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Bootlegged Music in Russia
Guppy06 writes "MosNews.com has an interesting article on the thoughts and opinions of everyday Muscovites on the rampant music (et al) piracy in their country. It seems that some of them don't have much trouble justifying it to themselves, with quotes like 'Yes, I know that some of the sellers are here with burned CDs. But they have to earn a living too, I can understand them.' The article also mentions 'In a country where the average monthly salary is about $240, buying the latest album for $15 is a grotesque luxury, let alone spending $600 on Adobe Photoshop or a similar computer program.' Apparently, catchy slogans like 'Listen up, you pirate, I choose copyright!' just aren't working."
If these things didn't cost so much and were worth the effort to earn money for them, piracy MIGHT drop but most likely not. Long live FOSS!
`Especially that 'et al' type of music.
Man, I'm glad I don't live somewhere that I would have to listen to 'et al' music. And I'm sure there's a lot of people who agree with me, but don't have the space to be a signatory to that here...
"Listen up, Russia. You signed the Bourne treaty, so start living up to your side of the bargain by eradicating these large-scale piracy rings or face the coming winter without trade partners."
or
"Information wants to be Free! That CD wants to cost 15 bucks!"
or
"In Capitalist America, nubile faux-lesbian rock groups ignore YOU!"
15 bucks is a lot anywhere for a cd! personally, i don't think it's justified to spend that much on a cd that maybe has 1 or 2 songs worth listening too.
that's why i like online music stores where you can get singles for $1. something like this could really kick of in russia, not sure what the internet usage is over there though.
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
...EVERY single CD I found in shops were bootlegs. I couldn't believe that people were actually buying them. Some of them were so bad that you could see the inkjet printer lines on the cover/back. Needless to say, I didn't buy any of it, but in some places, people have no trouble with this kind of behaviour.
A blog like any other.
My research indicates that it's legit, and has been online for awhile. According to the copyright laws of the US, you can "import" things from outside the US, even if they violate US law if purchased here. As long as it's legit where you get it, and you import it for your personal use, you're OK. Kind of the same how you can buy bootlegs outside the US and bring them home. Heck, it even gets good reviews
Plus, they have not ripped me off since May, and so far no one has shown how this is illegal.
While I know it's not Soviet Russia, it's damn cheap. You can download an album for $1.50- and it's legit.
An album costs 25% of a week's pay. The problem may start there. They simply can't do that. Why don't the music publishers price music a little more closely to a country's economy?
http://www.busyweather.com/
It seems that some of them don't have much trouble justifying it to themselves, with quotes like 'Yes, I know that some of the sellers are here with burned CDs. But they have to earn a living too, I can understand them.'
While it's kind of a stretch, it's basically the same as "it's okay to steal a loaf of bread if you're hungry." (With the vendors being the thieves).
What?
Allofmp3.com is russian and charges pennies per megabyte. Thats super cheap and legit right?
He who knows not and knows he knows not is a wise man. He who knows not and knows not he knows not is a fool.
run run the europeans are invading and they have....burned cd's?
http://eric.blogdns.com/
RIAA will just try to tax CD blanks to about $15....
i disable sigs
actually, in the US if it can be proven that the need for self preservation outways the crime committed than its a possible defense in court
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
People in some countries will argue they cannot afford to legally buy some software because the cost is very high compared to how much they get pain. But then there is nothing to prevent some company from developing software in the country that people can afford because the cost of development is cheaper there isn't it?
Apparently, catchy slogans like 'Listen up, you pirate, I choose copyright!' just aren't working." - what is so difficult to understand? In the former Soviet Republics there are hundreds of millions of poor people who their entire lives lived under opression of a corrupt 'communist' government. Nothing in that society belonged to anyone. Property rights are virtually non-existant. When the president of the Country puts the most famous, richest person in the country into a prison cell for basically just that - being rich and thus dangerous (well Hodorkovskiy sort of was aiming at the president's position) and the company is now going to be sold at 1/10th of the value to the buddies of the president and to those who will share some of the wealth, what the hell do you expect from the people? Respect copyrights? HA!
It also works the other way around - when the people of a country, whose assets were supposedely owned by noone and everyone at once were 'freed' from the regime, and the valuable assets were divided among the top elite who had access to some money and were in power, and the average person was left in the cold with nothing at all, after slaving their entire lives for this regime, these are the people who allow Putin to be the president, obviously he is representative of the population and who is to say that anyone at all in that country would behave differently from Putin given the power, then what do you expect from those people?
Generations of Soviets grew up with assumption that they had to steal from the state because the state stole from them. The sense of someone elses property is nonexistant. Mix this with the fact that making digital copies nowadays is cheaper than buying a loaf of bread and you have yourself a runaway copyright infringement process on 1/6th of the landmass of this planet.
You can't handle the truth.
those godless communist bastards are preying on our innocent capitalism aryan heros like 50 cent, eminem, and britney... think of the children!!!
> Apparently, catchy slogans like 'Listen up, you pirate, I choose copyright!' just aren't working
Well if respecting copyright is a choice then why would anyone choose to pay?
The iPod Lite Project taking orders soon.
In fact, societal perceptions of copyright vary greatly. If it's difficult enough convincing people in 'rich' countries with disposable income that copyrights must be adhered to, imagine going to a less-than-rich country and preaching the same thing. Even if the people who use pirated software or music wanted to be legal, often they can't afford to.
A lot of countries have no concept of copyright to begin with. The battle to standardize intellectual property laws across the world will be very, very long.
am quite thankful for the Russian bootleg economy. When travelling through Nepal and India really the only music selection I had was that of Russian imported bootlegs. Which is actually quite vast!! as I recognized many (if not most) US titles... They were also priced cheaply enough that I would not be over-concious in keeping them protected while traveling... In fact it was there I first picked up and listened to an album by the band called Portisehead, whom to this day I would say is one of the best bands in all of existance and who's music is THE perfect soundtrack for touring the third world!!
~slashdot are my only freinds ):
It's hard to justify the cost of a CD (or DVD, etc) to anyone in any country, if they've done the math and figured out where the $16 to $20 from each CD is going. Break it down and you'll find that about 75% of the points are going to the label in one way or another. Worse, as much goes to pay for advertising and promotion of the CD as goes to all other places (artist, representation, printing and pressing, shipping) *COMBINED*.
I found the best way to deal with this is just to avoid paying. I don't have cable anymore. I ditched it because the terrible programming wasn't worth $110/mo. I also don't buy DVDs or CDs and I don't go to the theater. Few movies are worth $10 per person these days. What, am I going to blow $20 so myself and a date can go watch Eurotrip? Get real.
I've taken the money I would have spent on the MPAA/RIAA/BSA goons and redirected it toward buying USED books. Instead of $30 to buy the latest ridiculous Spielberg rehash (ooh, this time he added three lighting effects in this one scene that weren't there before!) - I can use that $30 to buy half a dozen good reads. I've been working my way through the Top 100 Science Fiction Books of All Time (excluding the ones I'd previously read). Much better value. And when I'm through, I can hand them off to someone else without worrying about the MPAA/RIAA/BSA sending the FBI to break down my door and put me in prison for four years without due process.
I'm hardcore, man, I listen to heavy et al.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
Converted into US bucks - that's roughly 570 dollars a month.
You can't tell me that any attempt by copyright holders is going to 'Stamp out Piracy' with 15 dollar CDs - unless they match the 3.50 'Nice Price'.
Isn't there one person out of all the copyright holders who can wrap their head around that?
I rate this article 4 1/2 'duhs', and rate the clueless morans printing up 'For great justice, make your time Pirate!' posters a +5 Ner.
Accidentally posted anon (and want to be able to see replies):
It's hard to justify the cost of a CD (or DVD, etc) to anyone in any country, if they've done the math and figured out where the $16 to $20 from each CD is going. Break it down and you'll find that about 75% of the points are going to the label in one way or another. Worse, as much goes to pay for advertising and promotion of the CD as goes to all other places (artist, representation, printing and pressing, shipping) *COMBINED*.
I found the best way to deal with this is just to avoid paying. I don't have cable anymore. I ditched it because the terrible programming wasn't worth $110/mo. I also don't buy DVDs or CDs and I don't go to the theater. Few movies are worth $10 per person these days. What, am I going to blow $20 so myself and a date can go watch Eurotrip? Get real.
I've taken the money I would have spent on the MPAA/RIAA/BSA goons and redirected it toward buying USED books. Instead of $30 to buy the latest ridiculous Spielberg rehash (ooh, this time he added three lighting effects in this one scene that weren't there before!) - I can use that $30 to buy half a dozen good reads. I've been working my way through the Top 100 Science Fiction Books of All Time (excluding the ones I'd previously read). Much better value. And when I'm through, I can hand them off to someone else without worrying about the MPAA/RIAA/BSA sending the FBI to break down my door and put me in prison for four years without due process.
The Chinese deliberately steal Western software, videos, and music, make millions of copies of such intellectual property, and then proceed to export the illicit goods into the American market. The pirated copies of, say, Windows XP compete directly against the real McCoy in the American market. The FBI have arrested numerous Chinese for pirating software, music, and videos.
The piracy rate in Russia is 87%. The rate in China (which includes Taiwan province and Hong Kong) is 92%. The rate in Russia is lower than the rate in China; moreover, the Russians do not export the pirated software into the USA to compete against the original manufacturers of the software.
Clearly, piracy in Russia is a problem but is nowhere near as bad as piracy in China.
Shot of a thin gaunt man dressed in an old jacket hawking CD's with Cyrillic lettering in the rain. The rooftop of an Orthodox Russian Church can be seen in the background.
Announcer: This is Boris, a hardworking Russian music pirate. Every day he is on the streets, twelve, fourteen, or even fifteen hours, hawking his burned CDs of the latest hit albums from the US. He even has created his own mixes with high-quality jacket art that caters to the Russian market.
Shot of a fat man driving a Ford SUV and eating from a bag of McDonald's food. In the interior of the SUV, an in-dash satellite radio and GPS system can be seen. In the back is an in-car DVD player.
Announcer (cont.): This is John, an American music producer. Unlike Boris, he has a steady job, including health, vacation, and retirement. He only works a measily 8 hour day, and lives in a 3000 sq ft home, with central heat and air. Unlike Boris, who owns no vehicles, John owns a late-model SUV, which he parks in his own private three-stall garage.
Shot of a typical upscale gated community in the US.
Announcer (cont.): If you buy legitimate music, you are throwing your money to rich Americans who already have the good life.
Shot of a Moscow slum.
Announcer (cont.) But if you buy the latest songs from the Russian pirates on the street, your money stays in the Russian economy, benefitting many more people than just the pirate.
Announcer (cont.): Please buy locally.
In a country where the average monthly salary is about $240, buying the latest album for $15 is a grotesque luxury, let alone spending $600 on Adobe Photoshop or a similar computer program.'
Adobe relocalize their prog unit in asia in order to make more profit on their 600$ soft but the coders are so badly paid that they cannot afford these softs so they copy these...
I guess it's one another evidence that deloc is finally hurting more the home country than it's benefitting.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
I just returned to the US from a vacation in China, and in many of the rural areas (near Yunan, Dali, I was in the southern area) 400 RMB a month is enough to eat, rent an apartment, buy clothes, and still afford a few vcds and dvds a month. That's roughly $50 USD. Do you seriously think those people are going to see a $9.99 USD CD and think "oh what a bargain!"? No, they'll grab the 7 RMB copy next to it instead.
I browse Slashdot at +3, Funny
"Why don't the music publishers price music a little more closely to a country's economy?"
Cos then you could buy the stuff cheap over there and ship it back home saving a bundle.
Course that practice has been made illegal in the UK, the free market is wonderful, no?
Guess what makes it illegal...
Copyright designs and patents act 1988 and the Trade Marks Act 1994. It is illegal to import/distribute into the UK without the opyright or trade mark owner's consent. There's a bunch of additional stuff which makes it even more illegal to import software.
Levi vs Tesco and Sony vs Tesco.
Deleted
He just says it cheap, and maybe legal (debatable, and it hardly matters unless you've got enough money to afford one hell of a lawyer, which would kinda defeat the purpose of cheap music). Read his post and it seems empty of ethical arguments.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
let alone spending $600 on Adobe Photoshop or a similar computer program
Really, I'd rather pirate The GIMP than buy it for $600.
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
if you can't afford a $15 dollar CD where are you going to get the money to develope a world class photo editor? Assuming you've got the skill (which takes plenty since you're probably spend thounsands of hours working around Adobe's patents), what are you going to do about food for the 2 or 3 years it takes to get competitive with the nearly 'free' Adobe Photoshop cds?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I dream of a day when the big labels have been completely plundered and real music is again produced by artists/managers/promoters/executives that aren't becoming insanely rich beyond what they deserve. Britney (insert artist of your choice) has not EARNED her millions. Same for movies. I also hope television dies a slow painful death.
If you watch Survivor (insert reality show of your choice) you are crapping on your own brain.
So, kudos to the Russians from a Canadian who cares.
"Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest." - Denis Diderot
You have heard of outsourcing?
The US software company gets software developed cheap in Russia, China, India for a fraction of the US, but still a bloody good wage in their country. Puts a truly massive markup on it and sells it to Americans for a profit.
Deleted
Yup, on Sunday, for five days. I hadn't thought about it before, but, well... Thanks for the tip! :)
Let's say I can't aford a car. I need it for work. I can live without music but my living depends on a car. Why is it unacceptable to steal a car that is critical to my supporting myself and my family but okay to steal music which is a luxury? Albums cost money to produce just like a car. Corporate greed is a cop out. In many countries people can't aford food. I have far more sympathy for them stealing food than some one stealing music or software. If they steal Photoshop. Where did the computer come from to run it on? Could they aford that or did they steal that too? Is it okay to steal the computer as well? If they don't have the money for the software there are open source versions everyone is always boasting of that are free. Also groups are giving away music. The real issue is they want it so they take it. It's as simple as that. Anything else is rationalizing. The same rational many teens use for shoplifting. They can't aford it so they take it. Trust me you can live without it. I have to say how would programers feel if they were told no one wants to pay for software so they'll have to work for free?
I'm originally from Brazil, and go back every once in a while to visit family. The minimum salary there is on the order of $100/month, and piracy is also an everyday fact of life. My cousin tells me that when you buy a PS2 there, it comes pre-modded and with software to play DVDs from any region as part of the bundle; you actually can't buy a PS2 without it. Of course, the reason for this is because Sony never officially released the PS2 in Brazil (according to my cousin, this is because they knew that piracy was so prevalent as to make legitimate sales there unprofitable). For comparison, whereas a pirated game is roughly $10, an unpirated one is nearly $100.
Don't wrestle with pigs; you'll both get muddy, but the pig likes it.
"Apparently, catchy slogans like 'Listen up, you pirate, I choose copyright!' just aren't working."
Well, when your countries' finacial system is in shambles and legitimate opportunities to thrive are next to non-existant, I could see where one might look to alternate forms of income. It's not nessisarily right, but then it's also hard to feel sorry for the music industry, who will be making billions a year regardless.
And WTF is so special about black caviar, anyway?
You need a FREE iPod Nano
If US copyrights don't have much hold then I think Adobe's patents would be of big concern to someone in that country developing a world class editor.
Downward pressure on wages (although no where near the levels in russia) has made music a luxury to a large portion of the population. Work for $6.25 an hour, 25 hours a week, and tell me if you can afford a 15-25$ cd.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
ROFL!!!
I mean, really... I read that and it is funny, but the fact that they are actually using that as a slogan is just... It is just too freaking funny!!!
--- "End Of Line" - MCP
In other news, you have been trolled and you have lost.
And regarding the possiblity of iTunes and company, Russia hasn't invented broadband yet. They're still using pulse-dialing for their phone lines, for crying out lound. (If you don't know what pulse-dialing is, go ask your dad. Or your grandpa.)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized!
There's just something horribly, horribly wrong when IP "owners" are complaining that people won't respect their property when said people cannot even begin to consider doing so. They're dangling food in front of the faces of the hungry and complaining when some of it gets snatched away. That thought just makes me ill.
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
"Interesting?" This post gets modded up as interesting?!?!
I swear I am never going to use Latin again! Between the editor who moved the link to someplace where it makes no sense and the moderator here who... sheesh...
Would y'all rather I said "the rampant music (and some other stuff besides music, like software and stuff, making this an obnoxiously long parenthetical for a group of people who probably don't even know what "parenthetical" means, all the while making me wonder if I should put this before or after the word "piracy") piracy in their country?"
Et tu, Slashdot?
What kind of mongoloid moron shells out $110 a month for cable? Or pays $10 to see a freaking first run movie?
You wanna know how much cable costs me? $15 a month. Yeah, you read that right. How? I got the basic package (75 or so channels for $20 a month), and share it with my upstairs neighbor. No fuss, no muss. $110 my ass, have you ever heard of bargain shopping?
As for the movie tab, seriously, are you going to showings that have George Lucas personally wiping your ass when you visit the crapper to take a shit? Because that's the only way I'd fork over $120 for a freaking movie. The last movie I saw was Hero, wanna know how much it cost me?
Three dollars.
"How", again you say, in a slack-jawed manner? Easy. I went to the weekday matinee. If I were feeling like Mr. Moneybags, I'd have gone to the Sunday matinee and gotten gouged for $4. As for snackage, I grabbed a bag of Cornuts from my value priced box already bought from Kroger, and a couple cans of soda and put them on ice for the quick 3 minute drive there. I simply hid them in my jacket and took them in. Once in the theatre, I enjoyed Hero in extreme comfort with only one other person in the showing.
And THAT'S how one buys entertainment on the cheap.
Well Bob... Bob, I must say, I'm a big Michael Bolton fan, in fact I've pirated his entire collection.
as just 1$ a day you can help sponsor a RIAA Music Producer. With your help we can get them another Porche for the garage, that flat they have always wanted in the Bahama's, you could even help cover the cost for the private school tuition of their childeren, and other things their own goverment can not proivde.
..
So please give generously help make the life of a RIAA Music producer better today.
----
Seriously tho the Russian guy on the street, and that is where most of them are, have had the shit end of the stick for the last 60'something years, and now the people up on high are pissing and moaning cause someone wants to listen to some tunes....
get your prioities straight people!
They really frown on you moshing or slam dancing at a performance of Mozart's "Fidelio".
How about "as long as I'm not hurting anyone then it's cool, right?" It isn't about profits. It's about control. The music industry is losing that control as instant publishing and person to person communications evolve. They are fit to be tied because they see themselves being removed from the equation. They've gouged artists and fans long enough. Nobody will be sorry to see them go.
....
Long post made short..
I can fly round-trip to las vegas for $200, or buy 10 CD's....
10 CD's.. hey that is, kinda, a lot... except for, with theMusic Industry's Greed, there's only 2 good songs on each CD!
Actually, I do buy music, but i download it first. If i like the album, I buy it, if i dont like it, I'll delete it before too long.
But still, setting aside the fact i think the music industry is making an -insane- profit right now, I think their 'loss of sales due to downloading' is more of a 'loss of sales due to prices being too high'...
what kid working $5/hour in some fast food place is going to spend 3/4 his days paycheck(after taxes) on a CD? Especially when they've been disappointed in the -quality- of the CD's (such as, 1-2 good songs highly advertised, and the rest are ear-sores) The Music industry is ignoring -one of their biggest groups- of customers, and the only way to help them is by lowering prices... probably why they ignore them right?
Any major music label file for Chapter 13 selling CD's at $15-20 each?
Wrong. I tell you, the sufficient part, about 15% of my own music collection are perfectly legal CDs. Yes, some of them were purchased with BIG discounts, some are from 'cheap classic music' series, but the fact is : it is possible to buy licensed music in Russia.
Stores with legal copies sells music that is hard to find in bootlegs. They almost divided the market and coexist in peace (a sort of).
Broadband ? We do have broadband. Not so 'broad', but anyway... it's ADSL. Advertised everywhere, cost is $24 per month.
Pulse-dialing ? Yes, it is the default. Call the phone company and they'll change it to tone dialing.
There is only one sad thing - all this is in Moscow and St.Petersburg. The rest of the country is still unconnected.
I was born in Odessa, Ukraine ... which damn close to russia :P (I lived there for 11 years)
and just about EVERYONE tries to make a living ... you know those plastics bags that every store gives u in US? in Ukraine you came with your own bags! or you bought plastic bags :-\ (you'd wash them, too)
college students re-sell Turkish made ripoffs on markets because after going to a uni, there isn't much hope for them to earn an honest/legal living ...
just my 2 bytes
US copyright law does not require actual damages in order to conclude that copyright infringment has occurred. Thus, in the instance where actual damages cannot be proven, the law allows for statutory damages as a possible remedy.
Whether or not an infringement of copyright helps or hurts the copyright holder is irrelevant as to whether their rights were violated, and thus able to recover under the law.
What?
It is ot Russia's fault that the computing became the global monopoly via the system of obfuscating drivers and cryptic OSs. It is very difficult to produce a program similar to Photoshop-$600, not because of the scientific chalange, but because everything was done to make it as complicated as possible. One more remark - I was born and lived in Russia for several decades. Now I live in the West. The food costs in Russia about 10 - 15 times cheaper than at the West. 240 USD is like 2000 USD in the West. I could go to the farmers' market in Russia and buy superb fresh potatos, apples, etc. for 20 bucks so much that I could hardly carry it out. Here I spend 100 just for two small paper bags in the supermarket and it is basically nothing to eat. In the world which becomes smaller and smaller there should be some standards. Unfortunately, the US standards, based on the anti-scientific Imperial system of measurments, is taking hold world-wide. Instead of the metric system we are to use the technological systems, which are build using feets, inches, miles, yards, stones, ounces, etc. This stuff just can not work in the modern systems. This is the reason of crashing sattelites, unsupported hardware, "unexpected" computers shutdowns, etc. And it is not Russia's fault. Russia uses the metric system. As for music - there is a lot of modern nice Russian music too. If at Russia one can hear on the radio French, German, English, Brasilian, etc. music, in the West it is only its own music on the radio. The foreign music is just not allowed. I do not know how it works, maybe via some secret organisations of "Skull and bones", which do exist, as we learned during this US presidential campaign. But it is the fact, one can never hear the song from Russia here. Never. Even though in the FSU it is the hit among half a billion people. Why shall buy Western music and films, if the West is not even interested in our culture?
1. I have yet to see a _legal_ foreign origins CD anywhere around here (except MS Windows Home Edition). If they don't want to (properly) sell them here they are better not to complain that people "pirate" them. Also - very few people have international credit cards to pay over Internet.
2. Average salary is a bit of a myth. Hardware costs are higher here than in the "civilized" world but every household has a computer (those who want) and it's probably pretty pepped up.
3. And yes - those russian companies that sell software (1C and stuff) have an ok business around here. I guess MS is also well in the black.
4. Localization! If Autodesk makes a half-assed russian version of AutoCAD they better not expect people rushing to buy it when bootleg localizations are of better quality.
5. Same about music - you do realize that songs in English for most people here are not quite as cool as they are for those who can understand lyrics. Would you buy Hindu songs at the same price?
And anyway - what was the point of posting this article?
So the music industry doesn't make money off of Russia, where people are still desperately poor. So?
/disposable/ income -- the income people feel free to spend. And many countries, Russia included, have almost zero disposable income.
First, there is no way to stop this piracy until Russia has enough money that the average person has disposable income.
Second, I'm tired of dual standards, where western countries crack down on 'pirating' when the sale price is based on western incomes. Even if you changed it to fit local incomes, it's not enough. It needs to reflect
And you would have them give that up to people in the west? Does the music industry, people like Britney Spears, and the software industry, people like Bill Gates, really need Vladya's two rubles after food and rent?
There are many non-mainstream authors in Russia. They are making their CDs, that often are home-burnt, and selling them. This 'undergound' music is priced about 1.5 to 3 times more than bootleg records, but all money goes directly to the authors.
People are buying these discs - no problems with the price. Probably they just do not want to pay for the nasty advertising and stupid shows ?
In US extra $$ paid to the music recording label is not a problem, but in Russia it is.
Another fact is that NO ONE of those independent records has ever been pirated.
Yet copy right law at heart is not about the protection of the creator. it is about protecting an environment in which people will seek to create. The protection of money making rights is simply the carrot that makes this viable.
Music industries are recording record profits, by direct implication the artists tied to those records should also be seeing record profits. Smaller indy lables in particular are seeing much greater gains in profits.
In the end the letter of the law with regards to digital piracy is indeed being broken no ifs ands or buts. However the spirit of copyright protection is not, in fact it is very very far from being broken. There is no lack of incentive for people who make music to produce it which is the creative value in the process. However there is a direct threat to the distribution mechanisim which has grown up around that process. It is not the function of copyright protection to protect the record industries business model.
If the only way you view a situation is that the law says it is illegal in a very strict constructionist view then it is a circular argument where because the law exists it is right and to break it is wrong.
In order for laws to change there must be conflict. This conflict either comes from as yet unregulated/unacounted for areas or from the failure to follow the law as it is laid down. We are now seeing a situation where current law simply does not deal in a reasonable way with the reality of digital communications. It will sort itself in time. So long as the law and enforcement remains so out of step with reality black markets will exist. Pretty simple Economics when you get down to it.
I don't ask you to be me. I only ask you not expect me to be you.
I had been using iTunes for a couple of months, and I must have dropped about 60$ in a couple of months, which is a lot of money for me as I basically never buy CDs.
I actually really like iTunes because (to me) the price is reasonable, there is a fairly decent selection and the interface is very nice.
The main problem I had with iTunes is that they didn't have any Beatles songs and there were some Beatles songs I really wanted.
Enter allofmp3.com:
(1) They have ALL the Beatles albums ever released.
(2) You can download in any format you like with no DRM.
(3) $0.01 per megabyte.
(4) You can download a FULL preview of the song (at lower bitrate) and keep it indefinitely. This made me realize that 30 second clips are crap. You can't really tell if you like a song you haven't heard before after listening to it once for 30 seconds.
The downsides:
(1) The interface is kinda clunky. Functional, but thats about it.
(2) You have to give your credit card to shady Russians. That made me a bit uneasy, but so far its been cool.
In short, well worth checking out.
I always find it interesting that if you don't follow the party line and say it's the copyright law's fault and intellectual property should be free you get a zero mod. This is about getting something for nothing. It really is that simple. Deal with, you're just looking for an excuse for taking something you want without paying for it. Zero modding should be reserved for off topic not because you want to kill the messenger. I have never once heard anyone point out a reasonable model for producing film/music/software and giving it away for free. There's a small amount of software and such being produced for free but it represents a small percentage of what people use every day. The material you wish to pirate comes from somewhere and those people deserve to be paid for their work. If you don't want to pay then don't listen to the music or use the software or watch the film. For software use only open source free software, for music listen to the radio and for films watch broadcast TV or get cable. Trust me there are alternatives and those alternatives are reasonable and involve people being paid for their work. Mod away, you only prove my point.
You're just a slightly more pretentious variation of the regular 'I don't own a tv' snob.
et al: an abbreviation for et alia, "and the rest" or "and the others"
et tu: "... and you?" A reference to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, expressing Caesar's dismay at seeing a close friend among his murderers. I'm unsure how historically truthful this is, though, or indeed what its relevance is to Slashdot.
Pretty simple Economics when you get down to it.
No wonder you're so wrong. You rely on economics to explain the law.
This situation is actually quite cool because legal companies have to compete with pirates and because of that I can buy, for example, LEGAL Far Cry copy just for about 8$(222 RUR).c hstring=far+cry if you don't believe me.
See http://www.ozon.ru/?context=soft_search_list&sear
A well paid software techie may get up to $1000 per month but many earn much less ($400 or so). $2/CD is about right for them.
See my journal, I write things there
in soviet russia artists bootlegs you
Well, by 'actual damages' really what is meant is damages and profits of the infringer. But even if you can prove down to the penny how much that is, you can still opt for statutory damages. It's not a backup provision. Pretty commonplace, really.
You're right about the other bit, though.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I lived the past two years in Ukraine, and it's the same thing there. I remember one of my Ukrainian school friends once complaining that her Photoshop CD got broken... darn, she was going to have to go spend another 5 dollars on a new one. She wasn't one of those $240/month people, either.
I don't think I ever saw legal foreign music being sold there, in fact. Often CD's from local groups were legal, but those are much cheaper than legal american or other foreign ones (about on par with what they were selling the copied foreign ones for... a dollar or two.)
Be a PATRIOT--because the only thing we have to fear is the lack thereof.
Mod parent up. What are you waiting for? A better expression of this classic humanist argument you won't find.
I'm not sure what portion of a DVD's cost goes to cover promotion, but 50% of the cost of a CD does. So $10 of that $20 CD you might have just bought will go to cover things like apperances on MTV's TRL, appearances, radio play and other forms of advertising, which are usually handled by the record labels.
Here's why I don't like that argument.
Go into any Best Buy, walk one hundred feet forward and about thirty to the left. Now spit.
What CD did you hit? Chances are that CD was not on TRL. Chances are that CD was not even on the radio. Yet there it is, costing as much (or more) than a Britnety Spears or Elton John (not saying anything about quality here, just degree of fame) CD.
So, what the hell is that? A lot of CD's have pretty much no promotion to speak of yet cost the same as something where the promotion costs millions of dollars. All I can think of is that each one of those unnamed $15 CD's is supporting a monster, a terrible monster that consumes all it can.
Hey Russians - go fot it!!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
How much do you think AllOfMP3.com counters your argument?
Not saying there's a winner, just saying it's not as clear as you make it out to be. Personally I'd put them about dead-even, with Chinese organized crime having more of an expereince advantage.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The thing I find most amusing about the effort to stop piracy is this.
The entertainment industry spends millions upon millions upon billions of dollars just trying to figure out what sells well. Omnipresent advertising saying how good something is, cover art designed by teams of marketing experts and run through focus groups. Music designed and tailored to appeal to people at the most fundamental levels.
Now you take this product that companies have literally spent millions on in an effort to make it the most desirable thing on the planet. You take that same item, and put it in the middle of a population and price it so 90% of the people are not going to be able to afford it.
Then you are surprised when all of the effort you put into making the product irresistible actually works? Even people with scruples have a breaking point, where they just throw them away. The products are designed to break you down and make you do something you were not planning on in the first place - it is all too easy for the human mind to turn that impulse to taking instead of a purchase, especially so if the purchase is not a practical option anyway.
That's why iTunes works so well. It's a great channel for that impulse to be satisfied fairly cheaply (for a US or UK citizen). But in Russia, they'd have to price stuff at, well, AllOfMp3.com levels. And that might even work except I have to imagine that the percentage of people with decent internet connections is somewhat low. So street vendors and a whole industry springs up to take up the slack and cater to the impulses that the media companies worked so hard to induce.
Now THAT to me is funny.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Goto their concert, its not like any band will get much money by sales of cd's, the bulk of the money goes into the pockets of the labels and resellers anyways.
'In a country where the average monthly salary is about $240, buying the latest album for $15 is a grotesque luxury, let alone spending $600 on Adobe Photoshop or a similar computer program.'
Copyright infringement is still the wrong answer because it doesn't solve the fundamental problem: that music and software are overpriced. In fact, it makes the problem worse because it creates a dependency on overpriced goods.
Russians could create their own music and software and sell it more cheaply on the world market, benefitting everybody. Or, they could contribute to OSS projects and make them better, again helping everybody. If Photoshop costs $600 and the monthly salary is $240, that should be a big incentive, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to create good software (although Russia has a lot of those, too).
like you sugested they should, then yes, patents do matter. So I'll throw your arguement right back: If you're not going to respect patents, why respect copyright? Why even bother making your own software, sell what's already been made instead.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
'In a country where the average monthly salary is about $240, buying the latest album for $15 is a grotesque luxury, let alone spending $600 on Adobe Photoshop or a similar computer program.'
I have a friend in mainland China, who says that much the same situation is true there. It's always bewildered me that prices don't get adjusted for local economies even when they have local publishers and redistributors...
--Rachel
In soviet russia, works were banned. Now, welcome to capitalism. Works are used to extort cash. I'm guessing that the samsidat culture only makes pirating feel more natural. And the west didn't really oppose it either. How did we get our tetris programs and our Dr Zhivago movies again? Time to open up paint cans for anti-piracy propaganda posters.. where the big sicle will be replaced with the big "c".
Since I am working and living in China I am used to the huge amount of DVD piracy here.
We had some korean customers coming to the China office and over dinner we offered to take them to a good quality and very cheap pirate DVD store.
The two koreans looked at eachother and then one replied:
"Why buy DVDs when we can download for free ?"
I guess the piracy industry is getting killed by Kazaa and eMule these days.
I cannot see how this piracy market is not innovative. Being there myself, i bought "Super Mario Bros" for the Sega Megadrive (Genesis). Somebody ripped the graphics, wrote a new game for a console that was never allowed to play Mario and put it into a real cartdridge. This console was never allowed to play Mario. -- Granted it is not as playable as the "real" Mario, but the music is great, it has some new elements and you cannot jump on enemies.
There was also a Pokémon game for the Sega and many such things for the Gameboy Advance.
I'm not from Russia, but I am writing this in a pirated copy of Notepad, on pirated Windows XP, with pirated Microsoft Office, pirated Microsoft Visual Studio, and pirated Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, among other pirated programs, with a meter tall stack of, mostly pirated, music CDs aside, and another which includes a CD with the complete works of J. R. R. Tolkien, among 600MB of other pirated books. (As a sidenote, I have (pirated) SuSE on another partition; but I need MVS and my brother and sister don't like Linux so that's why I have Windows also.)
I don't see any of it as anything wrong. The software would be worth possibly thousands of euros if bought legally. But I don't have that money and even if I would have I could not afford to spend it on the software, so if I could not pirate it, I would not buy it. I have registered a few postcardware programs, bought a few original CDs from groups I like, and have paper versions of The Hobbit, LotR and Silmarilion; that is the limit of my pocket. I do not see how have I damaged anyone by making them loose money they would never have. On the other hand, I do see how would I damage myself, my contributions to some OSS projects, my future family, finally my entire nation by not using pirated software.
All of it is illegal, yes; so is crossing the street while the red light is on at 5 AM when there's no traffic in sight... illegal, but who's harmed?
It is strange to see that the usual RIAA-adepts/trolls/etc. do not come with the same defence they always do to explain to the uneducated, rebellious /.-crowd the unfairness of not being able to have what 'rightfully' belongs to them. Almost no post is now saying: "Copy-infringement is theft!" or "If you don't want to pay for it, don't buy it", etc.
I have the distinct feeling that this would have happend if the story was told in the USA or europe, instead of Russia. The fact it's in a country where the people are simply and obviously to poor to pay the exorbitant prices one asks for DVDs and certainly CDs, makes it the more obvious that they ARE in fact ridiculously high priced.
It's one thing to portray yourself as the victim being robbed, causing the musicians to starve to death when you actually have a chance of cleaning out that much money out of the pockets of people. But it's another thing when people are so poor you have no chance in hell to EVER get that kind of money from them, be it with slogans or threats. In those situations, where the whole debate is brought back to its basics, it becomes clear who are the actual thieves.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
What happened? I'm not very old, in fact I'm probably one of the younger members here being 18, but since when was music all about album sales and making money? I thought music was about making people happy, expressing your feelings and views. A recording doesn't have the same feeling behind it as it does when you goto see it live. What happened to music...to quote a band i really enjoy listening to:
"I hope this song starts a craze.
the kind of song that ignites the airwaves.
the kind of song that makes people glad
to be where they are,
with whoever they're there with."
-Brand New; Okay I Believe You ButMy Tommy Gun Don't
Where are these songs? Why aren't songs that are good, without the chopping and cutting and redoing of constant studio work,on the radio? Where are they at? I want them back, and im not paying 20 bucks to hear them. I'll spend $40-$100+ to see a band I like perform live, but I sure as hell aren't going to shell out 20 for the album, that contains one decent song on it.
I find that a somewhat strange statement. Are you really sure there's no-one in Russia contributing to (F)OSS? Given the quality of coders they have there (hardcore trained because they had to reverse engineer everything - cool stimulation through US embargos, btw) that would rather surprise me.
Anyone?
Insert
Before I say anything else, just let me say that I fully support the people on the $50-a-week sallaries here. It's not realistic to expect them to spend a quarter of their week's livelihood on a shiny coaster. It's just not... ...This is BS. And not just any kind of BS... We're talking the kind of BS that grows really good tomatoes. Irregardless of whatever justification you care to come up with for your actions, ripping CD's or pirating software entails taking intellectual property that doesn't belong to you and not compensating the creator or owner of the works for their efforts. This isn't to say I have any sort of contempt for or desire to stamp out the activity, I'd just like people to wise up to the truth on what they're doing. :P) and use the legal alternative provided to them. In the case Russia's music market, maybe something as simple as the record companies suppressing their egos a bit and lowering their 95-odd-percent premium on CD retail costs to something inline with what the person on the street can afford might just see an increase in sales. ... Launching an advertising blitzkrieg in a country where joe average doesn't give an airborne reproductive act about the BMG's and the Warner Music's is just plain pointless. Isn't it better to make *some* profit in a region than none?
That aside... I've always found it amusing to listen to all the various justifications people come up with for copyright violation:
"I don't like to $30 for an album with 2 good songs"
"It's not stealing because the original remains intact"
"I only try before I buy"
The odd person might buy a CD after downloading songs, and yes alot of people do now use legal digital music alternatives now they're available, but the reality is that 99 out of 100 people who pirate media will never pay for it in any way, shape or form.
Taking that into account however, I do understand the plight of the russian people. It's not reasonable to expect them to pay the same costs as the American with the SUV and the 3 bedroom house. It's human nature to weigh an object's true value against its cost. If it wasn't, then why would so many people around the world download millions of songs every week through P2P with the same legal regard they show for jaywalking?
In the instance of reducing piracy, the buck stops with a company. If vendors had one iota of common sense they would price their products in different regions based on the mean salary of the average peasant on the street. Itunes is a perfect example of this; provide people with a service they want at a sensible price with options they ask for, and a large percentage of people will be receptive to the idea (obviously itunes itself may not be feasible in a country like russia with its telecommunications infrastructure, but I digress
One of my favourite albums is Friday night in San Francisco. Acoustic guitar trio. John, Paco et Al.
I remember when CD was a new, still rather marginal thing in the shadow of the vinyl disc. Because of lower manufacturing costs of the CD, lower prices were promised, as soon as CD market starts up.
Price of LP was around 10EUR around then, and CDs cost 16-18EUR. (Prices weren't exactly like that, as the value of the currency changed after that quite many times, but you'll get figure.)
Nowdays CDs cost around 20-25EUR, and one doesn't even get the fancy covers the vinyls had. Where are the promises of the affordable price? Why the music industry doesn't even try to aim for affordable consumer price, and settles to spend into expensive technology to "stop" piracy instead of selling the music at the price where people wouldn't bother pirating?
What comes to music overall - radio stations play the hit songs over and over again. After two weeks of constant playing, I've already gotten fed up with these hit songs, and I definately will not buy the record anymore. Combined, the high price of music and constant radio coverage on new albums, has driven me to avoid music. I rather listen to human voice, talking.
Legit, but unethical. Does anyone remember ETHICS?
I'd like to remind you of a somewhat archaic message from long ago. "Thou shou not steal."
Ok, so you're paying for it (albeit pennies on the dollar). But you obviously know it's stolen merchandise you're buying.
I'll see you in hell. I'll be the one passing out free condoms.
It's not illegal because I don't WANT it to be illegal!
My other first post is car post.
I've never been able to fathom how shallow, repetitive, and, well, stupid popular music/television/etc. is (or, more precisely, how people can make mega-millions off such crap while intelligent music is ignored by most).
On a related note, I have become a big classical music fan in recent years. I would love to see something like "Gnu-Classics", a compilation of recordings of the classical (broadly defined) repertoire where permission is explicitly granted to allow unlimited copying and sharing.
Copyright?
:-)
Bah, guess who invented all that neat stuff like nuclear power, the plane, the jet-plane, the rocket, the car, the computer, video-games and so on?
Correct, germans
Give us patents and copyrights on that stuff back which you took away after some calamity some time ago and in exchange you may keep the patents on the german inventions "communism", "massmedia-propaganda", "genocide" and "nationalsociasm". George makes better use of them anyway. Oh, and you may keep those hard to empty tubes for toothpaste too.
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
I'm not sure, but I think that's down to the shops. If it sits on the shelf for months on end, they need to charge more for it than things that they turn over quickly, because at the end of the day they can only keep so many CDs in stock, and that floor space costs money.
Of course, it's all wrong. Here in the UK there's a smallish chain of shops called Fopp whose USP is that they always have hundreds of great albums for five or seven pounds. So you go in and you buy half a dozen CDs you didn't know you wanted, and they're the very same CDs that are gathering dust in the Virgin Megastore up the road.
And the beauty of this is that it's self-perpetuating - you buy a CD just to see if it's any good, and because it's so cheap it's no big deal if it's not. You find you like it, you go back and buy that artist or label's entire back catalogue. Fopp's worse than a crack dealer, basically.
First, the United States has not signed all the Geneva Conventions.
Second, the Geneva Conventions are in some ways absolutely absurd. For instance, prisoners are supposed to be guaranteed athletic uniforms. In a lot of ways the Geneva Conventions are a reflection of a 1920s notion of how gentlemen ought to act to each other in a state of peace; they do not speak very much to the modern state of the world or to the modern state of war. Let's not forget that Geneva was drafted in the post-WW2 period by diplomats whose military experience and notions of 'the laws of war' were shaped by WW1.
Third, Geneva sees the world in strict black and white. For Geneva to apply, you must be either a civilian or a uniformed soldier in the service of a recognized government. If you're neither a civilian nor a uniformed soldier in the service of a recognized government, Geneva considers you to be a spy and entirely outside the protections of the Geneva accords.
So think about this: the detainees captured during combat operations in Afghanistan are not civilians. (Some may be, and we desperately need a legal process to determine who is a civilian and who is not; but I do not believe the majority of them are civilians.)
The Taliban were not the recognized government of Afghanistan. Only one country in the world recognized their government as being legitimate, and anyone who suggests that the opinion of a generalissimo dictator (i.e., Pakistan's Musharraf) lends credibility to the Taliban-as-government idea has no credibility at all.
Thus, no Taliban fighter could be considered a soldier under the Geneva Conventions. Even if the Taliban were a recognized government, they'd still fail because they didn't have uniforms. (A pedantic point? Sure. But that's law for you; law is nothing more than the rigorous application of pedantism.)
Not only that, but the Taliban committed gross breaches of the laws of armed combat. They mixed in with civilians; they militarized noncombatant areas; they targeted medical personnel; they engaged in military operations against civilian targets. Under the Geneva Accords, they can be summarily executed for this without judicial process. After all, they're not in uniform, not in the service of a government, and not civilians--they're spies. Kill 'em without trials. It's legal.
So when you start talking about Geneva, start thinking long and hard. Do you really want us to treat them in strict accordance with Geneva? Or do you want us to treat them in accordance with some nebulous 'standard' which far, far exceeds Geneva protections?
If you want Geneva, fine. But don't go about talking how awful it is that Bush isn't strictly adhering to Geneva without understanding just how horrible Geneva allows us to be. I'm no fan of Bush, but I have to give him this: he's not summarily executing people in Gitmo. And under the law, he's allowed to.
(Addendum: None of this is an argument to abandon Geneva. I'm only suggesting that we acknowledge Geneva's many shortcomings and understand what it actually says, not what we wish it to mean. If I had my way, NATO would agree on uniform standards for prisoners, both regular and irregulars, with severe penalties for violators. I don't trust the UN to form a new Geneva Convention, given that Geneva is fundamentally a human rights issue and Libya's the current chair of the UN Human Rights committee.)
Bootleg foreign music is huge here, too. Ever been to a flea market in California, or Canal Street in New York, or any city's Chinatown, or a shop that sells Indian wares... You'll see racks and racks of obviously bootlegged audio and video tapes, CDs and DVDs with homemade covers. I'm sure Bollywood's version of the MPAA isn't happy that their movies are pirated, but what are they going to do? They don't have jurisdiction here.
my password is private, but unchanged.
Most the current copyright machinery was created in the time of vinyl and audio casettes, where creating a hard copy was pricy or not possible at all for an average person. No wonder it does not work in the new technological reality, which is just last 2-3 years - not enough time for a schoolchild to become a lawyer even. This is why there is no sence in upkeeping the old law definitions, like a copy of music in the RAM - it will just not work, in Russia, in the USA, in Antarctis... The fairness has to be enforced by other methods, it is time to come up with fresh ideas.
(which takes plenty since you're probably spend thounsands of hours working around Adobe's patents)
People living in countries that don't recognize software patents have no need to work around them.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Did he just say "making fuck" ?
I'm a 2000 man.
Last I heard you could rent CD's in Japan though for 200 yen or so and they pretty much knew everyone was making a copy (either minidisc or CD-R). Do they still do that or is that over now too?
I've noticed from this side of the pond, that there are quite a few people who buy Japanese imports of American and British CD's because they will include the extra track or two that the domestic release doesn't have.
My other first post is car post.
"but because everything was done to make it as complicated as possible."
Theres nothing stopping russia creating its own applications and even OSs. Look at China.
"Unfortunately, the US standards, based on the anti-scientific Imperial system of measurments, is taking hold world-wide"
The reverse is true. Metric is worldwide and imperial is hanging on by its teeth in the UK and only used solely in the USA.
"if the West is not even interested in our culture?"
Its nothing to do with culture , its to do with market. The english language media market is so massive it doesn't need to import stuff from non english speaking countries. This is nothing against russia , you won't for example find many brazilian , nigerian, indian etc songs in the english speaking media either.
Du, Du hast, Du hast Mich .. uh .., 99 LuftBallons, und, balls to the wall, MAN !
So take back those commie-pinko words:
"...in the West it is only its own music on the radio. The foreign music is just not allowed."
Nena, shave those underarms ! :.
See this story http://www.mosnews.com/news/2004/07/26/kalashnikov .shtml for Russia's response to the issue of intellectual property piracy. It has some validity.
I'm proud to say that my Kalashnikov -- a Saiga-12 (semi-automatic, magazine-fed 12 gauge AK-47 shotgun) -- is the genuine article, made in Russia by Izhmash. So are the 8-round magazines I brought home from my last trip to Russia.
In Soviet Russia the SSLLLAAAAPPPP!!!!!
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated up.
In Soviet Russia, music pirates you!
In Russia, music bootlegs YOU!
Karma: none (due to not believing in reincarnation)
How does the Russian music business operate? Do Russian artists sell CDs through the same networks, or do they make their living from performances?
For unique content like movies and music, there isn't really equivalent competition. So free market competition doesn't really work in such a direct matter. It would if studios and music labels competed at that level but they don't. It hurts consumers and themselves but they don't seem to care if you go by the irrational attitudes exhibited by the MPAA and RIAA.
It is the same here in Serbia.An average pay is 100 EUR.A disc is 1,5 EUR.Who has the money to buy originals?!
P.S.Sorry for the bad English
Tony: Bart, um, is it wrong to steal a loaf of bread to feed your starving family?
Bart: No.
Tony: Well, suppose you got a large starving family. Is it wrong to steal a truckload of bread to feed them?
Bart: Uh uh.
Tony: And, what if your family don't like bread? They like... music?
Bart: I guess that's okay.
Tony: Now, what if instead of giving them away, you sold them at a price that was practically giving them away. Would that be a crime, Bart?
Bart: Hell, no!
~Warning!~ The above is encrypted using rot676!
You could make a CD in Russia from their service and bring it into the US since it would then be a tangible object and be legit. There is no difference here.
Not to mention, we have software "export" laws governing what crypto can go to other nations. By your argument, if I make that software available to someone in North Korea, I'm not exporting, I'm letting them reproduce.
I noticed your arguments on this way back in September and you were one of only two people arguing that this was illegal yet you were nearly HALF the posts. I have no idea why you feel SO strongly on the subject but considering KCTL radio switched to using AllofMp3 (site down, can't confirm) for their content, I don't see where you have a leg to stand on.
- gtaluvit (prnc. GOT-tuh-LUV-it)
The united states is going to have to realize there other parts of the world where people do not have money to do with as they please. The U.S. economy is going downhill and soon there will be nobody in any country that can spend money on anything but food and hookers - you know, just the neccesities. People will be glad Russia has music. viva la pirate.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
For the rapant piracy in Russia. The RIAA and the MPAA should, like, totally go after the Red Mob.
There was a microsoft guy giving us a presentation of MSDNAA at my local colledge in Sarajevo. Basically, you can have access to a lot of MS software for free. Newest Windows, Visual Studio, betas, etc for free (excluding MS Office + games). There is a simple procedure you'd have to take in order to get a CD (you provide one) with software (you even get a licence). After the MS guy told us all that, one guy asked "why all the hassle? Why shouldn't I buy the same cd on the street?" :))))))
I'd really appreciate it if one of the lawyers here could clarify something for me. Is it illegal to download music from dubious sources in the UK, USA and Canada (to pick three)? Notice I am not talking about sharing or uploading. And by dubious sources I mean Allofmp3.com (representing download services), Kazaa (Big P2P networks) and Soulseek (one to one sharing of hard drive directories). Or to put it another way, how likely are you to a) be illegal and b) get caught and prosecuted if all you do is leach.
I live in Turkey, which is in a similar position with Russia regarding piracy. Legal copies have come a long way though, and selling pirated music in a real store is unheard of - it's more of an under-the-counter thing now; with secret rooms, using radio to call for CDs from the storage room after you make your pick, or simple stands on the street.
What's interesting is that there is actually a lot of open source software that is being copied and sold - since broadband in Turkey is still quite poor, I buy Linux distros off the street if I'm bored and want to give it a shot again. FreeBSD, Debian, Fedora, Mandrake, anything. Lots of OpenOffice and collections that include The GIMP, too.
The police still destroy open-source software on the assumption that it's pirated and not Free, which is understandable since surrounding those CDs are hundreds of copies of Windows, Office, OS X, Photoshop, 3ds max etc.
I don't know how it is in the US, but perhaps it would help if open source software was sold for about $1-$.5 in large quantity at many places, of course with the obvious option that the store could actually copy and sell the software themselves?
Lived in russia (not Moscow or St Petersburg) now for just over 6 months.
:-)
/. are aware that music and games in the UK cost on average twice what they cost in the US.
I still havnt seen a single legal copy of anything apart from Night Watch (big Russian blockbuster film... totally strange plot but enjoyed it anyway).
When i buy games here (not really bought much music) they are usually on decent quality disks. Sometimes not, youve just got to learn which sellers to go to. Customer service is fantastic. You go up, ask for something. 90% of the time they do, or if they dont one of their mates will have it.. you should see them running around. Went and asked for UK version of X2: The threat. Guy ran around like crazy for 10 mins. Couldnt find it. Said come back tomorrow and the next day it was waiting for me. Most of the games/applications cost (in my city... cant say about moscow) between 60-160 roubles, which translates as roughly £1.20-3.20 or $2-5.5. This is an acceptable price for Russians. Read on one post that average salary is $240/month. I believe most people here are (officially) on less than that. Basic wage for a nurse here is around $50-$100/month. My mother-in-law as head of her department at the university is on $200/month. Of course everyone is on the take and generally supplement their incomes in various ways. The most obvious example is the road police. They will pull you for anything and everything. You can even get fined for having a dirty car or so ive heard. Anyway, they get a decent wage compared to many but the actual money they make is very good because you have a choice. Pay the official fine (and spend a day in a queue at the police headquarters - which is out on the edge of the city) or give them 50-100 roubles and go on your way. Obviously most people give the police money. Been pulled 3 times now. First was for parking in a no-parking zone (the no-parking signs are quite hard to spot sometimes... i think its deliberate). Was still new to russia and didnt understand they system and got robbed for 500 roubles. Next time was just a random passport/licence check, no fine. Next time they claimed i wasnt wearing a seatbelt. Now knowing how to behave i indignatly annouced that "... i am english... we always wear our seatbelts!!" And they let me go without a fine. The policeman still tried to get 10 roubles out of me but couldnt find a reason. Fortunatly i had washed the car recently
One thing to note is that the wife and I left the UK because we couldnt afford to live there. The cost of living is stupid. One of the richest countries in the world? My left bum cheek!! One of the most expensive more like. Both me and the wife had good jobs but by the end of each month we were scratching around for money. And dont even get me started on house prices. Because my wife is Russian and didnt have extended leave to remain they wouldnt take her income into consideration for a mortgage and on my wage alone (just to reiterate... it was a good wage) i could just about afford a one bedroom flat in a crappy part of town. At least here in Russia i have a good job which keeps our heads above water and a nice flat in the center of town. Ok, my car is a Lada but if youve drove on russian roads you will know if you have a foreign car the repair bills will kill you financially.
Ok, got slightly off topic there but back to the main point. Russian people cant afford full price CDs/DVDs. If piracy in russia was somehow obliterated it wouldnt help sales of originals one bit. Who could afford to buy them?
On the point about free trade (notice how companies are all for free trade when it benefits them, and run to the courts crying when they are big fat monopolies and rely on trade restrictions keeping their profits)... oops wandering again... If the company can afford to sell CDs for example $5 in China but charge $15 in the US then its blatantly obvious that they are ripping off those closer to home. Im sure that a lot of people on
Come the revoloution (what revoloution?) im sure the RIAA and MPAA will be the first against the wall....
Russian pirates are pushing music at prices the people can afford. With few other alternatives this becomes the standard way of doing business. This is the very reason when asked, the russian public sees it as normal. Everyone can spurt off about laws, copyright infringment or whatever else. That doesn't change that fact that these people can't afford to buy albums at the regular price. The truth is 15 dollars is alot of money for a music album period. Yes, there is Itunes, Aol, and whole host of other online music providers dishing out tracks 1 dollar each. Though the system they use is a bit misguided. There are 12 second skits that originally ran seemlessly in front or back of a song. Yet these cost a dollar as well because they have a track number. I guess that's just one of my personal gripes.
Russian vendors - software and musical, reacted by dropping the price. You can buy russian software or localized version of the game just about the same price as pirated one (3 or 4 pounds per CD). It will be CD only version, but it will be legal copy. You can buy box version but it will be much more expensive (20-25 pounds). Another thing - federals will really ride on you if they catch you selling pirated software from russian vendor. But if you sell pirated microsoft - only russian MS will care. When you think about this issue, take into account that piracy in Russia - stable main bussines, and legal software or musical CD - just emerging. P.S. 260$/month - salary in the city, province - half of it.
It is entirely and deliberately deceitful to compare the price of a luxury item to the average wage.
"30 meter yachts priced at 6m USD, in a country where the average wage is only 45k USD, are being pirated by bootleggers and sold for 10k USD! guess those anti-piracy coastguards just aren't working."
The distribution of income in Russia is highly uneven; low in the country, high in the city. If you lived in povery, you wouldn't be *buying* CDs. The Russians who buy CDs are affluent, can afford them and buy pirated material because it's cheaper and often more convenient, just like everyone else everywhere else in the world.
--
Toby
I guess we can all have some sympathy for the poor starving Russians who need to get their share of current movies and songs and what else, Rolex watches and Gucci handbags. Buyer and Seller are really inseperable parts of the piracy problem. If we could just bump off the RICH PIRATES [sellers, and people for whom we have little sympathy], since assination is fairly standard business practice in .ru, would we solve the problem? Hell no! Its the demand for stollen goods that makes them worth stealing in the first place.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
Here in the US, we've always held that it was okay to set your prices at "what the market will bear." Software, music, video etc is easily duplicated even with technological methods, and blows that whole theory out of the water. These things aren't food, clothing, shelter, medical attention, gasoline (etc), they aren't required to get by in life, and pricing them at the maximum the market will bear only encourages folks that can't "bear" the price--to steal it in the privacy of their own home and enjoy those luxuries for themselves.
The world according to SComps
That's why some companies respond to problems like this by releasing cheaper versions of their software.
Win XP start-up edition being one of them.
Once again thank you Microsoft.
They recently released a Queen's Greatest Hits album in Iran. Its one of the few American albums allowed to be released in Iran by Iran's fundamentalist government. LEGAL copies are being sold for $1. Why are we here in America and Russia getting stuck with $15 when Iran only has to pay $1?
... and in the DRM, bind them.
I live in Romania. the situation here is as close as rusia. Avarage sallary is WAY low.. in the lines of $100 - $150.. well there are extremly welthy people too but the avarage joe duznt make more then $150. I have no clue how MS expects to sell windows xp for $200 when a new top of the line vid card is at the same price wich would be a great replacement for my almost 2years old geforce4mx440 card, and a pirated winxp sp2 coroprate cd comes at as little as $1. Another problem is lack of software in stores.. the only piece of software you can get here is MS products.. windows xp/me/9x, office, and visual studio(costing in the lines of $1500 or somethin) what should we do? order outside the country? you mean next to software cost wich is this high we should chip in the transport, taxes - this presuming you'd have a way of paying internationaly. Regarding music.. i for one like psytrance. there's no way you can get any cd here. order from http://www.psyshop.com/ you tell me? well.. not any good either.. a cd's price is about $16 + transport it will get pretty high. well this presuming you can provide a form of paymant accepted my the site.. (most people here dont have international credit cards or cant use other serivces without paying alot) you guys are crying about $16 per cd? how about $25 or so wich is the price u probably get after all expenses. I have no doubt of the quality of the material in this case and i'd gladly pay it if i'd be able to afoard it. Some idiot was stating earlyer that if you dont wanna pay for the content dont get it. How about if you cant aford it? We should be deprived of all music/movies/software just coz we're not as rich as other people?
Don't copy that floppy!
h at _floppy/
http://www.bigkid.com.au/2004/08/18/dont_copy_t
but on the other hand, you have no right to expect that a starving person is not going to attempt something desperate and just quietly starve to death.
In a world without piracy, yes, some local band or software house could make a decent living by selling cheaper programs/CDs/whatever.
It doesn't even have to be a perfect substitute for, say, MS Office, it just has to do what you need without costing two months' salary. You'd be surprised how many features people can live without, if the alternative is starving for a few months.
Same as, say, with the Via C3. It's a slow CPU, and not even in MHz. It's also got lower IPC, making it basically a piss-poor alternative to either a P4 or Athlon. It also costs very little.
So when a dirt poor Chinese family wants to buy a computer, they could fork over half their yearly wage on a high end P4... or they could get a cheap C3. (Well, still expensive at Chinese salaries, but not something you blow your whole lifetime savings on.) So Via has a helluva lot of buyers in China.
What makes this work is that you can't pirate a CPU. You either buy it, or you have no computer at all.
The same _could_ work for software. If a Russian family can't pay 30$ for a computer game made in the USA, they could probably pay 3$ for a game made in Russia and with Russian programmers and Russian artists. Again, it doesn't even have to be up to Quake 3 standards, it just has to be enjoyable enough if you don't have a choice.
Except this potential market got killed by piracy before it even started. Noone will buy your home-brewn game for $4 when they can buy a pirated copy of Quake 3 for 1$.
So if you look at software development in those countries, there isn't much of it, other than stuff offshored by the USA and western Europe. The _only_ software produced, is paid for by a company (typically a western one), and never for domestic retail. _Noone_ there produces for their own domestic consumer market, because they can't compete with piracy.
That's a lot of jobs lost in Russia itself because of piracy.
And that doesn't only apply to Russia. Microsoft used to be officially happy if you pirate their software at home, at least until they got the market by the balls.
There were a lot of alternatives which _could_ have found a lucrative niche if piracy wasn't an option. If the only choices had been "do I buy MS Office for a lot of cash, or the less sophisticated ProductX for very little cash?" ProductX would have been a viable enough choice for a lot of people. But in practice, ProductX also had to compete with option 3: "or do I pirate MS Office for 0$." And there they failed.
Piracy is what in the end helped MS into being a monopoly. The fact that MS's proprietary, wantonly-changed file formats now pass for a de-facto standard, was helped a lot by piracy.
I keep getting Word and Excel forms all the time, even at home. Whenever I have to send something to the company I work for, e.g., a request for vacation, it _has_ to be in some idiotic Word or Excel. When the last company went bankrupt, even all job placement sites sent me... badly formatted Word forms.
And whenever you try to protest "but I don't fscking want to pay hundreds of bucks on MS Office just to fill your stupid forms", what's the answer you get? "Oh, geee, so copy it from somewhere already. Heck, here, I'll give you my CD."
If piracy wasn't an option, a lot more people would have been willing to tell their boss or their government where to shove those Word and Excel forms.
That's really the destructive effect of piracy. It doesn't kill the likes of Microsoft, which are actually helped by it. It kills the small companies, and in the case of Russia and China the domestic companies. And the likes of Russia and China are shooting themselves in the foot big time that way.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Right, because the statutory damages will probably in most cases end up being more than the actual damages.
What?
They have quality and reliability on their side...as the iTunes store has shown, it is possible to compete with free. Piracy is more of a response to price-gouging than an attack on them for charging anything at all.
Even if there is a legal technicality that distinguishes bootlegging from competition, remember that this is not true from the common person's perspective. Everyone hears music so much on the radio and in movies and from their friends, it really comes down to a price vs. hassle question of how to acquire it. I know for a fact that if the price were loweredo for cd sales or online downloads, I might consider paying for it before I just download it from someone.
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
My girlfriend bought a 2 disc set of every mp3 of Depeche Mode for almost nothing. The professional looking jacket and cds had multimedia content and looked great. She bought it in Poland. Music there is, from what I heard reall expensive. Now that she is here, she buys CDs of bands that she likes. I'm not sure what the cost of a CD is like all over Europe, but if it gets to the point where people can't afford digital content, they will resort to piracy if it is possible. It's not "right", but it will happen none the less. -un1xl0ser
v4sw6PU$hw6ln6pr4F$ck 4/6$ma3+6u7LNS$w2m4l7U$i2e4+7en6a2X h
All modern "progressive taxation" schemes are like that too, taxing the rich higher to support the poor.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
interesting... didn't think I used economics to explain the law. I used it to explain why there is rampant piracy. Big difference. Of course I would say that another area of economics is what has led to the law being so out of step with reality. The money and power that has come from the media industries control of a highly lucrative market has led to an out of whack level of influence on the system of law. Capitalisim and free markets are good things but they are not without their problems. The tendency for power to accumulate into less hands over time and the ability to squeeze the little guy out is one of its dirty secrets. Walmart is the poster child of this issue.
I don't ask you to be me. I only ask you not expect me to be you.
Wait a minute - if it's illegal to make a copy of the music even if that copy is only in RAM for playback, then doesn't that make playback of legit cds illegal in portable players with an anti-shock memory buffer ?
He has posted a good link, worthy to get attention!
I don't claim I know more than I know, and if you know you know more than I know, then by all means, let me know.
Companies are greedy, why the don't sell LOCALIZED versions at LOCALIZED prices.
Let the companies suffer in their stupidity.
Uh, 50 Cent is not Aryan--apologies to Mr. Goodwin and 50 Cent.
Anyway, I have a small number of bootleg CDs in my sizable collection (almost all movie OSTs) myself. Some of them, I got the legit version as soon as it came out as well. On one occasion, I deliberately passed up a 'box set' of Final Fantasy music that was offered for auction on eBay. As far as I know, the only legit title in that set was the Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001) OST -- the rest of the set was bootleg (likely Son May) because the price for the set was too low--proper import CDs from Japan run $25.00-$30.00 or more while Son May CDs and their ilk are around $10.00 apiece.
Sometime before that, I unknowingly got the GunBuster (1988) OST in Son May when I was rather new to anime at the time. I liked it so much, I was able to get a legit copy (at twice the price I must add) and show my support for Koohei Tanaka, the composer, who crafted a musical work in the same league as John William's Star Wars (1977 - 2005) music soundtracks.
Guess what--both versions sound identical.
This is what the record companies are up in arms about: "Who gives a sh!t about packaging--just lemme download the fvcking MP3s and burn 'em on a CD-R!" is the attitude of the day in this post-Napster music realm--look at all the P2P applications that are out there that are surely used almost solely to move infringed content around the internet....
As for me, I'd rather have the originals music CDs -- so I got pratically all of mine from eBay, the world's largest flea market/tag sale. Unfortunately, the CD creators did not get anything from me for these used CD sales. I would have bought them brand new whenever possible if the prices were more reasonable.
The record labels could easily make a mint if they had a Stateside version of allofmp3 with reasonable prices, music available by the song and the album it came on (if any), and ABSOLUTELY NO DRM! I'd like to build a legit MP3 'archive' of all my favorite tunes (that I can still remember) I used to hear years ago on MTV BEFORE they sh!tcanned Mark Goodman, Alan Hunter, Martha Quinn, Anita Blackwood, and the late J.J. Jackson and started to 'play' anything and everything but music videos!.... It'd cost me a small fortune to buy all the CDs used from eBay just to get the 1 or 2 tracks I want off each CD to build my archive.
"Ha, ha! Dream on!" sez the lables as they continue to release their copy-protected, mass-market pablum and plan out their latest round of lawsuits against infringing music downloaders.
One day, the tide of public sentimate will turn against them and they will effectively go out of business sitting on a gold mind that is their catalog of audio records that no one will buy from them at any price--the animosity against them is too great for sustainable commerce to take place....
For products that are selling and selling for a high price, piracy is a minor problem at most. The fact that they are selling for high margins is proof enough... if piracy were seriously hurting their bottom line, they'd be forced to cut the price to compete with it.
And in some cases, it may actually be a benefit. Why? Because the people who are most hurt by piracy are the people who would be selling to the pirates if the pirates couldn't buy "big name" products instead. The classic example is in software, where piracy of Microsoft Office helped killed competing word processors and spreadsheets.
It doesn't matter whether it's software, music, or any other product where the reproduction and distribution cost is negligable: So... it doesn't hurt any western musicians when Russians pirate their music. What it hurts is the Russian musicians for whom these CDs are unfair competition.
Look, the whole problem that the corporations (whether Music or Software) is that they see "piracy" as depriving them of revenue.
The argument is, that if I couldn't get a "pirate" copy, then I would fork out the full price for an "official" copy; that my choosing a "pirate" over an "official" copy deprives the copyright owner of revenue.
Of course, if I earn two thousand thalern a month, and can afford to spend twenty-five thalern on the new Britney album, but I choose to buy a "pirate" version for two-fifty, then the record company is right; I have deprived the delicious starlet of some revenue.
However, if I earn 2000 finbinks a month, and when the choice is between spending 1000 finbinks on the "original" or 25 on a "pirate" copy, then there is no real choice. I'm going to buy the "pirate" copy. Since there was no way I was going to buy the "original", even in the absence of the copy, then there is no loss of revenue for the delicious starlet.
Beef.
I live next door to Russia.
Several years ago the big labels came over here and made offers to the largest of the criminal underground who were producing pirate music discs.
Several friends are radio DJs, one of them working for a "pirate" distributor (keep in mind, that to these people these are legitimate businesses -- they still pay taxes and keep their noses clean.)
The Western labels told the "gangsters" that if they shut down the other pirates, they can have a monopoly on distribution. They destroyed a true "free market economy" and replaced it with an American/British system of closed distributorships.
As a result, people have died brutal, senseless deaths in the mad scramble to prove to the Western labels who deserved the right to the monopoly.
The end result has been to kill music sales. Simply nobody buys licensed discs. Not only that, but the selection of discs over here has dropped severely. It used to be that you could walk in to a "pirate" music shop and pick up Coil or Autechre, but all there is now is Britney, Back Street Boys, Eminem -- the lowest common denominator that would sell (since the masses aren't buying music, they're only selling what would be most popular.)
The one shining light is mp3.ru, and other similar sites which allow cheap "licensed" downloads (very popular over here). But also peer-to-peer apps are popular.
Interesting point: Russians don't have pirated software or music. It's either licensed, or it's unlicensed. They buy licensed if they require better quality, a warrantee, or technical support, but if they don't need that they'll just get the unlicensed version.
"This is totally insecure, but very convenient."
In fact it is believed that he said the Greek words, "Kai su, teknon?" (And you, my son?)
English is easier said than done.
like: In Soviet Russia copyright owns YOU! Where is /. heading to?
There's no secret conspiracy to keep foreign music off US radio: it's a public conspiracy, an "open secret", something "everyone knows". Basically, the way for a record label to get airtime for a track is to pay for it. Oh, it's not as straightforward as the '60s-era Payola, they call it "promotions" as if the money was going to advertising and marketing efforts, but it goes straight into the radio station's pockets and the "advertisement" is the song itself.
It's not just foreign music that gets left out, it's a lot of great local music that doesn't have a big label behind it. And in the end it's the artists that pay for it, because that promotional budget is treated as an advance against royalties... eventually, they'll get some of that back from the BMI and ASCAP payments by the radio stations, but commercial radio in the US is basically a 24/7 advertising channel whether you think what you're listening to is an ad or not.
Publishers simply must lean to live with supply and demand every other producer of anything does. Publishers need to understand they are NOT SPECIAL. If they are goning to charge more then there is demand for the product people won't buy the supply. They will do without or steal it(now I think IP in modern society is major BS and the law should say its inpossible to steal it but...) Its supposed to be a free market. We hold free trade to be a good idea. So their choices are lower the price enough to take the insentive away to pirate it in Russia, effectively lowering the price in the US as well, since we can reimport it, therefore sacrificing the profit margin in the US, or stop selling to Russia because they can't afford to pay, and lose that profit but stop the piracy, or deal with the situation as it is, but I suspect that things will change and they can't count on IP law protecting them forever.
Then there is the region codeing concept with DVDs that I wonder if we tried a few cases could not get the *IAA to shoot themselves in the foot over it. INAL but it seems to me there are trying a two way street thing again. We can legaly buy somethig from overseas, somehting is not illegal unless the law says it is and in this case our free trade treaties mostly explicitly state it is leagal. The region codeing is done on the specific media, not the data. If I downloaded a "prirated" work they would argue that the work was the product not the media it was delivered on and I stole the work. That means the media has only an extreemly minimal value of its own. Then the *IAAs deals with manufactures and each other to control the availibility or only hardware to play certain media, and certain formats of the media in a given region amounts to coluding and price fixing of the data!
The law is the law, and should be followed, or changed not simply broken unless its done in organized protest for the perpose of changeing the law. So its wrong for someone to just pirate a bunch of movies off the internet, but a National Pirate some IP day would fine with me, as it would be a protest.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
...by brancing out into songs and movie talent too!
Piracy in Russia sucks, but not because of what you think. It sucks because it encourages f*ing filthy disgusting moronic western pop culture stuff, which otherwise wouldn't be so rampant in russia. Make a cd 100 bucks, put folks in jail for piracy, do it guys, noone should be able in russia to get the damned shit. I hope it will be this way in russia. all crazy american crap will be copyrighted, and almost impossible to get hold of, and for normal things which are culture, and not ms windows, there will be no copyright. copyright is the most fucked-up thing in the world, and if you don't get it - I'm sorry for you, lads.
What makes the line in Julius Caesar sort of funny is that it, in an English play, is a Latin paraphrase of something likely originally stated in Greek.
since when is oil a copyrightable work?
Oil can be extracted using a patented process. Doesn't the United States have parallel import restrictions on patented goods as well?
It's focus groups, I tell, you, that destroyed any hope of the band getting their choice of cover art for Smell The Glove.
:-)
And while iTunes is all appley and so forth, it's still charging CD prices for compressed DRMed audio. Which I don't want. Not that I'm an iTunesable area
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
You are arguing that there are two choices: army==geneva==rights vs !army==!geneva==!rights. This is untrue.
Taking an example from your own text, you argue that they can't be considered soldiers, but at the same time arguing that they 'militarized' an area. Surely only an army can militarize an area? This is where the lie is revealed: you wish to treat them as an army in order to turn them into spies, but refuse to where it would turn them into PoWs.
There is a description for people who are not in a recognised military and still do bad things with guns. We call them criminals. This is where your and Bush's argument really starts to be offensive: they are arrested, but not given either their Geneva or Miranda rights.
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
Please. That's a dead-on analysis of the problem.
BUT..
It only applies to software. The same logic doesn't work for music, because every piece of music is different. There are no two pieces of music that relate to each other the same way OpenOffice and MSOffice do.
what are you going to do about food for the 2 or 3 years it takes to get competitive with the nearly 'free' Adobe Photoshop cds?
Step 1: Get GIMP usable and localized. If the pirates can localize Photoshop Elements, then they can localize GIMP even further.
Give back your /. id, you don't belong here.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
You think you have freedom? HAHAHAHAHA, right. You have the freedom to do EXACTLY what your government TELLS you to do. You're the worlds greatest lovers of freedom, yet you have 5% of the world population, and 25% of the worlds prison population? Thats freedom alright.
In WWII the Jews had freedom as well, free to live in Ghettos, free to be slave labour, free to get shipped to camps, free to give their businesses to other people, free to be slaughtered in horrific numbers.
Face it, you were free, at one point. Today you are free to do what your government tells you to do. I always thought the definition of free was the right to do what you want to do.
There's nothing wrong with piracy accept for the name "piracy" ....
Preface: At the beginning of the industrial revolution (USA), many bright and well educated people believed that it's entire meaning and purpose was to leverage inventions like the cotton gin to expand their plantations for unlimited growth and profit - they were dead wrong. Today, in the information age, there those who believe that the entire meaning and purpose of the information age is to leverage technologies like the Internet to expand their copyright controls to the ends of the earth. They are also dead wrong, their greed has blinded them to the facts, and they must be stopped at all costs. Like always, they tout their prosperity, impose false (property) rights, and declare fradulent incentives. And like always, their arguments are worthless, evil, and must be challenged....
A Bitter Protest Against Copyrights
If someone said there was no incentive to grow potatoes unless they could rip up your yard and plant some, or there was no incentive to say good things unless can control your speech - most people would see these for the worthless values that they are. But if it was said that there is no incentive to make beneficial or creative works without the right to restrict what people copy (copyrights), then all of a sudden people just take it on faith. They don't even question it, they just assume that society would fall apart without them. But the Renaissance happened without copyrights, so why can't the information age?
Incentive does not a right make, and calling copyrights "intellectual property" is intellectually dishonest. While the moral and historical foundation of property derives from physical limits and mutual respect, the foundation of copyrights derives from kings who granted publishers monopolies in return for not publishing bad things about the monarchy. So rather than being an equivalence relationship, copyrights are more like a form of censorship. In fact, copyright monopolies cheapen property rights by treating things that have natural limits in supply such as food, shelter, and medicine like information that does not.
Worse, is how people who copy are slandered with names such as thief and pirate, as if copying was akin to boarding a ship and murdering people. They are even accused of stealing food out of the mouths of starving artists. However, these verbal assaults hide a cruel lie, the one that says - "copyrights benefit creative people". Well, the truth is that for every artist or writer that has made it big, there are literally unmentioned thousands who copyrights haven't helped a bit, hindered, or even destroyed. For most creators free copying simply increases the share for their personal demand. But with copyrights, some are even bared or sued from sharing their own creations in public. Others die with the world never truly knowing their artistic genius as the mass media drowns them out. Rather than helping the creative, copyrights destroy them, and deceive them while doing it.
However, these aren't the only problems associated with copyrights. They are just a sample of many that are constantly blown off, glossed over, or ignored. Like the failures of Hollywood culture, the failures of big media to provide quality material, the failures to provide reasonably priced books to college students while tabloids are dirt cheap, and massive anti-trust behavior in the software industry to name a few. And then these very same industries ask, well "how will we make money without copyrights?" Like a disingenuous thief asking "how will I feed my children without old ladies to mug?"
The problems associated with copyrights might have been bearable a quarter century ago when the biggest issue was copy machines. But today, in the information age, information is so easy to copy and manipulate that there can be no middle ground. Our society will either have to control all of it or none of it. Our communications will either have to be monitored or free,
Like iTunes Music Store, Allofmp3.com at least claims to have a license from the copyright owners to reproduce the songs on your machine.
I'll sell you a legitimate copy the GIMP for $600 if you ever change your mind.
Depends on the extras you plan to include. How big is the clip art library? What kind of support contract? Does it come with color space management plug-ins? Does it integrate a port of a vector illustration program (e.g. Skencil) or a diagram program (e.g. Dia)? If you manage to improve GIMP enough to be worth $600 for a site copy, I can think of a lot of small businesses that would buy into your offer.
People in Russia have armed militia groups on the streets with a lack of respect for law and people that makes Al Capone look like an infant. We all now from the recent terrorist attacks how much concern their government shows for the well-being of the anonymous taxpayer (http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/europe/09/07/putin. us/).
They torture, rape, and subject to famine and diseases the troops who should help re-establish order even as we speak. (http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2004/s1224628.ht m, http://www.mosnews.com/news/2004/04/27/armysuicide .shtml).
You think MUSIC PIRACY is a what concerns the average citizen out there?? On their scale, such trivial discussions are laughable.
Actually, ADSL is available in a lot of cities in Russia. Novgorod, Rostov, Krasnodar, Stavropol - that only those I know for sure. I bet Novosibirsk, being the "Capital of Siberia" and a big scientific canter, has it as well. This market in Russia grows extremely fast today, just like the cell phone market.
I cant believe the number of *AA shills on this site, I guess we are seeing the true toll of all of the lawsuits filed lately. What did the RIAA get a hold of a /. member list? CD's are selling in Russia for what the market will bear in Russia, unfortuately the American corporations will not provide these CD's for what the Russian market will bear. Hence the people will pirate music, movies, whatever so that they can get what they want at a price they can afford. Maybe if US corps were a little less interested in 90%+ profit margins and a little more concerned with providing their customers with what they want, piracy would be a non issue.
I was born and raised in Russia, so I just can't pass this hogwash.
1. While I agree that it's easy to find legal "mainstream" music, I couldn't care less about mainstream. I listen to the stuff considered exotic even here in the US. Try to find something like this legally in Russia, especially shortly after an album comes out. This is the stuff that's only a couple of mouse clicks away in the US. Also, CDs are usually either close or well above $20, which is way too much even in the US.
2. Broadband. Yeah, for $24 there you get a whopping 1GB of traffic per month and pay for every megabyte on top of that. Plus, you have to pay for the equipment as well. And this is only in Moscow. No wonder iTunes type businesses are having a hard time taking off.
3. Pulse dialing. Depends on the company and where you live. In most cases a call to change from pulse to tone dialing will only cause a roaring laugh on the other end.
4. Contrary to what the guy says, you can be just as well connected in a small town. My brother in southern Russia had a 128kbps ISDN line with 1GB traffic limit for a little over $15 a month.
It's politically correct, not to mention popular, to disparage religion and propagate assorted stereotypes, while anyone less than 100% accepting of homosexual politics is excoriated as a bigot. For all your ethics and principles, you sure have trouble comprehending "irony" or "hypocrisy."
Well, the value at trial will be.
As in all cases, there remains the significant issue of 'does he have that much money' since you can't get what he doesn't have, and 'can I practically enforce this judgment' since that's always a bit thorny, and 'will bankruptcy reduce the recoverable damages' which is a matter of some debate, last I heard.
Always gotta keep track of how much money you'll have in hand at the end. A judgment for money damages isn't good enough by itself.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
The original Kalashnikov model was designed, amazingly enough, by a Russian engineer by the name of Mikhail Kalashnikov.
It was called "Avtomat Kalashnikova 1947", meaning something like "Kalashnikov's Gun 1947". It was shortened to AK-47. Kalashnikov models since then have different numbers, but they are all still known in the U.S. as AK-47.
If you sell something for a price that is too much people won't buy it.
People will buy from your competition. And make no mistake, people who burn and resell unauthorized copies are a form of competition.
"Contrary to popular belief, music and software aren't essentials to life."
Not true. many companies expect you to be able to do work at home. In most cases that means a computers and the appropriate software. I know people have been turned down for work and promotion when it was found out thay could 'only' work from the office.
This also happens in poorer nations.
So if it comes down to:
a)Buy software at full price, possible not eat and loose roof over your head
b)Buy software that is being distributed illegally for a reasonable price, and still get to eat.
c)Have no income.
Which would you choose?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
makes a lot more off her commercials and other avenues then music. At the end of the day, the person mixing the music may make more.
Now, I'm sure if someone like you was offere millions of dollars to be in a Coke ad, your morals would prevent you from taking such a fat check, but most people in the world would take it. The industry (both music and TV) is very hard. Espcially on women. It is hard work.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
BTW, surely political correctness means not disparaging anyone? How is disparaging religion PC?
I didn't say it was illegal to use in Russia, but it is here - there's another post somehere in this story that explains the details.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Imagine CD prices skyrocketing to $75 - $100.
Windows Home edition costing $600, MS Office - $2500 and Photoshop - $3000. Halo2 - $300.
Just because the record and software companies suddently feel that these are fair prices they are entitled to.
The iTunes store starts selling songs for $10 a piece.
You are still getting $35-45k/year, still payihng same rent and taxes.
Now, consider your new approach to buying/obtaining software and music.
Congratulations, you now understand how the Russians feel. Companies should stop bitching at a market which doesn't support their insanity and adapt instead. It's ok to find the cheapest place in the world to produce your gizmo but don't be surprised if the people who you pay $3/day don't shake out $15 to give you 1000% profit.
This is arrogance and ignorance at their highest.
In the case of IP-based products whith almost zero duplication/distribution costs, at some point the companies selling them start printing money. After the costs of [initial investment] + [support for x time] + [advertising/distribution] + [media and packaging produced for pennies in china] has been covered, the profit on the software is humongous.
How about a cap on the money-printing part of the profit, at least in places with lower standards of living? Like, making 300% profit instead of 10000%? (made-up numbers)
I believe that if Photoshop cost $60 in Russia, people who use it professionally would be buying it.
Yes, I moved to the US from an eastern block country. Yes, they have no respect for insanely priced IP products there. Yes, I am OK with it.
Cheers
-- andre
Copyright IS in the public interest. Cartels are not. The RIAA is a cartel. A "real" democracy would not allow it to exist.
By the way, here's a fun analogy. In 1995, two newspapers along with the FBI acquiesced to a terrorist demand and published the Unabomber's manifesto. Find the parallel.
If by "obliterating" you mean "slaughtering," that's a gross distortion of Christian fundamentalism. Sure, there is a 0.001 percent that believes non-Christians should die. They're called the KKK -- and every group has their own version, including the Muslims and the homosexuals, so chill with that shit.On the other hand, if by "obliterating" you mean "crushing your opponent's voice in the political process," you've accurately described the tactics of homosexual politics. Google for Rick Santorum and tell me I'm wrong, that homosexuals are mature, respectful people who truly value diversity of opinion -- as opposed to cowards who hide behind the First Amendment to protect their opinions while attempting to skewer their opponents.
15 to 20 dollars to see Madonna on the wrong end of an AK-47? ;)
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Although a good example, the collective will of the factory owners are not a democracy.
Since they are the primary holders of power and own the system of power they are in fact the government or government institution.
The correct analogy would be if the factory workers voted to have warm factories in the winter time.
Or better yet the consumers voted with the dollar to support the factory owner's ability to keep that power of ownership.
Secondly, the idea of copyright is not a part of democracy itself. A democratic nation can choose to have copyrights much as a Communist nation can declare all works of art as property of the state. It can be just as easy for a democracy to choose for itself not to have copyrights or outlaw works of art all together.
This also borders geo-political science in which in theory a democracy can have less freedoms by voting itself with restrictions on liberty vs a Elightened Despot who enforces radical new freedoms for his subjects (but is rarely the case since most despots tend to be not very enlightened and people living in democracies tend to like freedom rather than oppression).
Remember your history books....you know, the ones that you used to stand on in order to reach the cookie jar in the kitchen when you were a kid. Russia is the country that SHOT monopolists in wholesale numbers back in 1917 to 1989 and beyond. They could do so AGAIN! All they need is greedy capitalists to lay sanctions on poor Russian citizens or put a poor Russian girl in court in another country for the 'crime' of hearing a 'copyrighted...patented...trademarked...(the names are starting to read like an obcenity)' whatever. I wonder how many thousands or millions of young American or European boys and girls now growing up are willing to die in a war over this. That is what it is going to come to, basically. The industry invented a supposed 'crime' and gave it a historically heinous name, piracy. Copying a song for ones own use or listening to a time shifted television program is no more 'piracy' than having a hangnail. Last I heard, a major American store chain was accused of this for having a turnstile in its checkout lane....sued by Wal-Mart. Most of our foreign trade agreements are givebacks and subsidies to the Chinese slave labor merchants just in order to protect our media monopolists.
Media monopolists should read their history books about what happened to the Russian royal family in 1917 before trying to strong-arm Russia or its people. Remember also that without them, we would all be saluting with a stiff arm the idealogical children of men who put the parents of the controllers of much of today's media monopolies in gas chambers and death camps. Is this how we repay those who essentially gave there lives for us? Russia lost 20 million of her citizens in the Great Patriotic War. How many millions do YOU
want to lose?
Yakov
This comment is off-topic, and is a response to the Hodorkovski nonsense of the parent.
While your observations on the structure of the former USSR are correct, vis-a-vis people stealing from government, I do take objection to your (implied) criticism of Putin's behavior with respect to that slimy piece of shit (Hodorkovski).
Try to remember that Hodorkovski acted as a front for foreign capital invested in ``harvesting'' natural resources of the country. If you do not take the "Russia is evil because it's not bowed over to the West" stance, then you'll realize Hodorkovski was basically raping the country, and any people that worked for him. Hodorkovski was arrested for not paying taxes (which is true), but the larger issue was that he was an incredibly dangerous criminal that had an alarmingly firm control of a large section of the economy, and he was a puppet for interests outside of Russia. This is why they nailed his ass. In some sense, the taxes were a pretext (just like for Al Capone), but this way is at least more ``legitimate'' than shooting the bastard, which is what he really has coming.
Putin may not be a gift from heaven, but Hodorkovski is from that breed of traiterous shit from which spawned Gusinki, Yeltzin, Kuchma, etc..
Give people some perspective before unilaterally bashing Putin for doing something that should have been done much earlier.
One has to wonder at this point if Adobe had marketed Photoshop for, say half the price, if they wouldn't have realized more profit. Before I get modded down to troll sans economic/marketing degree, just think of the number of people in the U.S., let alone Russia that own a "fell off the back of a truck" copy of Photoshop. My point is PS is a highly demanded program and it's cost is surely a barrier to the average computer user. Given the average monthly salary in Russia, owning a legal copy of PS is not really an option.
/.
Now do the majority of people really need all the features of PS? Probably not, but with software, and maybe this is just me, it's nice to know if you wanted to you could. i.e. apply filter XYZ, burn the image, posterize, solarize, and whatever other unique features you might want to apply to your image. Often though a program costing 1/6 the price of PS would do just fine in most home settings.
If I'm wrong I'm sure someone will let me know. That's what's so great about
P.S. I don't own a copy of Photoshop. "Mr. Cumstien, this is the BSA, we understand you have a copy of..."
Et al? Wasn't that guy involved in stealing link commissions? Not that you can trust anything you read on slashdot, but still, I wouldn't listen to any of his music, that's for sure. Sneaky bastard.
tired of online ads?
why is the above at this moment rated as flamebait!, attacking copyrights in this forum is totally 100% appropiate.
17 September, 2001 China joins WTO, neat date huh?
One year earlier the U.S. Senate approved a bill granting permanent normal trade relations to China.
What a world, what a world.
You want your stuff to be sold in BestBuy? Be prepared to pay them for the shelf space. It costs some software publishers $100,000 just to get in the door.
ADSL is the only "broadband" option for the most of the city, beyond plain dialup. There are two ADSL companies in the city. They don't even cover all of the city, just most of it.
One-time non-refundable installation costs are about $200 with both of them, while the monthly payment tactic differs:
- ROL gives you unlimited traffic for $60/mo. I'd go this way, but they were stocked up with orders for months ahead in September, so I had to use their only competitor:
- Web Plus gives you 0.5GB of download traffic every month for $34/mo on the billing plan I chose. Any traffic beyond that is about $80 per GB. For the record, the bandwidth on my connection is 30KB/s downlink and 15KB/s uplink. I was also severely upsed by their dishonest advertising that nowhere mentions VAT until you get your first bill (at which point you're already locked into them).
Comparing to 10 Mbps LAN w/unlimited traffic I had in my dorm in a student willage in Norway for $15/mo, this is certainly a rob off. But this is what we have here.Tone dialing may or may be not available, depending on the time when your area's phone station was installed. In newer housing developments it's usually available on request, as well as a bunch of other phone services like redirection (yes pulse dialing is always the default, so not everybody may be aware of the options). Why would you need tone dialing, anyway? Pulse works just fine, thanks.
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
I don't think all of the CD's at Best Buy have to pay to get in, Best Buy needs to have a good selection as well.
I'm talking about the masses of CD's, many probably sitting there forever.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I do take objection to your (implied) criticism of Putin's behavior with respect to that slimy piece of shit (Hodorkovski) - you can take any objections you want, but the fact is that Putin has exceeded his mandate dealing with this guy. You are obviously trolling when you are saying how dangerous Hodorkovskiy was to the country. Au contraire, Hodorkovskiy was only dangerous to the government of that country and there is a huge difference between being dangerous to the people and to the government.
Obviously, as I can see, you are one of the many people who hate all of the rich Russian ellite simply because they did something that everyone else there wish they have done - given an opportunity (at the time legally, might I add) these people 'privatized' economic assets of the country. Do I believe it was right to allow this to happen? No, I do not. Do I think Hodorkovskiy is a criminal for doing it? No, absolutely not.
Putin is the lying slime, ex-KGB, piece of shit, who lies to his people. Who is more dangerous to that country? Hodorkovskiy commanding an oil company, or the president lying to the people every single waking moment, using his powers to destroy the economy, sending his people to die in senseless battles, not doing anything even remotely useful when the terrorists take kids in Beslan and only lying to his people about the magnitude of the problem, using his powers to toss the Constitution down the drain and masking it as taking care of the country?
But this is the president that people select, and he is a master of deciet and lying, he puts the covers over the eyes of the population, making them believe that it is always someone else who is responsible for their problems, be it Hodorkovskiy, be it Chechens, whoever. But this president is infallible and all the mistakes are made by everyone else and not this guy. All the crimes against the Constitution and the human rights are committed on his watch, but he is obviously not responsible for any of it.
Don't talk to me about the slime. I can see the slime. It's name is Putin. Sure sure, he is not the only one, but he is just another liter of slime in that slime bucket.
You can't handle the truth.
http://www.btbbt.com
China's bittorrent community is nothing short of massive.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Wouldn't free/open source software present the same problem? Do I purchase from vendor A for $100, vendor B for $10, or download the free alternative? Your argument would then seem to imply that FOSS is just as bad as piracy in killing innovation and small startups. Perhaps the flaws aren't with piracy, they're with copyright.
Hah! Having been to Russia and partook in their CD bazzars (held in front of a music store on a saturday, next to a cop shop, where I drunk vodka with metalhead teens). I'd have to say... DAMN THE MUSIC INDUSTRY! They sold recordings in Russia which
a) were not available at all in the states
b) out of print
c) compilations! (Led Zep 1&2)
Now, there is a market demand here for music. Mine! I could spend $30 to get NiN:Demos and Remixes or $2 in a Russian Bazaar. For one, I am tired of paying exorbitant CD prices for complete crap. And I'm tired of the total hogwash propagated by the music industry these days, driven by teenybopper inklings and 'what's cool' studies. On one hand, they deride mp3 swappers, on the other hand, they use the demographic data from IP addresses to push radio playlists! Hypocracy! MP3 is not original fidelity, even at 192kbps, the high end, where it achieves it's lackluster compression, gets totally thrashed. I say, let us download albums first, THEN pay the $15 if we like it enough. (or $1 a song...) but whatever, i'm only one voice, and i'm probably gonna be marked a flamer, cause i feel gay (and happy!) for getting this off my chest...
So let me get this straight: you (the US) declare that they are 'armed forces' (a term with no legal meaning) but not an 'army', declare war on them (justifiably, don't get me wrong), then declare that, as you have declared hostilities and invaded their country, you get to refuse them either geneva or miranda rights. Neat. Can you see why the US is currently viewed as a friend by so few nations across the world? Could you make a bigger mess of calming down the Middle East?
BTW, you're not Don Rumsfeld, are you?
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
No, the world recognized the Taliban as armed forces. The world also did not recognize the Taliban as an army. No matter what country you're in (unless it's Pakistan), your country declared them to be armed forces but not an army and not in the service of a government.
You keep on talking about Miranda as if it's some part of international law. Miranda does not mean what you think it means. Miranda applies solely to criminal law within the borders of the United States. It doesn't apply to civil law within the United States, and it has never been construed by any court, anywhere, anywhen, as applying to military operations.
If you're sincere in wanting to continue this discussion, please learn what Miranda is before continuing. If I see another wildly uninformed message from you, I'm going to assume that you're trolling.
I know exactly what Miranda is, and even why it is so named, and you're missing my point: not that they should be accorded US-style access to a lawyer etc, but that they must either be treated as criminals (hence the Miranda reference) or PoWs (Geneva). The US can't simply decide that they're neither and keep them imprisoned for as long as it likes without any charge, although it seems that that is what Bush et al have decided to do. If you do think it can, then kindly explain on what legal grounds it has the right...?
In other instances, the US decries imprisonment without charge, in this case it seems to think it's fine. This two-faced attitude is costing your country dearly in international relations - even the UK public doesn't support you on this one.
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
In your own words, leave that false dichotomy alone. They're not criminals, can't be criminals, because their actions are taking place far outside of US jurisdiction. (Hamid Karzai's government might correctly call them criminals, but the US doesn't get to do that.)
And since the Geneva Accords have made it expressly clear that the Taliban do not qualify, the Accords do not extend to them.
Which part of this are you failing to understand?
Why is it the United States is the bad guy here? Did we force the Taliban to be so offensive to the common decency of the world that only one country recognized their government? Did we force the Taliban to not organize into an army? Did we force the Taliban to conceal their arms, to attack from civilian enclaves, to dress in civilian clothes and mix into the population? Did we force the Taliban to violate the laws of armed combat?
So let me get this straight: we did none of the things which cause the Taliban to be considered outside the coverage of Geneva... and somehow, we're the bad guys.
I think you need to grow up.
As I intimated a couple of posts ago, the action in Afghanistan was entirely justified. As you may recall (on that occasion) a few other countries helped you...
No, my point is that you have since decided to behave as if you are allowed to make the rules up as you go along. That's why the US is becoming the bad guy in the opinion of the rest of the world.
What you don't seem to see, in your own words, is that if only armies have spies, and they weren't organised into an army, then they are not spies. They remain civilians, albeit armed (if you don't think that is a valid syllogism you might visit the south of your own country and attempt to have some rednecks declared spies).
So, as they are civilians, charge them with whatever crime you think they have committed. If you prefer to treat them as an army, give them their Geneva rights. What you simply can't do (and retain respect) is throw them in jail and refuse to charge them with anything - that's one of the things that illegal regimes do that we in the 'civilised' world are objecting to.
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.