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Head Of ATF To Direct RIAA Anti-Piracy
plasmastate writes "Via Fox News: Bradley A. Buckles, the director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, is moving over to the RIAA to hunt down music pirates. And visions of David Koresh danced in their heads..."
...is this something to worry about? Or should I be sadly shaking my head at the RIAA's ever-more-pathetic attempts to crack down on a technology they don't understand?
You may know what copyright infringement is (not hard, it's a law), but you only THINK you know economics.
Try studying the Austrian school of economics. Google for some of the Austrian economists who think intellectual property is an oxymoron (like Thomas Jefferson did).
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Frankly, I think the United States suffers from considerable corruption in all of its upper-levels of "law enforcement related" divisions.
The FBI, for example, has been bungling up cases left and right - but we largely seem to ignore it or excuse it as "honest mistakes anyone could have made". I mean, look at the recent case with the random shootings in the Northeastern states. Their top criminal profilers all described the culprit completely wrong! They've wasted large amounts of time and money chasing after such minor things as "illegal warez distribution" on computer bulletin board systems and the Internet. They seem to have a bloodlust for anyone remotely possibly doing anything somewhat related to child porn, too - and there's a really *good* chance lots of innocent people are sitting in prisons around the country right now over their overzealousness in this area.
The ATF, of course, has done a number of inexcusable things - including raids at night on the *wrong house address*, and stomping on people's pets and killing them as part of their searches for people and drugs. The Waco thing was simply the most televised fiasco of theirs, but far from the exception to the rule of how they manage to overstep their bounds and screw things up.
There is, of course, plenty of reason to suspect the CIA of doing very questionable things too -- but by their nature, it's harder to pinpoint them most of the time.
The old saying, "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." certainly holds true.
If you want to bring economics into the game, whose fault is it if the masses steal? If the opportunity cost (an economic idea) is so high that people don't want to pay, then it affects the supply and demand. Since RIAA sets the price high, then there is a deficit -- what people are willing to pay and the supply do not meet equilibrium, and therefore there are a lot of CD's on the shelf. The RIAA assumes that this is the result of piracy. What has happened is that there is crappy music and so people's oppertunity cost has dropped, i.e. they don't want to pay for crappy CD's for one song, and the market has not adjusted, i.e prices should have dropped, and people look to get their music cheaper. The piracy begins when people's value of the music is so low and the price so high that people implicitly associate a lower value on the CD's (go to Best Buy and watch, invetiably some person will pick up a CD and say, "I don't want to pay $22.95 for one song.") They like the one song, but have no venue to purchase it at a reasonable cost, and there is no market structure to figure out what that cost should be -- RIAA won't cooperate, it is an all or none package, you buy the entire CD or not at all. So the person goes home and downloads the CD, because free is even cheaper than the oppertunity cost.
Well, there's my two cents.
The views expressed are mine own and do not express the views of my employer.