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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."
This is dumb 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) Bad 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.
Philosophy.
...who swap digital copies of 'The DaVinci Code,' Chamillionaire's new album and the latest Grand Theft Auto video game for free
Gee, you should be PAYING THEM to download that crap. Eew.
I'd like to see a study that looks at if people that pirate software and other copyrighted materials would pay for them to begin with. I'd also like to see a study of the commercial gains from piracy. For instance, downloading an MP3 from a friend of a song. The downloader likes the song, so he buys the entire album from iTunes. He now kmow about the band and enjoy them and will likely purchase more. All I see are press releases from the record and movie industry claiming they "lost" money.
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.
These 3 products have a value of as much as $250 billion? Wow, these guys really are making too much money. Guess I better go download some more movies.
So first the government wants to ban the legal sales of Grand Theft Auto here in the US and now they want to ban the illegal download of Grand Theft Auto overseas? Are they for or against the game? Or do they just not want anyone to have it?
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
Ah, the democratic will of the people in action. At last the US government is listening to the cries of its people to punish those Swedish guys who make free stuff available and aren't breaking any local laws. Oh, wait...
It's unfortunate, but this is just more of the same.
But what are we going to do? Intervene more in the politics of other nations? Yeah they love that. We can go to war to get all our copies of Grand Theft Auto back (right before we ban them for being obscene).
Sooner or later India and China will have a larger say in global economics, and their positions on these topics will carry more weight. I wonder what things will be like when other countries don't bend so easily to the will of the U.S.
It sounds like they're going to be moving to the war on piracy. I expect we'll be carpet bombing Stockholm before the elections.
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.'"
I for one had never heard of "Chamillionaire" until this article. Why site these specific items? It's almost as if they WANT me to go download it! Which I won't because piracy is bad bad bad. Everyone knows Ninja's are where it's at these days.
I forsee the future, and it is bleak. What's next, Cory Sherman for President??
"Remember kids, when you download MP3's, you're downloading Com^H^H^HTerrorism."
-Some Bloke
Is there heaven? Is there Hell? Is that a Tuna Melt I smell?-Primus
Hollywood will be teaming with the government to bring you candidates who although short on substance and integrity, are guaranteed to have voter appeal and provide a vehicle to forward the Republican party platform.
...the figures for the "lost revenue" they pull out of their *sses gets larger and larger. I think the industry is goatseing itself there...
My sig is too lon
Comment removed based on user account deletion
is the industry giong to pay for our government to do this? oh wait, taxpayers will.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Politics is show business for ugly people.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
It looks like a reporter has a hard time distinguishing between legal jurisdictions. I doubt that the Swedes would have wasted time criminalizing something that was already illegal. This is a perfect example of the fuzzy thinking that most people bring to this (admittedly complex) issue.
The whole article sounded more like a RIAA/MPAA press release then anything resembling news.
The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer. - Edward R. Murrow
The US picks and chooses which of its laws it will enforce in other countries -- the general trend seems to be that if there is a belief that some US corporation can profit from the law being enforced, it will be; otherwise, the US government couldn't give a shit. Consider the laws here in the states (and recognized by several international groups) regarding chemical factories. Does the US start meddling with other countries when a US chemical company decides to open up a plant somewhere and blatantly breaks the laws it would be required to follow here in America? No. Labor laws? No. But turn it around,so that the company is producing its products here in the states and selling them overseas, and suddenly, the US is interested in enforcing American laws outside of America. Double standard?
Palm trees and 8
What's wrong with infringing on the sovereignty of other nations? Isn't that what empires are supposed to do?
"Just as a man could light his taper from an existing candle without diminishing the original flame, so, too, could he acquire an idea without diminishing the original source."
Thomas Jefferson is right but you, and pretty much everybody else misunderstands copyright when they quote him as you did here. His analogy basically gets it wrong, regardless of how poetic and insightful it may initially seem. Ideas are free to use and take as you like. Copyright doesn't stop this, never has, never will. What copyright protects is the expression of an idea in a tangible medium. What does this mean? Let's use the Da Vinci Code fiasco as an example (because it was mentioned in the summary). Three authors jointly wrote a book called Holy Blood Holy Grail where they established the theory that Jesus and Mary Magdalene sired a child and his bloodline is potentially still in existence today. That's the idea. These three authors expressed their idea in the form of a non-fictional historical account of the facts behind this theory. Dan Brown took the idea and wrote a fictional story around the premise. the subsequent court case against Dan Brown failed simply because his expression of the theory (idea) was vastly different from the HBHG historical account. It doesn't matter how unique an idea is, and the theory presented by HBHG is rather unique, the only protection one will receive is for the uniqueness of the expression once it's fixed in a tangible medium (book, music, play, sculpture, painting, etc.).
If they do as well as Iraq and their mission in finding Osama Bin Ladden - then Hollywood has nothing to worry about.
Mission accomplished!
Someone thinks that russian kids have 250 Billion dollars that they would spend on Hollywood creations? Even if their counts are close, those copies are floating around because they are (relatively) cost free. If Hollywood managed to obliterate every pirated copy of everything they created, they would not end up with one additional dollar. People do not have 250 billion extra dollars in their pockets. They will just never see another Hollywood movie and not care when one comes to thei movie theaters.
I bought 5 books last night, knowing fully well that I could easily get them online for free.
I haven't bought any music or movies in at least five years due to the greedy ****ing **AA - that and everything released has been a -2/10.
Make stuff worth having and we will probably buy it... or you can just sue grandma for downloading without a computer, that always works.
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.
Yup. Potential loss of extortion money always pisses the mob off.
How can I be downloading his album if I've never even heard of him?
The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. -Anais Nin
(Wikipedia's article on Piracy.)
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
Wow, I can't think of a more beautiful thing you stupid politicians could be doing.
I'm going to write a letter right now to you all telling you how wonderful an idea this is, to force other countries to adopt our laws so they can pay for entertainment,
Why don't we force them to wear gold stars and send infringers to death camps?
Honestly, with the amount of HIV, poverty, malaria, influenza, strife, famine, and general nastiness out there in the world, I'm glad my hard earned tax dollars are going to supposed a 3rd party that doesn't give a rat's ass on this, and is instead out to make money for itself to support a bloated and outdated business model.
And us Americans wonder why the rest of the world hates us.
The article repeats the falsehoods that The Pirate Bay and the AllOfMP3.com are illegal file sharing websites. One is a legal under Swedish law and is a torrent site that does not host any copyrighted material. The Russian site, AllofMP3.com sells mp3 tracks legally by a quirk of Russian copyright law. The reason the RIAA is pissed is for 2 reasons, the first is that the songs are sold cheaply to both Russians and foreigners who go to the site which screws with their regional price fixing system, and the other is that they are not collecting the royalties to which they are owed because of those who are supposedly representing foreign copyright holders in Russia pocket the money themselves or they simply choose not to make the effort to get their share from those entities. This also infringes on the RIAA's patented business model which is mostly based on cheating artists out of royalties. If the writer did even a scrap of research beyond the press releases from the RIAA then at the very least the word "allegedly" illegal file sharing might be used instead.
Think for a moment about this sentence. No not about the amount or how they arrived at it. Think about that sentence and and the saying, "you can't spend a penny twice".
That amount X is perhaps lost to the content owners BUT it is not somehow evaporating into thin air, that amount saved is being spend on other things.
So if the content industry gets the amount X then other industries will lose an amount X. Put simpler, that kid who has a allowance who just got a movie for free will now spend that money on his cellular phone, fast food, clothes etc etc.
It is the real problem with the content industry. They used to have to contend only with clothes for young kids pocket money. Now there is games and the phone to contend with. If you ever worked for a phone company you will know how many people get into trouble with their mobile phone bill. That is money they can't spend on music/movies/games. You can't pirate cell phone minutes but you can pirate content.
The industry world wide isn't being hurt by pirating, just the industries that are being pirated.
As to the amount, well you then have to simply ask, where the hell would the economy come up with a spare 250 billion dollars. Since that amount of money is unlikely to be stuffed behind the couch, even Bill Gates, the figure is meaningless. You may as well make it a gazillion for all the relevance.
If piracy was eleminated today the only thing that would happen is that you would see a shift in spending patterns. Perhaps the fashion industry needs to get in on the side of the pirates, cause if everyone has to pay for every bit of content they used to get for free, they will have a lot less money to spend on clothes.
The economy is not a infinite idea, there is X money and you can't just wish up an extra amount. That 250 billion just doesn't exist.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
We live in an age were every individual can have their own printing press.
Obviously we cannot have that much freedom. Information is dangerous for the masses.
Only the publishing/media companies know best.
To restore order, publishing should only be done by the big media companies.
The material should of course be screened by the Department of Homeland Security, to fight Terrorism.
120 years for copyright is not enough. 1000 years would be fair.
Restore something even better than the Stationers monopoly of 1557!!
Down with "Freedom of Press (Piracy)".
When Bush says that your war is on the side of good and right, you know that you're in trouble.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
As some political commentator once said, once the feds declare war on anything the cause is already lost. How is a "war on piracy" going to actually accomplish anything? All it will do is provide an arena for posturing and bribery^h^h^h^hlobbying.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
According to your logic, so is everyone who purchases the material. Her statement pertains only to creation of material. Also she wasn't talking just about IP, she was actually refering more towards the physical, for a man who has no ability to hunt, fish, or grow his own food will surely starve without the help of others. I can survive however without my downloads.
One thing I'm suprised no one has brought up, all my friends have said the same thing, if they charged a more reasonable price for music and didn't limit what we can do with it, we'd be more than happy to buy it. When you go to the store though and buy only 4 cds and it runs you 80 bucks and that was at Walmart, thats pretty damn steep. Now according to the RIAA ripping the discs and placing them on a file server makes you a pirate. Because I have all my cds there on my server so I can play them easily through winamp, I can also create an MP3 CD to play my music in my car. The reason I use MP3 cds, dont have to change discs as often, as well as the fact if I'm in a major accident, all my music survives on my server. I speak from experience on that line, I lost 50 CDs in a violent wreck because I hadn't burnt them onto CD-Rs yet. It would have cost me over 1000 bucks, but my friend had many of the same disks as me, so I copied the ones he had, I still have the damaged disks, but I use the copy I got from him... PIRACY according to them.
Now lets say you buy it off of I-Tunes. 99 cents a song. I haven't browsed much, but lets see here approximately 15 songs per album, 4 albumbs, 60 bucks. You saved 20 bucks, however its not in MP3 format, and to use it on anything other than an I-Pod and in I-Tunes takes serious work. Piracy is not just because we want something for free, at least not among my circle, its because they over charge, we already own it, and we believe that once we purchase it we have the right to listen to it however we want, we bought it.
Don't quote Ayn Rand thinking that makes you sound smart while at the same time trying to insult people. She happens to be one of my favorite authors. There is a reason this debate is so hot, because they are trying to blanket legit issues as piracy. I would suggest pulling your head out of that dark crack on your back side. Coward!
-PB_TPU_40 The trick to flying is to throw yourself at the ground and miss.
The Davinci Code? Puhleeze. Who would download that garbage? I only use bittorrent to download cheezy british scifi sitcoms from the 80s.
Lets see ... pirates v. politicians. Who has a larger army? Who has better technology? Its pretty funny to think about. Kind of like pissing against the tide, no?
I will create a sig when innovation restarts in the U.S.
The whole of Hollywood is about 10 Billion. Video games are about 10 billion, Porn is about 12 billion, Music is about 6 billion. While these figures are nothing to sneeze at (A billion is still about a thousand million!) It makes me wonder what idiot pulled the $250 billion number out of their Arsche.
(On a sidenote with all the attention being paid to "Celebrities" and how much press the whole of Hollywood gets: The payroll of Norfolk Southern is about half of all the revenues of the whole Holywood film industry. Puts things in perspective doesn't it?)
Hajo
Hajo Monogamy: Belief so strong that millions of people end perfectly good relationships in order to start a new one.
I worked in Mexico for about a year and I'm not sure if it's even possible to buy a legitimate version of software, music, or video. I'm sure you can somewhere but you'd have to look around whereas pirated versions are everywhere. I especially liked the modified sony PS2 with perhaps all availabe ps2 games pre-loaded into the console for only slightly more money than a legit machine ; )
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.
When the US government gets involved and demands favors, things get done. Take Pirate Bay, as an example. If you try going to http://thepiratebay.org/blog.php?id=29 you'll find - Oh wait a second, the US pulled some favors, had the site illegally taken down, and what - it's back? No fucking way!
;)
Notice what they're doing now. They're flaunting it - before they had cannballs fired from the ship at a Hollywood sign, today they're using an abstract phoenix in the shape of the pirate ship as their logo, and in the blog (see link above) they have offers from many in various servers to set up redundant hosts. The MPAA and RIAA cannot and will not win. They HAVE to come to grips with today's technology or face extinction. Whether or not they want to admit it, P2P and sales CAN coexist. Some folks use it as try-before-you-buy (I've done this, quite recently in fact), and the folks who won't buy, are likely not the target consumer anyway.
Personally, I often wait for movies to hit cable or DVD before I watch them (usually cable first and if I like it I buy the DVD), unless it's a movie I want to see in the highest possible resolution, then I'll go to the theater and hope they bothered to focus the projector. I am mainly part of the secondary market - the market that the MPAA fought tooth and nail against when they tried to block home video from becoming reality. I buy lots of DVDs (although admittedly not since the MPAA illegally caused thepiratebay.org to come down for all of three days), probably too many, but I rarely go to the theater because so few new movies are worth the hassle.
As an aside where politics is concerned, rather than just the MPAA's stupidity: Is it IP that will be the final straw and get people to say "enough is enough" and actually get out and VOTE, or run for office, or do whatever else it takes to institute change? Will the reality that Joe Sixpack's Hi-Def television will not display Hi-Def from legitimate content with HD-DVD or Blu-Ray but will display pirated content at full resolution make him realize that it is the politicians he put in power which enabled this sort of bullshit to happen? Don't mess with Joe Sixpack's television, because he gets pissy when the telly goes on the fritz, and I would not want to be the one responsible! It'll be the boston tea party of the new millennium, only it'll be HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs!
Actually, if it is IP which causes major changes for the better, it would be a pretty sad statement of today's society.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I'm starting to see a cannon battle of the US and the Pirate Party and it's bay.
But now The Pirate Party of the United States is emerging what could happen now?
http://www.pirate-party.us/
Might as well declare a war on human nature.
Because that is what enforcing music copyright is all about. The single reason why there are music pirates is because music has ALWAYS been free. Since the dawn of time, it has been free. Free to listen to. Free to create. Free to copy (when copying became possible). Free to share.
People have always shared music, and no one has ever thought they were criminals when they did it. ESPECIALLY not the publishing industry in the USA when they flagrantly spent decades ripping off sheet music from Europe, and printing it for local consumption. (Hello China! I'm Pot, are you kettle?)
See, this is the whole ball of wax right here: There's NOTHING WRONG with sharing music. There never has been, and there never will be. Fuck the law - the law is a TOTAL ass in this regard. When did musicians get the idea they should earn 20 Million a year? That's fucked.
Sharing music isn't "copyright infringement". It definitely isn't "piracy". (Piracy involves sailing, murder and grappling hooks). It's just Civil Disobedience. And it's great!
It is only in recent times that music has been deemed to be "property" (LOL - what a concept) and that it can be "stolen" (LOL! "Theft" removes the item from the owner. Ipso facto, sharing is not stealing, and it is not theft.) but the population has NEVER accepted these laws.
In general, copyright laws are acceptable to a population provided they are not affected by the law. Americans have been stupid to allow Congress to repeatedly rape the public domain of the vast majority of material that should be in it right now. Just why this has been allowed to happen, I am not sure. Nor do I really care: I live in New Zealand!
One day, the American public will quite literally, stand up and say "ENOUGH IS E-FUCKING-NOUGH! IF YOU CAN'T MAKE YOUR MONEY IN 7 YEARS - FUCK YOU!".
There's no reason why anything should be protected beyond 7 years.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
saying that "people who drive on the left side of the road are driving illegally." It's true in the U.S... but not everywhere.
It's not even true in all cases in the US. One-way streets spring immediately to mind.
At any rate, you're right to criticize the reporting; in fact the article would be grounds for both a civil lawsuit and a motion to dismiss the case. By omitting the term "alleged," the paper has criminalized the defendant and tainted potential jurors. Of course, they're not based in Sweden, so it may be difficult to argue damages, and more trouble than it's worth, but such reporting is reckless and violates the principle of objective journalism. It's impossible to remove all bias, of course, but wanton disregard for basic principles of journalism is a plague on the industry today.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
you don't... you all drive at snail 55 mph pace on the highway, hence, no need to pass ;D
Copyrights aren't to protect "cultural heritage", they're meant to give authors/artists/musicians etc an incentive to create works, as they will have a monopoly over the distribution rights for a limited time, and then be open to the public. The key part here is limited time, which Congress keeps extending every time Mickey Mouse verges on going into the public domain. IMO, these extensions violate both the letter and spirit of the Constitution, and should have been smacked down two or three exensions ago.
Much piracy happens because the media is there and it's easy to get. If all methods of copyright infringment ceased to exist, these industires would not see anything close to $250 billion a year. And in any case, as failure to gain is not a loss, the amount of money lost to piracy is zero. You can't lose what you never had in the first place.
And I wouldn't have gone for the "facism" angle. I would instead have pointed out that the government is supposed to be looking out for the welfare of the people, not corporations.
*looks at the Da Vinci Code box office*
:-(
:-/
Oooh, it cost $200 million to make, and just made $650 million in worldwide profits so far.
I feel so sorry for them.
You guys must stop downloading that movie right now!
You aid crippling the movie industry! Just look at where we are today!
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Since the war on drugs has made drugs cheap, pure and ubiquitous ...
One correction: pretended war on drugs ... thanks to what the saying "what does not kill you makes you stronger" kicks-in.
I think that real war of people agains politics will kill politics quite effectively in very short time. Same as real war on drugs would have killed drugs and real war on terror would kill terrorists.
Because we can't consider war on drugs being serious when for example even some US soldiers deployed to fight drugs are smugling drugs themselves. Or when some politicians get bribed by narco-mafia (because why would they bribe them if drugs were legal or nobody wanted those drugs?).
Of course real fight against drugs or terror is most probably not fought with guns and bombs but then, politicians braging about fightng this or that without guns would look ... well ... boring, less entertaining, ... :|
It looks like to me a lot of people just want fun (majority also with drugs) with a little bit of suffering (terror) mixed in. So the politicians (as any good vendor) just deliver to the peole what they want while trying to profit from that as much as bearable (bearable to those fun+terror loving customers).
What a nice world we're living in. :)
hany