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U.S. Joins Hollywood in War on Piracy
Section_Ei8ht writes to mention a Washington Post article about a new joint initiative between the U.S. government and the entertainment industry. The government will now be aiding efforts abroad to stop copyright infringement. They cite the recent Pirate Bay fiasco, as well as the problems Russia is having with the WTO as a result of their thriving IP black market. From the article: "The intellectual property industry and law enforcement officials estimate U.S. companies lose as much as $250 billion per year to Internet pirates, who swap digital copies of 'The DaVinci Code,' Chamillionaire's new album and the latest Grand Theft Auto video game for free."
In other words, This is smart for two reasons. One is that it is the US meddling in other nations' purely internal affairs. The other is that it is yet another war on an abstract idea. (joining the war on terror and the war on poverty and the war on some drugs, which that other guy forgot.)
Good news, you can't win against an idea, only against a group of people (terrorists, pirates, the poor?). And yes there are too many pirates to even think about "winning" against them. They probably make up more than 50% of the population, meaning that there's about a 50/50 chance that when we need to put someone in prison, or just sue them into the stone age, we'll be able to do so.
All we need now is a war on pr0n, and we'll have around 70% of the population as criminals. Then we turn power over to the Democrats, they can declare the Christian fundies that make up our voting base as McVeigh militia whackjobs, and we'll have absolute power over everybody.
Power corrupts. Absolute power is pretty cool.
Hopefully I was correct about all this, but the claims I have made above were made in many long-standing high-score comments in the last discussion about this subject, and not refuted, so hopefully peer review will have made me sound like I know what I'm talking about.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Eventually it was discovered
...
That God
Did not want us to be
All the same
This was
Bad News
For the Governments of The World
As it seemed contrary
To the doctrine of
Portion Controlled Servings
Mankind must be made more uniformly
If
The Future
Was going to work
Various ways were sought
To bind us all together
But, alas
Same-ness was unenforcable
It was about this time
That someone
Came up with the idea of
Total Criminalization
Based on the principle that
If we were All crooks
We could at least be uniform
To some degree
In the eyes of
The Law
Shrewdly our legislators calculated
That most people were
Too lazy to perform a
Real Crime
So new laws were manufactored
Making it possible for anyone
To violate them any time of the day or night,
And
Once we had all broken some kind of law
We'd all be in the same big happy club
Right up there with the President
The most excalted industrialists,
And the clerical big shots
Of all your favorite religions
Total Criminalization
Was the greatest idea of its time
And was vastly popular
Except with those people
Who didn't want to be crooks or outlaws,
So, of course, they had to be
Tricked Into It
Which is one of the reasons why
Music
Was eventually made
Illegal.
--Frank Zappa (from the booklet of Joe's Garage, Acts II & III - 1979)
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
Think about alcohol Prohibition. Before and after Prohibition, a majority of adult Americans drank alcohol at least occasionally. (Perhaps even during it, though we'll never know.) Yet the idea was popular enough to get passed via constitutional amendment, requiring the approval of two thirds of both houses of Congress AND all the state legislatures. Not that it wasn't stupid, it was *so* stupid that 13 years later it became the only amendment ever repealed.
Never underestimate the ability of the American electorate to be precisely that stupid.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
There's a huge difference between perceived loses & real loses.
They appear to be taking a page out BSA's book to reach such conclusions.
Using the entertainment industry's analogy, every P2P download represents a lost sale,
& it sounds & looks good to the average Politician!
Now if we use an example the flaw will become apparent.
Example: If Photoshop's latest version get's downloaded via P2P 100,000 times does
that mean they lost those sale's?
Answer: At $649 US a pop I very mush doubt it!
Being generous I'd guess only 1% to 2% of those 100,000 people would truly pay
$649 US for Photoshop if that was the only way they could get it.
I think it would be safe to say the true cost of Piracy isn't $250 billion, but closer to the
$2.5 to 5 billion mark anually.
In all likelyhood the U.S. government will spend more than that amount each year hence
forth in fighting Piracy, thanks to the lobby groups mystical figures.