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!

Comments

Not a big deal..

[SoIosoft]

It's not like anyone paid attention ever to the FBI warnings at the beginning or end of VHS tapes.

Re:Not a big deal..

[BillyBlaze]

I've seen those FBI warnings on DVDs as well as tapes. The funny part is that, judging from their image quality, I'd guess they were copied from VHS!

Re:Not a big deal..

[grub]

Back in the day (early 80s) we'd copy whole tapes, FBI warning and all. Didn't seem to scare us teenage evildoers.
Hmm.. someone's at my door.

Yeah, great marketing....

[0mni]

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.

Re:Yeah, great marketing....

[wo1verin3]

It's like those stupid ads in the movie theatres telling you that you should pay to see a movie and not copy it.

DON'T YOU THINK YOU MAY BE TARGETTING THE WRONG AUDIENCE? YOU KNOW? THE PEOPLE WHO PAID FOR THE TICKET?! (no free pass trolls pls kthx)

I cause a ruckus every movie I see and my gf tells me to shutup...

On EVERY DVD?

[r_glen]

Why not just cut to the chase and arrest people the moment they buy the movie?

Doesn't hurt me

[ObviousGuy]

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.

Re:Doesn't hurt me

[Anonymous Coward]

More to the point, why is the FBI spending money on propaganda that is attached to private goods for sale to the general public?

These are not like health warnings on cigarette packs; these are threats with the weight of government put on packaging at the request of the entertainment monopoly.

It stinks. It makes the FBI look like hired enforcers. Can I get an FBI label to put on my car saying "The FBI says Grand Theft Auto is a bad thing"?

If the MPAA/RIAA wants warning stickers, they should make their own, and not use FBI logos and its implicit authority to intimidate people.

Permission

[Luigi30]

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?

But it already exists

[Nakito]

And it looks sort of like this: (C)

Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now we know which products to boycott!

DRM sucks

Re:Great!

[miu]

Now we know which products to boycott!

These messages hurt impulse buys in my case. When I see a message like "this software contains anti-copying technology" I remember all the times I've had games fail to work because of buggy piracy protection.

It means that I put off buying the game until it has been around long enough for users to report problems with the copy protection and the publisher to release patches. Sometimes I never get around to checking and lose interest in the game.

Doublespeak ... or just lies

[fname]

Well, the official propaganda arm of the USA, the Voice of America, has an article on the matter. I'll pull out one choice quote:

"It allows the average citizen who rents movies or movies or software or games to understand what is correct activity and what is incorrect activity," he said. "They need to understand that there is a law involved and that law is very important, and they should abide by it."

So, amyone want to bet that the RIAA doesn't note any of the "correct" ways we can our media, such as sharing with friends, making backup copies or selling them?

(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.)

Only 4 in 10 movies break even...

[Gleenie]

... 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.

criminal or civil?

[genixia]

The seal, marked by the "FBI Anti-Piracy Warning" label, is accompanied by a statement that criminal copyright infringement is punishable by up to five years in prison and a fine of $250,000.

...and what about the old plain-jane civil copyright infringments?

Good article quote:

[Mad_Rain]

"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?

Wel...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

More stickers?!

[plams]

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!

Reality check required

[darnok]

> "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...

Is anyone else disturbed by this quote?

[mynameis (mother ...]

Jana Monroe, assistant director of the FBI's cyberdivision, said the unit, created 18 months ago in large part to help hunt perpetrators of digital copyright infringement, will continue to get significant funding from the bureau. Monroe said preventing and prosecuting cybercrimes is now the FBI's No. 3 priority, behind anti-terrorism efforts and counterintelligence operations.

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.

Re:/me gasps

[Gherald]

> You mean implied oral consent?

Is that naughtier?

Re:no

[yerfatma]

Yeah, but you sure as shit can't do it with DVDs. Lost in Translation came with a nice warning followed by 10 minutes of trailers I couldn't skip. It's not like I own the DVD player and TV or anything.

Re:Manipulated numbers?

[bonhomme_de_neige]

Does anyone also think they were manipulating numbers there?

Absolutely. Reread the wording carefully:

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.

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.