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FBI Anti-Piracy Seal
Supp0rtLinux writes "Looks like the FBI is giving a new anti-piracy seal for entertainment and software products. Looks like now the RIAA and MPAA pursuits will add a new federal level to future prosecutions." I'm pretty sure that our forms of media already contain warnings against unauthorized duplication, rebroadcasting, and public performance, but now it's in logo form!
It's not like anyone paid attention ever to the FBI warnings at the beginning or end of VHS tapes.
Help me. I've been modbombed by a few people with entirely too much time on their hands.
Great now anyone who buys a cd will have to listen to a 40 year old man tell you to report piracy. It almost makes me want to get piranted cds more that way.
Why not just cut to the chase and arrest people the moment they buy the movie?
So does that mean that I have to update the warnning message on all my downloaded movies?
There are 10 kinds of people in the world > > Those who understand binary and those who don't
It's a label.
It spells out explicitly that the product is covered by copyright and it also specifies the maximum penalty for violation of the copyright.
No harm, no foul.
I have been pwned because my
Oh my god... A LOGO! I think I'm gonna pause... and then keep going. I mean, come on. You have that stuff there. All a logo's gonna do is make people glance at it, then copy it. ESRB anyone?
503 Sig Unavailable
The Signature could not be accessed. Please try again later or contact the administrator
So will this mean that when programs load they will have a 'Blue screen of Theft'?
Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree. -Martin Luther
And it looks sort of like this: (C)
Now we know which products to boycott!
DRM sucks
You mean you didn't pay attention to the FBI warning message? It's illegal to skip it!
I hope you had expressed written permission, rather than just implied moral consent, to ignore it. If not, you could be next.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
(By the way, I know that VOA isn't really a propaganda machine in the same sense as the Bush press office is. But it sounds funny.)
... According to the article.
Occam's Razor says that this means 6 out of 10 movies are crap, not that 90% of people are thieves.
-- Your mother uses Emacs.
You'd think they had more importaint things to do like prevent another 9/11.
I hate this line of thinking. As though an organization only focuses on one thing at a time. "I guess they don't have more important things to do." As though deciding to put out an anti-piracy logo consumed 100% of their resources and manpower. They probably hired some marketing company to do it anyway.
"Keith Kupferschmid, VP of the anti-piracy division of the SIIA, said piracy also remains rampant in the software industry, costing U.S. companies about $12 billion a year in lost licensing revenue....."While the seal will not solve the problem, we feel it will aid the software industry in its war against piracy.""
So let me get that last part straight - "We're trying this anyway, and it's not going to work."
So why bother, and/or what strategy might work?
"What do you think?" "I think 'What, do you think?!'"
Movie execs also are worried about lost revenue from DVD sales and rentals. "We absolutely need downstream revenue to survive," said Ken Jacobsen, senior VP and director of worldwide anti-piracy operations for the MPAA, noting that only four of 10 movies earn enough at the box office to recoup the average of $89 million spent on producing and marketing a film.
Maybe if they stop hiring the 20 million 'bennifer' actors/actresses and start spending just a 10th of that money on the script and they might see some profit.
But this is only encouraging piracy! Let me explain. This seal will have to be visible right? So now we have not only "Explicit Lyrics" stickers, but also "FBI Anti-Piracy" stickers. Soon to follow is "PEPSI, you can also download this music for free!" stickers, and "SCO - this crap was digitally mastered on a linux platform so you owe us $699" stickers. And EULA stickers, and "Stickers against stickers association" stickers..
So here's the situation: you enter the record store and you can't find your CD because they're all covered with stickers. So you begin to peel some of them off, and the clerk comes to you and asks what the hell you're doing with their property. Then you reply something like "Oh sorry.. i was just about to go home and start up kazaa, anyway."
So you see! It leads to piracy!
Does anyone think that this will be as helpful to people as the "Tipper" stickers are?
Parent: "Hmm this is copyrighted...Nope, son you can't listen to this."
Child: "Can I get the latest Eminem CD then?"
Parent: "Well, as long as it isn't copyrighted, it's fine by me!"
EVERYDAY IS CATURDAY
> "We absolutely need downstream revenue to
> survive," said Ken Jacobsen, senior VP and
> director of worldwide anti-piracy operations for
> the MPAA, noting that only four of 10 movies earn
> enough at the box office to recoup the average of
> $89 million spent on producing and marketing a
> film.
I think the MPAA should be looking at two other issues in addition to piracy:
- why do only 40% of movies actually make money? I find it hard to believe that wholesale copyright infringement is ripping that much off the bottom line; very few people actually have the bandwidth to download movies, and not all of those have DVD burners
- why does the average file cost $89m to make and market? I can remember only about 10 years ago that $100m was considered an obscene amount to spend on making a film (refer to "Waterworld" and "Last Action Hero" as examples); now it's only slightly above average?
I think these guys have got to have a bit of a reality check if they're spending $89m per film and complaining about not recovering costs. *Someone* has had a very big salary hike...
3rd highest priority is cybercrime!?!?
This is more important that say forensics???
My god if that doesn't smack of special interests gone horribly, horribly, wrong.
And that's without even addressing what how slippery a slope the prevention of virtual crimes would seem to be.
Listen here punk, bring that thing NEAR a Blockbuster(TM) and I'll throw you in Jail, buddy.
Moral consent, in that you can fast forward your own damn tape in your own damn house on your own damn tv without the FBI interfering.
If anyone is offended by my language, please s/damn/double plus unnice/ now.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Put yourself in their position, you're working for what you believe is the right cause, you do as your told, and you glide into a pension after service moving into the private sector afterwards. Bottom line.
As for the sticker... Means nothing and yes you can attribute piracy in some form to illegal activities. Although you see this from a downloading-does-no-evil perspective, fact is there are organizations that make money off of these things, and yes they can somehow can intertwined with terrorism. For example, out here in NYC where tax free bootleg cigarettes are the rage for those looking to make a quick buck, do you think Joe Blow average is bringing in truckloads to sell them to lower level sellers? Sure people run off to Indian reservations to buy and resell, but it's not an uncommon notion to think how easy it would be to make some mega black market cash to fund something more sinister.
So while the typical /.'er trolls along thinking about how evil this is, I personally think this was done to appease those with money making noise (RIAA), and as a means of saying "We're watching you", beyond that I doubt if the FBI is going to run around and arrest little Jack Horner for trading songs with Little Bo Peep, but rather would focus on factories who do this on a mass scale. Then again this is my perception of it all, and I am definitely not one to be an expert solely one who looks at things from a different angle. And in case anyone has forgotten, a law is a law is a law. Like it or not.
MoFscker
Anti Piracy Seal? Is that like Smokey, the Fire Prevention Bear?
Best Buy can have you arrested
This anti-piracy Seal, he's like a highly trained anti-piracy agent, whose stealth and clandestine methods of operation allows him to conduct multiple anti-piracy missions against targets that larger forces cannot approach undetected? He's been selected from the best of the best for his discipline, skill, and bravery? He'll strike terror into the hearts of media pirates near large bodies of water everywhere?
.I dunno. . .logo or stamp or something on the damn disks saying "piracy is bad, m'kay?". Bloody lame if you ask me.
No? Not that kind of seal?
Then I expect he'll amuse children and adults alike with his antics, balancing balls on his adorable snout and clapping his flippers together, all the while conveying a powerful anti-piracy message to our youth?
No? Aw c'mon! You're not seriously telling me that the FBI signed up a washed-up early 90's soul singer to convey their anti piracy message? That's just so lame. It probably would have been more effective for them to just put some kind of. .
I want the fire back.
... so I can slap a circle & slash on it for my own stuff.
How this rebranded "Don't Copy that Floppy" seal is going to deter piracy is beyond me. I'm sure it was as much of a deterrent as that William H. Sessions "Winners don't use drugs" campaign that showed up in arcades in the 90s.
As a taxpayer I can think of a hell of a lot of things the FBI should be spending it's time on WAY before jailing bootleggers.
Well, at least they are making a distinction between terrorists, spies, and copyright infringers.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
WASHINGTON, DC (UPI) - Vowing to put a dent in an illegal practice that robs the entertainment industry of three billion dollars a year, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has unleashed a new tool in the fight against online music pirates. In a media event this afternoon at FBI Headquarters in Washington, Director Robert Mueller unveiled Chester, the bureau's official Anti-Piracy Seal. Chester, a seven year-old harp seal that was rescued from a fisherman's net off the coast of Maine, has been recruited by the bureau to "inform America's youth about the harmful practice of copyright infringement," according to Mueller. "We hope that he will teach our children that it is wrong to steal music from the Internet."
Chester impressed a crowd of roughly 100 reporters, music industry representatives, teachers, and students by balancing a copy of Hoobastank's latest CD The Reason on his nose while holding a copy of Incubus' Crow Left of the Murder between his front flippers. At one point in the press conference, an actor portraying an online music pirate attempted to take the Incubus album from Chester, at which point the seal snarled and bit off the would-be-thief's left pinky. Chester also demonstrated that he was able to use lawn darts to burst large balloons that were imprinted with the logos of Kazaa, Morpheus, Gnutella, and other popular Internet P2P ("peer-to-peer") file sharing applications.
"He's quite the talented creature," beamed Mueller.
After the press conference was over, Mueller loaded Chester up in an unmarked Chevy Malibu and took him to Millard Fillmore Elementary School in suburban Washington, D.C. for a classroom visit. The popular seal captured the hearts of Mrs. Eleanor Richards' third grade class when he waddled around the room with a bucketful of FBI/RIAA anti-piracy literature hanging from his nose. "Chester taught me that it is real, real bad to steal music," said nine year-old Timmy Jacobson, of Alexandria, VA.
"I learned that Adolf Hitler also stoled music," pointed out ten year-old Kaitlyn Frankenhoff.
Chester is scheduled to visit five schools a week during an extended tour that is expected to last eighteen months. His initial weeks will take him from the Beltway south through the Carolinas, to Georgia and Florida, and finally to New Orleans, LA. Mueller is excited about the impact of Chester's mission. "We will get the truth about music sharing out," he said. "The next generation of American children will understand the value of honesty and the reward of a hard day's work." According to Mueller, Chester is also able to "answer the telephone", "close car doors", and "play sand volleyball." When he's not fighting music pirates, Chester enjoys dining on rotten fish and soft serve ice cream.
Hillary Rosen contributed to this story.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
Here's the deal. If large corporations agree to pay their taxes like everyone else, and not use illegal tax shelters, generally show a bit of civic responsibility, I'll agree to not pirate ANYTHING. /me just finished watching Frontline.
a x/
Look here:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/t
Sound fair? Good. You cannot have your cake and and pie and cream puffs and every last damn thing you want AND eat it too. Greedy bastards.
Absolutely. Reread the wording carefully:
So what they're effectively saying is that the average cost for a movie is $89m, and only 4 out of 10 movies make more than $89m. But that doesn't mean 4 out of 10 movies are profitable - the other 6 probably had much lower budgets and consequently broke even with a much lower revenue.
For example: let's say 4 movies cost $120m each to produce (the likes of Titanic, T2, etc.). Then to make the average 89m per film the other 6 cost about 68m each. Now let's say the 4 big budget films (due to superior film quality, more aggressive marketing, etc) make huge profits, while the other 6 only make 75m each. They still made a profit but they didn't make the requisite 89m. Now this scenario has been turned into "only 4 out of 10 movies are profitable" (that's not what they said, but that's what everyone heard), even though all the movies made a profit.
"Why are you watching the washing machine?"
"I love entertainment, as long as it's clean"
The FBI is an essential and necessary part of the U.S. government. To give them credit, they have done a great deal in investigating and prosecuting government corruption, organized crime, child abductions, and many other serious crimes.
Unfortunately the FBI, through no fault of their own, are being coerced by politicians at the behest of the entertainment industry (whose multi million dollar campaign contributions have had an undue influence on public policy) to become more and more a private law enforcement agency for powerful and wealthy organizations, propping up archaic and inefficient business models, who should be financing their own investigations. (I doubt the FBI would pursue GPL violations.)
I encourage all taxpayers to lobby their respective representatives with the aim of curtailing this waste of our important resources.
The downloading of copyrighted videos and music is now largely done via P2P networks. Unless it concerns national security, espionage, terrorism, or organized crime, etc., the FBI should not be spending its resources on prosecuting Internet file sharers.
Monroe said preventing and prosecuting cybercrimes is now the FBI's No. 3 priority, behind anti-terrorism efforts and counterintelligence operations.
:)
What a relief. Once again, it's safe for tradition to come out of the basement.
We can all go back to counterfeiting $100.00 bills and transporting drunken underage hookers across state lines