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MPAA Fights Pirates with Gentle Threats
Gillious writes "Wow! It seems the MPAA has learned from the RIAA's mistakes. It seems we aren't going to get mass-lawsuits for grandmothers and 12-year-old kids. I find this quote most interesting: 'The movie industry, he said, has to ask itself what the music industry should have asked years ago: 'Why do they want to steal from us?' The answer, he said, is simple: 'Because you won't sell them what they want.' The technologists say that what went wrong with the music industry can easily go wrong for movie companies, too.'"
Death to the RIAA!
STOP BREAKING THE LAW ASSHOLE.
Sincerely,
Tom St Denis
lameness filter....lameness filter....
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
"In the end, if people are stealing your stuff," Kocher said, "the technology has failed."
Remember folx, they want to make computers illegal. If you have computers, you can steal their stuff, so that's a failure of technology. Technology will be a failure until you can't use it to steal content. That will only happen once computers are illegal. Don't give them money ever again. They're just as evil as the music industry. But also don't steal their stuff. I want to see ROTK and TTT. Have I? Nope. I won't give them money and I won't steal.. (And plz don't chime in with that little "copyright infringment != stealing" "argument". I know it's not the same using big legally technical words, but it is the same in that you get to use things ithout paying for them when you should pay for them. Splitting hairs makes it look like you're trying to get away with something. And I figured out that pirating is stealing a long time before I ever heard of the RIAA or MPAA.).
I heard from someone who works at the FCC that currently they're trying to put watermarking tech into all consumer AD converters so those AD converters won't record protected content. Of course, commercial AD converters won't have these restrictions, but that's because everyone's equal, but some people (the powerful people) are more equal than others. So let's assume that they get away with this AD watermarking. What happens on Christmas when little Susie gets up on her own two feet for the first time and takes her first steps toward Daddy who's holding a little dolly as her Christmas present. Whoops.Forgot to turn off the stereo playing that protected content, I guess the watermarking will prevent the crippled camera from recording the sounds. Whoops, little Susie walked in front of a TV that someone left on. Guess the picture will cut out because we can't have people recording protected content, can we? Anyway, plz don't give them money, and plz don't steal.
Best. Comment. Ever. Enjoy!
You misspelled "copyright infringement."
Karnal
Seems to me policemen have much better things to do than try and help a private establishment such as a theater enforce its own house rules.
Government has a legitimate interest in protecting the public from low-quality counterfeit products and protecting local businesses such as video stores from competition from illicit copies. And there really is no good reason to bring a video camera into a movie theater, so the low imposes little burden on honest citizens. In practice, the police are likely to be involved only rarely, if a camera-carrying patron becomes obstreperous when asked to leave.
> Also remember that a finished CD is the work of dozens or hundreds of people -- all of whom expect to be paid.
.wma files online, I'm stuck to the few digital players that support wma. There's tons of sellers of mp3 players (and there are a few ogg players). The only lucky part in all this is both .wma and .aac can be burned back to a CD-R.
Most bands now days are 4-5 people, tops. Add in a manager, workers to press the CDs out, accountants, etc (most of those being spread out across multiple bands), and you get maybe 10 people being paid. Oh wait, that's more like 5 since it's the band that ends up having to pay the managers, buy the CDs, pay for the CDs to be pressed, etc.
> Before you shout "those greedy bastards!", consider that many of them are like you and me... good people, who may have families to support and mortgages to pay. They do this by working, in some capacity, in the music industry.
Good. That's great for those people who actually *should* be working for the company. If their margins are so bad, that they lose a lot of money, they should be downsizing. Of course, it works out instead that most bands (not necessarily excluding indie bands) are "loaned" money by a label, and then the band in terms of the loan pays the label for a variety of things. As has been quoted many times, most CDs have to sell at least platinum level before the artist who made the song gets any actual profits (barring, of course, all the money they spent in the process of making the CD that wasn't necessary (though the labels pushing to help the artist spend their loan money on glitter to attract fans is common)).
> CDs are sold into the distribution channel for about $8 - $10. This leaves the record label with about a 50% or 60% gross margin -- typical for a lot of industries.
A lot of industries take a good that at production time costs less than $1 in raw materials, and dump out a product that costs 8-10 times as much with only a 50%-60% gross margin? Oh wait, a gross margin is gross profit/net sale. That's not a precentage. Were you trying to say only 50% of CDs are sold? Or that the $8 is 150% to 160% the price of the raw goods? Well, whatever, as neither of those explain the 8-10 fold increase in cost.
> But the net margin is much lower, after accrual for price protection, channel marketing, returns and the like. This is why many, if not most, CDs don't end up turning a profit, and if a CD loses money, the record company eats the loss.
"Price protection"? Is that code for predatory price protection (aka, price fixing)? That phrase doesn't show up in my dictionary. Now, channel marketing I'd assume is meant to mean simply marketing. Advertising comes out the money loaned to the artist, so there's no direct loss for advertising in net profits. Indirectly, of course, not selling enough CDs (or having enough returned) will mean the artist doesn't make enough royalties to pay back the loan which could mean a loss.
>>"Sell me a song I like for $0.50 and I'm a happy camper!"
>Me, too, and I think prices will ultimately end up around there. But in the meantime, paying $1 does not fill me with sufficient outrage to allow me to justify piracy.
You know of a place that sells regular mp3s for $1? I don't have a Mac, nor Windows, and Windows Media Player doesn't work in WINE, so that leaves me out of most if not all of the online music stores. You point out that I have to buy a CD player to listen to a CD, so why complain about Windows/Mac? CD players can be bought from a whole host of different companies. There's actual competition as far as that goes. If I start using iTunes, though, I'm stuck using an iPod to have portage digitally encoded music. And if I get
>>"Let me use that song in any way I see fit (as long as I'm not trading it around like a joint at a frat party) and I'm certain the RIAA/MPAA can make a buck and keep their customers from
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
'The movie industry, he said, has to ask itself what the music industry should have asked years ago: 'Why do they want to steal from us?' The answer, he said, is simple: 'Because you won't sell them what they want.'
This is BS, and so is your explanation. The problem is this: most teenagers lack the sense of ethics that tells them not to steal stuff. When they get older they get a better sense of perspective and they realize that it's not worth stealing unless you can embezzle $200k from the company's pension fund.
When I was a teen, I had the motive to rip off music, but not the means/opportunity to do it on a large scale. Nowadays, they do. And furthermore, this no longer seems to be something that most people grow out of. The demographic for piracy creeps upward.
-a