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Tainted "Piracy" Statistics
newtley writes, "The music, movie, and software cartels claim 'piracy' is a Number One problem not only for themselves, but for the world as a whole and so successful are their continuing dis- and misinformation propaganda campaigns that they've been able to dragoon entire governments and police forces into acting as industry enforcers. But, says p2pnet, far from being at the top of the pile, movie and music piracy rank 16th and 20th, respectively, on a global index of illicit markets. (Software piracy ranks 7th.) And even those positions are subject to considerable doubt."
I think that says it all. Pirated music is just a slightly bigger problem than illegal fishing.
"No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes scripture." - Learned Hand
Did anyone notice that Pirated Web Videos is #5? Web videos include stolen background music, and stolen movies and TV content. I don't see where the line is between Web Videos and other pirated content, and whether certain money counts towards two issues at the same time.
And organizing Illicit Markets by value is a bit tainted: money is not always correlated with prevalence. Just look at small groups of CEOs earning millions of dollars: overall, they're asmall minority.
No matter what the arguments are from either side, the bottom line is that piracy of copyrighted works is still wrong and shameful.
The fact is pirates are enjoying the fruits of someone else's labor without compensating them for the price they are charging. There is no way that the piracy apologists can get around it, so they resort so stuff like this, and downplay any statistics they don't like.
Wrong is wrong, even if this doesn't rank on the top of the list of evils in the world. Stop trying to justify this illegal activity.
I forgot to add the topic-relevent bit.
Calling music piracy a major problem when society is full of stuff like quoted above is laughable.
Australian running a company that does C# / C++ / Java / SQL / Python / Mathematica
Intellectual monopoly laws create an enviornment of unprecendented disposable profit.
Couple that with a political system that demands bribery as a requirement to win and we have laws that are disproportionately strong for the industries' true importance in the economy.
If you think imaginary property and real property are the same, when does your house become public domain?
On the havocscope illicit markets list, Drug markets are measured alongside counterfeit products and pirated products.
The problem comes when figures for pirated & counterfeit products are from those industries, quotes of how much is lost... Now, somehow I doubt that the illicit marijuana industry value is based on how much that industry has lost. Considering that it is illegal in most countries.
So here we have two sets of figures - one which is basically "estimated loss on profit, based from industry" and the other is "estimated products sold".
Does anyone else see why this list isn't conclusive?
"Women are just like ninjas; They lie even when it is more convenient to tell the truth." ~ Unknown
I don't believe you truly understand the problems that counterfeit pharmaceuticals are causing - this goes far beyond some crook cheating a patient or someone sticking it to the 'rich pharmaceutical companies', but is a problem that creates disease pandemics and kills thousands.
To give you one example, counterfeit antimalarial drugs are a huge problem at the moment and are threatening the lives of hundreds of thousands in Southeast Asia and Africa. Often times the pharmacies themselves aren't aware that they're selling counterfeits - in fact the proliferation of counterfeits is so bad in some areas that a large pharmacy unknowingly sold 100,000 counterfeit antimalarials and in a separate incident the entire stock of one Burmese hospital was found to be counterfeit. Simply shopping at a distributor that's "insured and bonded against dispensing dangerous drugs, or knock-off ones" doesn't appear to be a realistic solution.
Simply testing whether the drug is a counterfeit is not necessarily a trustworthy precaution either. Due to the proliferation of counterfeit antimalarials, testing procedures were put into place. The counterfeiters got smart however, so they started to include low levels of the real drug in with their fakes. Now not only do we have drugs on the market that test as 'real' but don't provide enough of a dose to effectively treat patients, but these low levels of drug are rapidly creating drug-resistant malaria strains. Unless we're somehow able to stop this black market industry, soon we won't have any drugs left to treat malaria. How is this not murder of innocents for profit?
While you may think that stopping counterfeit pharmaceuticals is 'ridiculous' and that it's a 'non-violent', 'non-crime', I most certainly do not. It is ridiculous to think that the various States of the world are fighting these issues, most of them are non-crimes and in most cases not even violent crimes.
1 - The Second Amendment is a national legal instrument that plays no part in life outside of your borders. Many countries, for their own 9often valid) reasons, have chosen to either regulate or ban firearms, and your Second Amendment has nothing to do with their approach on the law. For those countries, firearm trafficking is a big problem - even if it isn't for you.
2 - The abrogation of all copyright laws is well and good for users of the intellectual property who believe that it's a good idea not to pay for anything that they can get away with. Just a few problems with that approach:
2.1 - The smaller the (paying) market, the larger the payment necessary to recompense for the cost of development, whether it's software, music, video or any other work of intennectual endeavour. Now, I know that many develop for the love of it, but for many others, this is their work, and the source of their livelihood. Will you, for the free property, pay to fead, heat and clothe the people who will from now on provide your entertainment but who now have no income? Get another job, you say! OK, so who now is making your software, your videos, your music? Because in the end, it's about money, and it has to be sourced from somewhere.
2.2 - It's all about free choice. You (and I) are free to pay or not to pay for someone else's intellectual capital, and if that someone else is willing to give it away for free, then well done, that fellow, thanks a lot, and all that. But if someone says "No, I want to sell this instead of give it away", then that is his or her right to do so, and taking it without payment is no less theft than stealing someone's car, or burgling someone's house. You may not like it, but the first time you have a home that you own taken over by squatters, you'll see the other side of this particular problem. In the mean time, believe me when I say that copyright, however poorly it currently serves us, is better than the alternative.
Cigarettes? Don't care!
Alcohol? Don't care
Fish poaching? DO care. The Japanese have just been caught out overfishing Blue Fin Tuna for the past 20 years or so, to the tune of many billions of dollars of this limited food stock. It's taken this long for the world to catch up with them, and they've just about fished out Blue Fin Tuna now. They are trying to do the same to the Whales, in the name of "scientific research", and if a large number of national governments can't satop them, what chance do you think that Green Peace or their ilk has?
Will those of you who think that you know what you are doing, get out of the way of those of us who know what we are doi
Wow. That is, at the same time, both ignorant and stupid. Well done!
1. You implicitly assume that addiction is related to genetics, and therefore by letting addicts die you are improving the gene-pool. Please provide some evidence of this.
2. You confuse stupidity with ignorance
3. You ignore a plethora of social factors involved in drug use
4. You ignore the negative effects that drug users have on society
5. You ignore the negative effects that the drug barons have on society (organised crime of other kinds).
The idea that 'people should be allowed to do what they want with their own body' is wrong. It's wrong because it's based on the premise that we don't owe anything to society. No matter how independant you might think you are, you still owe a huge debt to society, and its ancestry. Just going with the flow isn't good enough, and we have a responsibility to each other to ensure that people pull their weight.
That's one reason why I think 'libertarians' are wrong - they think all this is optional.
Dear governments of the world: We're concerned & we want to help you make the most out of your law enforcement dollar. We think we can help. Out of a list of 29 items, we the sane people of the planet will permit you to ignore the vast majority of these for the next few years -- 22 of them, in fact.
Furthermore, even though we're eliminating over 75% of the crimes on your action-item list, we are a generous bunch, so we'll only eliminate 50% of your budget. Given your newfound surplus (once you adjust, of course), we'd like you to apply the best possible strategy -- along with all of your remaining resources -- to making noteworthy progress against 7 high-priority items that actually impact citizens' lives on a day-to-day basis, in the order that they're listed below.
You'll notice we're taking a middle ground on the drug enforcement thing, putting some on the list & leaving others off. Well, that's what you get when you realize that the sane people of the world include liberals, conservatives, and libertarians. Our views may differ a bit on recreational chemical policy, so in this case we agreed to leave you to enforce the ones currently wreaking measurable societal damage, and let idiots do as they will on the rest. That list may change over the course of time.
# 8 - Human Trafficking
# 14 - Human Smuggling
# 25 - Small Arms Trafficking
# 9 - Amphetamines/Meth (we're really just sick of looking at ugly teeth)
# 6 - Counterfeit Pharmaceutical (I want my V!grr8 to do its job, dammit)
# 11 - Ecstasy
# 4 - Opium/Heroin
When these 7 are no longer a problem, please see us about permission to prosecute any of the others. We imagine that there will still be other, more pressing issues once you've solved the biggies above.
Pi Ran Out
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Then again, overfishing is one of the biggest environmental and political problems we have on this planet. There just isn't any effective legislation for international waters and disputed areas on the borders. Maybe music piracy is a bigger "economic problem" than illegal fishing, but that's just because the cost of music files and CDs are grossly inflated. When it comes to fish, the resources are limited and shrinking, but there seems no lack of kids growing up wanting to be pop stars because of music piracy.
Wait, surely this is an argument for legalising drugs? Criminals can profit from drug trafficking because its illicit nature allows them to have extremely high margins with none of the governmental oversight usually associated with the pharmaceutical business. If one could buy heroin or cocaine from the local chemist, organised crime gangs would be quickly priced out of the market by large pharma corporations. Doubtless there'd still be some money to be made from tax-dodging, but this would be a fraction of the market.
So the question is whether you believe that the disadvantages of legalising drug use outweighs the advantages of significantly reducing the profits of organised crime.
By that argument, suicide should be made illegal, since you're depriving society of your future contributions. Besides, paying back debts to society is exactly what taxes are for. If drug use increases our debt, then we should pay increased taxes; the high tax on cigarettes and alcohol is an obvious precedent.
Arguing that we shouldn't be able to do what we want with our own bodies, implies that our bodies are not entirely our property. I'm not sure I particularly like the idea of this.
Its horrid to punish someone for something they didn't do though. If I smoke myself into an oblivion then beat my wife, sure I should be punished. If I turn my baby into a crackhead to help it sleep at night, I should be punished. If I'm getting doped up all the time to the point that I can't support my family my children should be taken away by reason of neglect and I should be punished. If I like to smoke pot after work to calm myself down while I watch TV and munch on a bag of chips the government should fuck off.