'd like to look up into your lifeless eyes, and wave, like this..."
i am a soviet space shuttle
They are giving the truck manufacturers all the ammunition they need to make trucks.
Trucks give these so-called truck companies the very tools needed to have a truck company, which provides a perfect cocktail for the CD-R retailers to get their greedy, dishonest hands on the product.
What makes a man want to be a mouse? (Python's Flying Circus)
for those slashdotters who actually read the articles
;-)
So YOU'RE the one!
What, you expect special treatment?
They say to not know that they make other industries with the virgin discs that sell to them
Notice the dateline is "City of Mexico." I imagine President Bush lives in the "House of White."
How long before we have an international incident because someone relied on these freebie translators? Imagine the U.S. using google to save time going through all those docs from Saddam Hussein ("My God! He's stockpiled 36,000 sticks of weaponized rancid butter!").
*
I searched for "Mekong Group" (kind of a disturbing name to Americans in light of Vietnam fighting there: "The Mekong group comprises Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Myanmar and China's Yunnan province, all of which border the Mekong River.") No luck.
However, from reading the article in Spanish (and I don't speak Spanish) I get the impression that the actual allegation is that the Group knowingly sold millions of discs "off the books" and can't account for them in their invoicing. If true, the action doesn't sound so unreasonable, as it suggests they knew they were doing something fishy. "Suggests" -- who knows? But this doesn't sound like a suspicionless search, and not at all Orwellian.
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.
I'm Mexican and while I really feel embarrased this kind of idiocy happens in my country, looking closer it happened because the authorities and legal system are extremely broken and stupid when it comes to understanding the nature of the crime that is being pursued in regards to piracy, and the record companies can abuse the situation.
/.ter should know, piracy IS a crime, only it's not related to theft, but to copyright infringement. This definition is blurred specifically by the record companies in Mexico so to be able to prompt the Police to take care of things as they command.
Funny, but I think this is the same case in almost ANY country. So, while it happened in Mexico because the system could be abused pretty easily, watch out for the same thing happening in other countries soon enough.
Before this happened, I had even seen commercials stating in a pretty explicit way some phrases equivalent to: "Piracy is theft". This shows it's not only a fault in our system, but because the record companies have the money and power to push their lame propaganda, laws and the perception of the crime can be shaped fairly easily by pulling the right strings.
As every educated
You see, there is a really strong music industry in Mexico, where we have literally hundreds of "artists" that sell their overrated, overpriced crap all over the continent, and predictably, this industry is controlled by the same RIAA companies we love to hate.
In fact, these events should come as no surprise, because in countries like mine, most people can't afford to pay the equivalent to US$15 for a single disk, priced as if it were an imported item, when it could be cheaper because the price markups don't need to be as high as in other countries, where everything from labor to land costs are more expensive. People DO buy and distribute bootlegs, there ARE criminals around here, but this is not the way to handle the situation. This is just a test of RIAA's power.
Companies that want to protect their profit margins and revenue sources at the expense of the user... Where do you see this happening next?
Mark my words, this is going to happen in another country and at a much bigger scale, sooner or later.
Now, who are the real "capos"?
- Otaku no naka no otaku, otaking da!!!
I mean, come on, do you realize that fully 20% of the oxygen that trees produce goes to criminals, bums, drug dealers, and pirates? Coincidence? I think not! The trees must be jailed!
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
And AOL probably presses more discs than every record label in the world combined..
It's worth noting that to date, the CPCC (Candian Private Copying Collective) has collected over 20 MILLION dollars due to the levy on CD-R media.
Not a single PENNY has gone to anyone except the CPCC. They havn't given any of it to anyone.
And since the levy is implemented by the government, you'd expect that we (the public) could have a look at the books... Wrong, the CPCC is more or less a private company, so they don't have to show the public what they're doing behind the scenes.
What a scam.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
(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.
And AOL probably presses more discs than every record label in the world combined..
I suddenly find myself ambivalent about this whole affair.
Um, while James Russell (I think) did actually come up with the concept for what would become the CD in 1965, Sony and Philips didn't popularize the format till 1983. So, no CDs were kicked back in the 50's - 60's.
Also remember that even today, record contracts include at least a 10% "breakage" or "container: allowance off the worldwide gross prior to calculating how many rolls of pennies the artist will get, after recouping all expenses. What they do with that 10% (since CDs don't break in shipment like the shellac records for which the breakage allowance was instituted) is a mystery. Some labels actually skim 25% off the top. No need for CD kickbacks there.
Yep, 25%. You want to see just how egregious some record contracts are? The following is clipped from an actual label contract presented to the prospective band last week. All identifying brands and names have been removed:
ROYALTIES
Company shall accrue to Artist the following royalties for the sale by Company, its licensees or assigns, or long playing Albums derived from the Master Recordings against which all sums paid to Artist herein shall be recouped.
(a) With respect to records sold up at Company's or its distributor's "top line" price level in the United States, a royalty at the rate of ten percent (10%) computed on the (SRLP) list price less a 25% container deduction.
(b) With respect to each particular type of record sold in Canada and Japan (including records exported to third parties in Canada and for which Company is paid by such third parties), royalties shall accrue at Eighty Five percent (85%) the rate applicable under subparagraph 6(a).
(c) With respect to each particular type of record sold in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the European Economic Community (including records exported to third parties for such territories and for which Company is paid by such third parties), royalties shall accrue at Sixty Five percent (65%) the rate applicable under subparagraph 6(a).
(d) With respect to each particular type of record sold for any territory throughout world not specifically mentioned in subparagraph 6(a), 6(b) and 6(c) (including records exported to third parties in such territories and for which Company is paid by such third parties), royalties shall accrue at Fifty percent (50%) the rate applicable under subparagraph 6(a).
(e) With respect to records sold at Company's or its distributor's "mid line" price level through normal trade channels, royalties shall be at Seventy Five percent (75%) the rate set forth in subparagraph 6(a).
(f) With respect to records sold at Company's or its distributor's "budget line" price level through normal trade channels, royalties shall be at Fifty percent (50%) the rate set forth in subparagraph 6(a).
(g) Sales of any Singles, Extended Play Singles and recordings in the United States which are not long playing Albums shall be paid at the rate of Ten percent (10%) computed on the (SRLP) list price less container deductions and any taxes. Sales outside the United States shall be proportionally reduced according to the formula specified in 6(b), (c) and (d) above.
(h) With respect to the licensing of the Master Recordings to third parties, including but not limited to usage such as record clubs, compilation records and synchronization usage, royalties shall be at the rate of Fifty percent (50%) of the net amount of any such fees received by Company, its licensees or assigns.
(i) No royalties whatsoever shall be payable to Artist hereunder with respect to records (i) distributed to any person or entity primarily for purposes of promotion, (ii) sold as "scrap", "overstock" or "surplus", (iii) distributed as "free goods" (limited to no more than 20% or "bonus" records).
(I'm surprised there isn't a clause about shaking the artist by the ankles on a monthly basis to get his loose change.)
Beyond that, the more common kickback to organized crime in the music business in the 50's - 60's was cash applied to payola to help the "investments" of organized crime climb the charts.
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."