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Piracy More Serious Than Bank Robbery?
An anonymous reader writes sends us to Ars Technica for a dissertation on how detached and manipulative the discussion about copyright is becoming. "NBC/Universal general counsel Rick Cotton suggests that society wastes entirely too much money policing crimes like burglary, fraud, and bank-robbing, when it should be doing something about piracy instead. 'Our law enforcement resources are seriously misaligned,' Cotton said. 'If you add up all the various kinds of property crimes in this country, everything from theft, to fraud, to burglary, bank-robbing, all of it, it costs the country $16 billion a year. But intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions [of dollars] a year.'" Ars points out how completely specious that "hundreds of billions" is.
You wouldn't steal a car would you?
...all the no-extra-overhead money we could be making! It's serious!
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
Intangible products lead to imaginary crime and virtual losses. Why would anyone expect to get real police men for that?
What the hell is this guy on?
I pirate an album and Britney Spears loses 2 dollars. A girl gets violently raped and her entire life is damaged and she may never recover. Which of these two things are more important?
I like muppets.
Don't try to convince a big American corporate guy that his quarterly bonus is less important than the life of the average American. They are completely out for themselves. This is a perfect example of why we can't trust corporations to do the right thing in this country. They are led by greedy, self-serving a-holes like this guy.
I don't doubt his claim of hundreds of billions. In fact, there's probably a hundred billion per month. That being said, I don't remember taking any mp3s or the odd copy of photoshop at gunpoint. Just because the owner of respective rights may be out of money doesn't mean they would get that money if the medium wasn't free. These people don't seem to remember that odd quirk about piracy. You get what you want to take at your leisure. You're not pressured by your bottom line. You're not pressured to think if it is a good purchase. You get it because you want it, and only because you want it. I've got many mp3s that I wouldn't be caught dead buying the album (or even the iTunes track) for purely because I don't think it is even worth the .99 per track. I didn't get that copy of photoshop because I thought it was an industry standard image manipulation software. I got it because it cost me an hour in download time. The exact same could be said if the company receives $100 or $500 in profit on that piece of software. There are different rules to piracy than those which piracy is measured.
There are many, many problems here. First of all, this guy seems to think that monetary damage is the only form of damage possible, but there are plenty of worthless trinkets that have meaning to people. Second of all, I have always thought that the idea that file sharing is costing record companies money is a bit dubious, since during the height of Kazaa, they were posting record breaking profits. The problem is that economists like to think that anything that WOULD have been a sale but wasn't is actually a loss -- but that is stupid in a world where you are selling data that can be copied instantly. It is especially stupid when the overwhelming majority of downloaders wouldn't have purchased the album anyway -- usually because they couldn't have possibly afforded to (consider the cost of buying 20GB of music).
Palm trees and 8
Is there any use of posting this article, kdawson? You already know the exact discussion that's going to happen. It's the same discussion that happens twice a day every other time we discuss piracy.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
Actually the figure is probably much too low, if one considers the abuse of patents as "intellectual property crime".
Some examples:
* The way patent offices globally have turned the patent system into a pyramid scheme for their friends, printing coupons that are not backed by any state bank and yet are used as collateral to secure huge credits.
* The shakedown of numerous small businesses and large customers for "patent violations" based on legal instruments created by a mafia-style clique of lawyers.
* The wide use of patent "licensing deals" to create cartels that would be illegal and criminal under normal competition law.
* The use of patent "licenses" to tax the use of technology by the public, even though very often the public subsidised the original research.
* The use of "intellectual property laws" (designed and paid for by content industries) to prevent content falling into the public domain.
* The use of said laws to create artificial barriers to free trade, so prices can be raised in specific geographic areas.
* The use of the global patent system to keep the costs of medicines artificially high (even at the cost of millions of deaths)
* The use of the global patent system to prevent free competition in many markets.
* The use of the global patent system to stop alternative energy technologies being developed.
* The use of patents to create conflict and litigation than enriches lawyers and specialists.
And on and on and on... the cost of "intellectual property crime" surely runs into the trillions...
Of course we're supposed to think that when corporations abuse the law, it's a different thing than when individuals do it. Corporations can buy laws, individuals usually can't.
My blog
Okay, here's an idea. From here on out, anytime you pirate something made by NBC Universal, you also get to sucker punch Rick Cotton in the face. Then he'd have a reason to whine about misappropriation of police resources.
LOL
Really? Is the time and effort put into creating entertainment, imaginary? If someone pirates entertainment, can all that be gotten back?
Ah, no wonder: a lawyer said it.
It's time for tort reform in this country; too many money-grubbing pigs are using a broken system to do things like channeling for the unborn to make cases in front of apparently easily manipulated people. All to the end of fattening their bank accounts.
We should do something about piracy.
Seriously though, this debate is getting tiresome and at the end of the day, I feel no more enlightment on the subject.
These people fail to see how stupid it is to scare the public with billion dollar figures. I frankly don't give a crap if company x lose a y dollars per year. My point is that if a company is struck by heavy use of piracy, then their business module is entirely misplaced. It could be too expensive, too difficult to purchase, only a tiny useful function out of many less useful ones, and many other factors that contribute to such outcome.
Take a music CD for example. It's expensive, impractical to purchase, often DRM:ed and includes maybe two, three or four songs that you like. This is why iTunes and other comparable services are slowly taking over that "lost" segment that chose piracy over unthoughtful music labels.
I don't believe that we are criminals by nature and I doubt that most of us prefer to "steal" rather than purchasing, but the companies have to find solutions very soon and adapt before piracy becomes a habit and not just an escape.
Last but not least, I am yet to see an anti-piracy statement that admits to the positive effects of pirating. After all, that's how many artists, movies and software developers gain a lot of attention. Do you think Photoshop would be widespread in Europe if there was no alternative to that idiotic $1,500 price tag? At least people pirate Photoshop instead of turning to the cheaper alternatives. And when have you heard Adobe admit to this?
Full Tilt
The article mentions burglary, fraud, and bank robbing. NOT RAPE. That said, the loss of personal assets should STILL be given more priority than the loss of a percentage of the massive profits that the software companies make. Especially since all software is sold with NO FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE in the EULA.
That means all software is inherently worthless and companies make a profit because you were stupid enough to buy it.
Start robbing banks, then you wouldn't need to copy CDs and movies, you could just buy them.
First thing you'd do when entering the bank would be to shout "are any of you copyright lawyers?", then proceed to shoot any of them in the legs. They'd soon start to realise that having the police deal with bank robberies is a far better idea than having them go and arrest college kids for downloading Metallica...
What a bunch of unethical twats...
"Until someone determines a half-way reliable method of calculating how many people did not pay for the product directly as a result of it being available for pirating, then the "losses" remain as some unknown value between (0 x $PRICE) and ($NUMBEROFPIRATECOPIES x $PRICE)."
Oh there's a "loss". It may not always be monetary, but it ends up making everyone suffer all the same.* Anyway there's nothing "imaginary" about copyright infringement being a crime.
*Piracy is an excellent example of short-term gain favored over long-term consequences.
Cost "the country" hundreds of billions. hmm. dont you mean the entertainment industry? way to conflate you interests with the public good. and way to vastly exagerate your own interests too.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
All software is sold with NO MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Therefore software is inherently worthless, and they make a profit because their customers were stupid enough to buy it.
In fact, I have a lot of them on my property. I assign an arbitary $10^99 value to each of those molecules. But look! Every day passers by breathe in some of those molecules. Therefor, I conclude that the police focus on investigating these unimaginable crimes!
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Handbags and Banks...
By referring to "costs us" implies that realized value (e.g. money) is lost by piracy.
Until a CD is actually sold, its value is only potential - none of it is realized; it is a promise of a return on investment.
On the other-hand property in my house, money in the bank holds real value - stealing it costs the economy that value - unlike "loosing the promise of a sale."
Hopefully someone can take this thinking further than I with a hang-over can.
-bms20
If someone copies a song, a movie, a piece of software or any other digital information which can be copied indefinetly without losing any quality then NOTHING IS LOST. Yes, perhaps someone would have been willing to buy a license to listen to a CD for personal consumption only and not for performance in a public place including, but not limited to, schools, prisons, oil rigs, etc. etc. etc. containing that information, but that is speculative, and is in no way a real physical thing. If someone robs a house, a bank, a store, or whatever then that is real stuff which has been lost by one party, and thus has a real, physical impact.
e ality-check is, the person who is gaining the information through illegal means is not the criminal, the person they got it FROM is the criminal. Now, this may be comparable to goods counterfeiting or something (but if the "fakes" are exactly identical to the "real" article, then is this a bad thing since the end-user gets the same thing? It isn't like money forgery since it doesn't involve creating fake agreements. License counterfeiting would be comparable, but the information held by the end-users in question is knowingly unlicensed.). Whatever it is compared to, it is NOT theft. That is such a terrible analogy it should be addressed as such whenever possible. If a good analogy is made then fine, I am not disputing the legality of copyright infringement, I am just saying that it cannot be compared to theft because copyright infringement multiplies assets, whilst theft shifts a fixed amount around, and thus the figures cannot be compared.
Basically what I'm saying is, projected earnings should in no way be counted as concrete assets. An accountant would get into serious trouble if she processed next years accounts using made up figures and said "Well, I made an educated guess that you will have this money next year.". If digital information truly has a cost, then people copying it should be applauded for increasing the country's economy (although at the same time having a dramatic effect on inflation), since the overall amount of wealth would be going up, rather than shifting from the victim of a crime to the criminal.
Just to show how messed up the whole system of building-on-previous-decisions-without-making-a-r
How about the banks reply to this saying "Of course bank robberies are a bigger problem than copyright infringement! We invest the money stored in our vaults to make more money, so whenever we are robbed we lose infinity billion dollars!". This is just another case of things being taken at face value completely out of context, in this case the law.
Sorry for the rant
Sorry what was that? I was just busy making a backup of my DVD of The Big Lebowski I bought last week so I could remove the "piracy is a crime" intro to the film. It's so annoying having to wait through 2 minutes of "don't copy this or else!!!!" crap, I want to drop the DVD in and watch the film straight away.
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
Piracy creates more losses than robbery, burglery that is true. And since more and more of the economies in the western world is dependant on copyright it's very important that it has high priority.
There are crimes where people gets hurt, like rape and murder that at all times must have highest priority of all.
Don't let the bushmaster hear 'bout this or we will have another "War" on our hands!!! Just add another division of grunts and parachute them in!! I give it 3 years before that "War" is lost too!!! war on terror war on drugs war on dood who copies Zero's and One's repeatedly in a somewhat random order
Hopefully, the jackass who argues that piracy is a greater crime than Robbery, gets robbed tomorrow (even pistol-whipped so he can get his head straightened out). Big business wants all the cops, all the time, to police their profits. After all, corporations and gov't are merely quid-pro-quo whorehouses sold to the highest bidder. When the gov't needs illegal wire-taps, Verizon and Sprint allow them secret rooms to listen in on calls. When Haliburton (and KBR) need more revenue, the gov't hands out no-bid contracts. When the gov't dislikes literature, Amazon and Wikipedia ban the book "America Deceived". We The People had our gov't (and our police) sold out from beneath us.
Final link (before Stark County District Library caves to pressure and drops the title):
America Deceived (book)
After all, they add nothing to the GDP - and actually detract a little from it.
I feel a bit sorry for this guy actually, he has been so brainwashed by "the market knows best" that he doesn't even have a moral fibre left in him - this is what happens if people commit absolutely to the "market religion" - all that matters is that the numbers know best and people are reduced to the role of consuming automatons. If the people don't consume enough then we will throw them in jail as a deterrent to others - buy our "stuff" or you will be in the same place.
The hundred of billions of dollars he cites is not only for MPAA/RIAA, but for all IP crimes; that includes all fake goods: watches, clothes, etc...
I hope my own government sits up and takes notice of this lawyer fellow. I hope they divert our limited policing resources away from these cheap, unimportant crimes (such as assault, bank robbery and fraud) and instead police piracy better.
In fact, if they do, I pledge to never, ever pirate anything from that point forward. Never.
Instead, I will get a gun. That'll be easier then, because there will be less focus on preventing unlicenced people from obtaining them. I probably wont pay for it, they're paying less attention to assault too, and the guy's a criminal - hell, he's selling me an unlicenced gun. So i'll rough him up a bit and just take it. Then, I happen to know a nice armoured truck I can rob when its full of bank money. Then, i'll buy some cd's from RIAA with my new fortune.
It's rare to get a worthy though from a hollywood action flick, but see if you remember this one. A person is smart, people are dumb.
This article just shows that a person can be dumb too.
Doublethink is basically the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both
It's precisely this kind of moronic idiocy that gives lawyers the reputation they've gained for complete braindeath and uninhibited parasitism on society.
Cotton should be disbarred for incompetence in council and incitement of litigious fraud.
Let's go back in time 100 years. It's 1897. Music of that time was different, granted. So was the technology to record and distribute it, but artists were paid for performing music. An artist became famous because they were good. If they were really good, people would help them out and let them record for a modest fee, but the sales would get the artist a majority of proceeds.
Eventually, music became something influential on a corporate level. Zoom forward to 1957, 50 years ago from today. Artists began trying to market themselves to "record companies" in stead of their audience. The record companies would fund up and coming artists, who were usually established acts already. The elusive "record contract" would be still geared to pay the artist a good sum of money, but the cut for the record companies was getting bigger. This is where it began to snowball.
Lets move to more recent times. Now we have record companies finding talentless bimbos and tryhard boybands to front this multi-billion dollar industry. Not only that, the record companies are taking most of the proceeds and the artist is forced to tour/mime in order to make the kind of cash that would have been available to them 50 years ago. Good artists who may not be the 'in' thing at the moment (as in, not pop/emo/rap) struggle to get a recording contract. Even when they eventually do, it's on the record companies terms. Desperate to get noticed, most new artists will sign anything just to become famous.
So now record companies are making ridiculous amounts of money off the consumer and kicking the artist to the kerb when they are no longer the 'in' thing. This is bad for music, and bad for the consumer.
So when I torrent the latest album from the artist I like, does that make me a criminal? Even if I go to their concerts, buy merchandise and do all I can to get them money knowing that the record companies don't get as much of a cut from touring? I think, if anything, I'm doing the right thing. It's a very Robin Hood mentality, but stealing from the record companies and giving to the musicians is the way I believe in.
I think if everyone else did what I do, music would be in a better place.
You moved your mouse. Please restart Windows for changes to take effect.
I propose we trial this, with burglary, fraud and robberies on network, music and movie execs to be ignored/filed for stats/legal purposes and bank robberies on their accounts to go happen with no resistance.
:)
And we allow them to go after as many pirates in say, New Zealand as they like
If the money/manpower now going after preventing, and prosecuting occurences of violent crime, were diverted to piracy, how much would violent crime increase?
And how loud, for how long, do you think the populace will scream to get their law enforcement back on crimes that actually harm them and their property?
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
It's a bogus argument.
First, the money lost in the type of piracy mentioned has subjective dollar figures attached to it. If I steal a song it doesn't mean that no one in the world will purchase the album that it came on. Very difficult to be accurate.
But the real issue when prioritizing crimes is what is the affect upon the human beings who is victimized?
Theft is apparent and easy to measure. Piracy against a Mega_Corp is vague at best. I don't think there is any real damage done to the people who work there below a certain level of piracy activity.
I had to look up 'specious'. New word for me!
I think that you have the right idea Rick! Piracy should get much more attention. The problem is that people are wasting too much of law enforcement's time by calling in these minor crimes and distracting them from the important stuff. Maybe you guys could start a campaign to educate the masses so they don't call in every bank robbery or theft. Then there'd be more resources available for catching the real criminals.
You are still going on that golf trip to europe next month and leaving the house empty, yes?
I particularly have a hard time defending the content producers when the pirates provide a better product - ignoring price. If I want a particular song, the music industry will sell me a CD with that song along with several others I don't want, or I can buy a fairly low quality digital copy, probably with DRM in a format I don't like. Pirates offer a variety of formats and quality levels, and you can play their versions on anything you want.
Movies aren't much different. You can buy a DVD, which can only be played legally in authorized devices, or you can download a heavily DRMed copy that - unless you have a media center PC - you're stuck playing on your computer monitor. Pirates offer a variety of quality levels, you can burn them to DVD's if you have the proper software, and play them on anything capable of playing them.
Like I said, I'm not a pirate. I have an older taste in music, so I get most of my CD's used for a couple of bucks. I rent movies and go to the theater on occasion. If the content industry starts offering the same quality of product the pirates offer, but they can't compete in price, then they will have my sympathy. But so long as the content industry refuses to match the pirates' level of quality, and keeping making specious claims like the ones in this article, they get no sympathy from me.
So show me how buying a copy ( they arent fake products, they are real products.. yet another marketing device ) watch for 1/10 the price, when i could not afford the full price one, costs the IP owner a single dime?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Why would anyone expect to get real police men for that?
Because the people who suffer most from "piracy" (sic) are the very wealthy (RIAA ringleaders and such). The police are there to serve the wealthy. Don't you have any sense of propriety?
Physical burglary tends to hit the lower and middle class the most, since they are easier to rob, and even when it does hit the rich it hits them for pennies compared to the huge virtual dollar signs that are never made manifest by those evil, evil file sharers. Most importantly, when burglars steal stuff from the lower classes they usually go out and spend what they steal, so the money keeps flowing upwards (as it should). No REAL harm done...unlike filesharing in which the upward flow is inhibited...THAT'S just not acceptable.
somehow a burgler breaking into my house worries me a lot more then say corprate fraud (let alone mention "piracy"), even if it costs me a lot less.
Hundreds of billions of dollars is the GDP of a good-sized US state. It is also roughly the size of the loss due to hurricane Katrina ( http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2005 /09/04/59145.htm ). Cotton seems to be suggesting that domestic piracy has the equivalent effect on the US economy as losing an entire state, or having to rebuild a major city.
Their intellectual property is vastly overvalued. Hell, let me slap some arbitrary value on the environment. Then I can make claims that crimes against the environment are in the TRILLIONS! Wow, that makes intellectual property violations look like peanuts! I guess we know where we'd better be putting our law enforcement.
Dear Mass Media Giants,
You effectively control our political apparatus through effective lobbying. Please leave our LAW ENFORCEMENT alone.
Sincerely,
The rest of us
This estimate kindly brought to you by the Carl Sagan Institute of Statistics.
A normal and sane anti-crime force would fight against those crimes which cause more damage to people's lives, everyday routines, people's safety and general trust in the outside world, like not being afraid to go out in the streets and let your children go out, not being afraid to leave home for a few hours just to find it broken in and everything taken, and so on. However "minuscule" the monetary value of the offenses mentioned in the article might be compared to "piracy" stealing issues, they are enormously more important. If these people can't or don't want to see this, they should be kicked out from their offices, and kicked out hard.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
I'd love to see real facts and figures on this that don't involve:
Counting legitimate backups as lost revenue.
Counting personal format, time and place shifting as lost revenue.
Counting damaged copies legitimately returned to the store as lost revenue.
Counting viewing by a family of X number of people as lost revenue of X-1 times the price of the media of lost revenue.
Counting ANY AND ALL activities that do NOT involve paying a fee for every single solitary time the content is viewed as lost revenue.
Counting THINKING about any activity other than paying a fee for every single solitary time the content is viewed as lost revenue.
Counting stuff they don't even own as lost revenue.
But then again. These are the media conglomerates. They've been lying to us all our lives. Why should they change now?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
If my $500 bicycle gets stolen, the police will reluctantly take a police report, but they will tell me that they ar actually not going to investigate. They simply don't have the resources to do it and they would spend more to recover it than the price of the item. So sorry, but foget it...
I can't imagine how the FBI could spend resources for a $25 DVD.
The most ridiculous part is the proposed punishment. Let's assume Blow Joe gets cought copying for himself the world's best, most valuble movie ever made to mankind. He is ssent to trial and sent to jail for 2 years. The cost of getting him cought, the cost of the trial and then keeping him in jail would be quite astronomical, compared to the actual demage. Multiply this with the alleged number of theft and thiefs: you would bankrupt the country, or tax payers would have to pay at least as much as the budget for education.
It's nonsense.
You know, the biggest ripoff of all has got to be ever extending copyright. Everytime recorded media is about to loose it's "protection" the industry buys an extention from congress. Movies and music that were made with copyright protection of 25 years is still protected 100 years later. Each time the industry does this, they rob the public of what the public was due when the material was produced. When copyright is extended beyond average life spans, the public domain is never enriched with relevant material.
A more insidious issue is one of cultural control. It's not even done because studios think the old material is a revenue maker, they are afraid of competition that can take away their control. The older material could compete for mindshare and it carries it's message with it. That message can be jarring to someone locked inside the broadcast monopoly box, and that disturbance is the start of independent thought. It does not happen when all of the messages you get are consistent. Broadened taste is something industry and government abhor. Concentrated production can't keep up with real popular taste and government can't control distributed production.
This has already happened, to a small extent with net flicks and to a larger extent for those willing to risk punishment for file swapping. Netflicks circulation numbers show that people will take choices when offered. Something goofey, like 90%, of their titles are in circulation at any given time - people want it all, not just the blockbusters.
A free market for movies and music will emerge, but the broadcast monopolies are doing everything they can to thwart it. Physical distribution can't really keep up and electronic distribution will end their monopoly. Anyone can put a movie on the internet. This is why Disney would rather you not download Steamboat Willy and why all the studios are desperate to end network neutrality. YouTube is killing them. Not because people are watching their old crap, because people are watching what they want.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
> So show me how buying a copy ( they arent fake products, they are real products.. yet another marketing device ) watch for 1/10 the price, when i could not afford the full price one, costs the IP owner a single dime? I am not going to "show" you anything, sorry. And I agree with you. I am just pointing out that the guy talked about "IP crimes" while the Ars article was only talking about MPAA and RIAA.
Copyright and "Intellectual Property" especially is imaginary: you lose nothing concrete when your "rights" under copyright are lost.
...
When your plumber fixes your pan, you don't pay for each flush because you benefit from that transaction in the future: you pay once and then it's over.
your WORK is real but IP is imaginary. Try and find the king of "Intellectual"
.... is not worse than bank robbery.
What the hell is going on with the mentality of authorities, law makers, and marketing departments?
Are they degenerating into STUPID?
When you rob a bank you remove value, not a copy of it.
Its a well known practice the act of sharing content in order to promote, market the content, by the company producing and/or marketing it.
If piracy is worse than bank robbery then are such company contributors in the marketing department guilty too? An accessory to the crime, embezzelment, etc.. IS this an act of entrapment?
Many people that pirate probably don't have the resources to buy much of what they pirate and/or don't have a resource of the content legally, so if piracy did not happen, would these people somehow magically then have the resources to buy and find a resource to buy from? And if they don't buy and can't pirate then is it really a loss to the company, or which is more of a lose to the company, income that wouldn't be received anyway and/or lessor knowledge of product in the population (contrary to marketing)?
I do not condone piracy, but the hard fact is that its also not uncommon for a legal copy to have such anti-piracy overhead in it that it interferes with its use, when the only option left is to get a cracked/pirated copy (even when you outright have the paid right to a legal copy). And there are other variations on this need for a legal party to obtain and use an illegal copy.,
Is piracy worse than bank robbery? You rob a bank and get away with it, someone has to make good on what was stolen and usually its the federal government FICA...uh err... tax payers. You steal copy of content then who needs to make good on it? And doesn't media manufactures sometimes have to pay some sort of probable piracy fee (that to some extent their media will be used for piracy)?
There are a lot of contridiction in the subject matter of piracy, from marketing to reasonable fair use, Bank robbery and the likes such as identity thief are certainly far more serious. And if another company pirates some content its not viewed as piracy by IP infringment..... how interesting how the vocabulary changes.
Perhaps the origination of the coined term "Piracy" needs to be looked back on. Bill Gate complaining of pirates for his port.. uh err...pirating of BASIC..
Hard line is that many customers had been waiting after having paid, for too long to receive the product. Other hardware companies were selling faulty hardware and the such acts not so nice to the buyers. Frustration level were high among these buyers/hobbists. Who was really ripping off who?
Today this same man/company "MS" has a federal criminal record as well as a criminal record in other countries.
Connotation..... lets just call it the same...
There is a lot more on who is right and wrong. Software Patents are acts of fraud, the Software industry pursues making a profit on user/consumers by denying consumer easy ability to do more for themselves. "What do you want us to make for you, improve, etc... that we can sell it back to you?" Product lock-in, etc..
Consumer Entrapment Abuse is worse than bank robbery as it steals away the ability of the general computer user to do more for themselves and their productivity.
They need to separate the bullshit from the reality. "Hundreds of billions of dollars"? What? It's doable maybe, but how, I don't know, does the music industry make that much or are they claiming they make $5G/year and not $999G/year because the other $994G was would-be sales pirates took?
On the flip side, imagine a store has 100 CDs (purchased at $5 each) and 100 people buy them for $10 a piece. That store made $1000 revenue, $500 profit. Now, if 50 people pirate and 50 people buy, that store made $500 revenue, 0 profit. In the first case, the store re-orders to meet demand and the label makes more money; in the second, the store does not, and the label thus doesn't make as much money either. All the effects along the line until you reach the original artists' pockets apply, of course.
Neither their bullshit analysis nor my slightly more realistic one cover the effects of per-track purchase (iTunes) or the effects of people going out and buying movies or music after downloading it (I downloaded all of Poodle Hat, eventually bought the album). We both also ignore things like businesses using PhotoShop because every graphics artist was once a kid who pirated $1500 PhotoShop; if all your employees swear they do better with GIMP, you damn well download and install free GIMP everywhere.
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1.) There is scarcity, on slashdot it is scarcity of original thought and common sense, but in this sense the scarcity is scarcity of talent and the ability to entertain, that is what should be paid for.
2.) If the music or movie or whatever has no value, then don't download it. If you download it, then there is a reason you downloaded it, to either watch it or just collect it, either way, you get some value from it. If it entertains you for 5 minutes, then that has a value.
3.) the argument that "I would not have bought it anyway" is bullshit. If I walk into a grocery store and steal a can of caviar, I can not complain that its so expensive that I would not have bout it anyway, so its not a crime.
4.) perhaps instead of everyone else adjusting their ways of thinking to yours, maybe you should consider the other alternative, that YOU need to accept a new definition of value, or ownership, or property. Since you are not creating the goods, you have no right to dictate those definitions.
The world is changing, and they are not the only ones who refuse to adapt. You are holding onto an antiquated idea that loss is strictly a loss of usability of a tangible good. As we move away from a goods based economy into one that is more service based, then the idea of time=money really does become true. The idea that taking and using something, regardless of the physical media is still getting some utility from something you did not pay for. You folks are holding onto your 6th grade or even 12th grade definitions for things like "loss" and "theft" or "piracy" . Those definitions are not the way the law and economists define them. Time to grow up and face the fact that times have changed.
"Our law enforcement resources are seriously misaligned"
Which is more important for law enforcement to deal with -- copyright infringement or ACTUAL piracy on the high seas? The latter does exist, and was an increasing problem of late, but has subsided somewhat as governments have given it more attention. Should resources be redirected from the Coast Guards and navies of the world to combat copyright infringement instead? How can anybody advocate the claim that copyright infringment is more important for law enforcement to deal with than violent crimes?
Besides the fact the quoted numbers are bogus, this lawyer is an idiot for thinking the relative importance of everything can and should be measured in terms of dollars, and even if it were done, if you did a realistic cost analysis of violent crime, inclusive of its effect on victims and insurance, I'm sure that copyright infringement costs wouldn't look all that impressive anymore.
Let's not confuse crimes like burglary and bank-robbing which places innocent victims in danger, with file sharing which has no public safety issues that I know about.
I will say that piracy should be a crime, but I think our law enforcement has too much on their plate with keeping us safe than worry about who's stupid enough to copy a movie like "Next".
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
...who's got the patent on that?
, if I could download one
By piracy I mean counterfeit goods, not the sharing of files between friends.
While copying something instead of buying it is basically theft, it should continued to be treated as a civil offense and not a criminal offense. I'll even say that most small distributions among a small number (let's say less than 10) of personal friends should be left alone.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
The Amiga OS had the CLI, the GUI and the side door port (more commonly known as the AREXX port but didn't need AREXX to make use of) to allow users full access to the commands and instruction of most all programs written for the Amiga. With this third interfaces the user could automate alot more, and far more easily than found on any other system even today (including teh MAC Automator program which is limited in usability)
...bl bla flaw.)... I can try and get the company to buy it... yeah right....
The technology has ended up in teh hand of those who want to bury it, obviously. And if anything it only goes to show how greedy and abusive the environment of the computer industry currently is and what to expect of any technology that doesn't contribute very well to the consumer/user entrapment abuse mindset.
It is pathetic and barbaric this lack of having all three primary user interfaces available in a user friendly manner. It is pathetic and barbaric that you have to install most programs on the system you are going to run them on, in order to use them as it prevents people from building their own personal tool box that they can take with them from job to job (and we have plenty and various media to enable "portable"). There is a lot of utility software I will not buy, because of this. I don't have an investment in such a personal software toolbox and that is the software industries loss and the result of greed.
Lock the user in... that's barbaric and pathetic. Don't let the user do anything for themselves that might even hint at programming, without making them have to learn teh complexications of programming in some language of this that or the other bullshit.
Example (and I'm sure the forest is so thick with examples you just may not see it due the weed in front of your face):
Autocad: Annotation - numbering parts. Want to insert a part number into an existing sequence of numbers. ie. 1 - 45... insert a new part and number it 6, shifting all above this.
Of course anyone can see what needs to be done, and it can certainly be done manually, but there is no way for the user to automate this in a simple manner. Learn LISP or Visual Basic or bla bla bla...first, or deal with learning the complications of the Autocad API and then writing the external application or DLL or whatever the fu&.
For fu& sake grab text, inc or dec it and put it back. A macro that should be easy to create, but the facility to do so doesn't exist.
I can buy someone elses program for $40 that does this, but its the installation problem again and its not under may control once install on a company system (possession is 9/10 of the law
Express tools has a tool that can do this (come with autocad), so long as the text is not in a block and its limited more so than I might customize such a function. But I don't want to learn lisp or VBA or teh Autocad API just to fu&'in do this simple thing.
It doesn't have to be this way. It is that way because it support the greed of consumer entrapment abuse. If the user really wants something and you don't let them do it for themselves with out a lot of overhead you make them deal with, then you can sell it to them....
User/Consumer entrapment abuse...
Self Degrading to the level of STUPID! The result of dumbing down your customers....
And the software industry wonders why CS degrees are dropping in number.
The flip side of Piracy is Consumer Entrapment Abuse.
Nature - for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. IS Piracy just a "Reaction"?
We're all supposed to live in a democratic civilization. Almost every western civilization was built on democratic principles. Germany, the UK and yes, even the USA.
I'm quite sure that more than 50% of the population of every western country does not consider copyright infringement a crime. Considering who has already "illegaly" burned a CD or used P2P, the percentage is probably quite a bit higher. In a proper democracy, it should therefore not be a crime. That's the way a democracy is supposed to work, isn't it?
"democracy", n.: A political system governed by the people or their representatives
Software engineers do not have the same problem, or the same solution, as composers and artists. Engineers are not crweative they do not create content. They create software which at it's core is simply instructions. They provide instructions to the computer on how to do things.
I do not consider this to be "art" or a creative work. It is simply a necessary component of the use of the hardware.
Which is why I am always an advocate of th elimination of the whole software business model altogether. Software as a business model was pretty much founded by Microsoft. Before Microsoft, software-only companies were not the mainstream. Almost all software was created by and for hardware companies to make their hardware work and/or to give their hardware an advantage over othe rpeople's hardware. To me this, is how things should work. Onc ethe software is no longer a salable item, protecting it form "piracy" is not an issue anymore, because the custome ris not buying the software they are buying the product. The software is simply an enabler.
Personally - I think that like it or not, this is how the market is going to end up anyway. Why? Because the computer software "industry" is not an useful industry - it is a leech on industries. It consumes vast amounts of capital, from which it produces a good which is not tangible, can be duplicated at zero cost, and once created and has no intrinsic value by itself.
And just a note - I myself am a software engineer, who works for a software company. I just can see the forest for the trees. I honestly do not expect to be doing this "for a living" in ten years. And personally I think the world will be a better place for it.
This is amusing watching how business believe theft of IP as a loss in sales. There is a dangerous aspect to this however and that is how government is willing to enforce their failed business model on us. The market no longer wants to walk into a record store or a theater to buy their media products and currently to do so legally, there are few good options to this. One of the bad options given to us by the industry is to "rent" a copy of the movie or music, that we may use a limited number of time on a limited number of devices in a limited way.
Eventually I believe that they will have the ability to check to see what you own and government will allow them to do this..
In 1765 King George III created The Stamp Act. By his degree all documents, papers, books, letters, posters, newspapers, and even playing cards, had to carry a tax stamp. In order to make sure if your papers were taxed.. British officers could write themselves their own search warrant and come into your house to check. As you can see there was a great outcry from this abuse of powers and this would absolutely be illegal by all of todays standards... or would it..
Can the government digitally search your papers and effects to see if you payed the proper "tax" ? Things seem to be going in this direction.
Bringing liberty to the masses. - http://freetalklive.com/
Someone needs to rob this guy.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
You know, if this man honestly believes we should "waste" less time combating fraud, burglary and bank robbery, maybe we should let him have it that way.
:) I'll gladly steal Rick Cotton's identity and empty his accounts if it means I can buy my own movies and sleep with a clear conscience.
Why download the latest movies when you can easily buy them with other people's money ?
It's easy for a download junkie to justify their actions by saying "I'm not a criminal because I wouldn't pay for this anyway", just as it is easy for MAFIAA monkeys to say "I'm not a victim because I've never been defrauded or burglarized, and bank robberies only happen in movies!".
The big difference is that the victims of fraud and burglary are far more numerous and tangible than the supposed victims of media piracy. When you file that police report and insurance claim after being been robbed, there's no fuzzy multiplier to inflate the value of your goods. When a 419 scammer sends you a fake bank draft, there's no speculation about the numbers printed on the piece of paper. Yet when these corporate shills quote their losses, they can't even say the same numbers from day to day, and you have to wonder how they even survive in the cutthroat business world if they're really losing "hundreds of billions" every time they step into the morning sun.
Man, I really wish I could have sued the whole world when my puny little computer store was losing business to the competition. After all, it's not my fault that the asian guy across the street had lower prices and a larger inventory... right ? So he wasn't necessarily paying his taxes, worked shady deals with his supplier and cooked the books to hide the fact that his employees were paid below minimum wage, but really... it's the customers that are to blame for taking advantage of the better deals... RIGHT ?
Substitute "computer store" with "film/record industry" and "asian guy across the street" with "the internet". Dun-Dun-DUNNN!
-Billco, Fnarg.com
We can do it very effectively.
- First, ban all trading on eBay and Craigslist etc. That will immediately have an impact on pirated goods.
- Secondly, employ large numbers of suitably skilled IT people to find and deal with all servers which allow file sharing. Shut them down regardless of the consequences. If your website is on one of those servers, well, guilt by association was good enough for Sen. McCarthy.
- Third, punish student file sharers appropriately. Put a large police force (let's call it the KGB for short) in all universities, public places, high schools etc. Send convicted criminals to - well, somewhere unpleasant. I'm sure the Russians would lease the Kuril islands, or even parts of Siberia.
- Fourth, only allow CDs and DVDs to be sold by shops with a permanent KGB presence.
- Fifth, ban all computers capable of storing user-transferred content to everybody except corporations with a turnover in excess of $1 billion per year.
- In fact, to be on the safe side, mandate a return to magnetic drum technology and dishwasher size storage. That will get rid of all those iPods and similar piracy devices.
This will work because, before long, the annual turnover of the presently constituted recording industry will fall so dramatically that losses from piracy will be completely insignificant.Pining for the fjords
that doesn't imply taking resources away from real crime, or having the public spend money prosecuting themselves. simply make copying for non-commercial, personal use legal. That would instantly eliminate that "hundreds of billions" in crime. Problem solved.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
For the good of society I suggest that piracy be stopped immediately. The Television, Movie and Music industries need to do our part. Since its obvious all of us would buy everything shoveled at us if it werent for the lack of funds and/or the ability to pirate, the best thing the industries can do is cease offering it to the public. Make us suffer through creating our own music and entertainment rather than telling us what is cool...that will show us and teach us a lesson while ensuring all those tv shows and songs stay out of the hands of evil people everwhere.
Bank robbery is more costly per offence, but piracy is more wide-spread. Death by a thousand pricks, or however the saying goes. Piracy costs the entertainment industry a lot of money. It may not cost hundreds of billions of dollars, but it does cost them a lot. Piracy also has less of a stigma behind it than bank robbery. Not pursuing it now will only lead to the cementing of that lack of respect for copyrights into our culture, plus will continue to cost the owners of the IP, and will hurt the industries and their consumers both in the short term and the long term.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
and people end spend a long time in jail just waiting to go to court and criminalizing civil infractions like this will back up the courts even more and some of the cases may not meet the jury trial evidence / Burdens of proof and other things.
Also do you want to let people who do fraud, burglary, rape, bank-robbing, and so on go free to make room for non violent file downloaders?
The music industry are clutching at any straws possible to avoid having to face the reality that they have made themselves entirely redundant. Because of their greed, inflexibility, enforcement of DRM, and lack of innovation, their products are too expensive and unappealing. The music industry have never added value to anything. They are used to being the gatekeepers to the monopolised distribution channels that musicians need access too, hence they are just like a giant toll-booth.
They are now witnessing that when you make the toll too expensive and the road too polluted, people just build and use alternative routes instead. In this case, the alternative route is musicians selling directly to the public via the internet.
However like any structure of people, the fat cats are unwilling to give up their power even though they are now redundant, but because they have never added value to anything, they have no innovative skills to draw upon becuaes they have never needed any. The only option for them now is to force people to use their road through legislation against the others.
The police exist to protect the people, not business...
They should concentrate on crimes that affect the people, and put crimes that only affect the profit margins of business on the back burner, especially when, in the case of copyright infringement, there are no direct losses. Who's to say how many of the pirate copies would have resulted in actual sales anyway?
A business can afford to lose a few thousand dollars of sales, but the average guy on the street cant afford to lose his $200 TV. Similarly, violent crime can result in people being killed or injured, copyright infringement doesnt.
The job of the police is to protect and serve (the people), the primary goal should be to protect the people from crime that directly harms them.
If anything, the police should be spending far less time dealing with copyright infringement cases, and more time catching pedophiles and the like. If big business doesnt like it, then they can donate large sums of money to the police so that they have sufficient resources to deal with serious crimes, and then some resources left over to help corporations keep their profits high.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Cotton and his Coalition Against Counterfeiting and Piracy are seeking to change federal law enforcement emphasis so that intellectual property crimes are given priority over other kinds of crime...
Cotton's Coalition against Counterfeiting and Piracy? I thought that fell in 1991?
So we're up to "hundreds of billions"? Considering the GDP of the US was about 13 trillion last year I guess that not only means a large part of everything the US does these days is make music and movies but we are bleeding _another_ several percent of potential US GDP in "lost income" from that economic engine. So we should envision the RIAA getting battered by Katrina several times per year and barely able to say afloat in the torrent of downloads.
[My Intro to Soc prof wrote Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics. Actually, intelligent people have sincerely claimed even stupider things with even less self interest so I guess I'm not surprised we're up the "hundreds of billions".]
...in this very special case I would love to see this guy facing a junkie with a gun who shoots him to a cripple for the 200 bucks in his wallet and then ask him again whether he thinks hunting pirates who do 200b damage is more pressing than keeping the streets safe from junkies that shoot you for the 200 bucks in your wallet.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Please check your dates. Before Microsoft there wasn't much in the way of personal computing either! You cannot regard the last 30 - 40 years as the middle of a steady-state market where Microsoft "changed" anything. Rather, they defined the market, but software as a business model was not their doing. Any old geek will tell you the hundreds of applications which were available.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
"intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions [of dollars] a year."
A couple of observations:
1. If people were actually forced to buy the 'intellectual property' that they currently copy illegally, I suspect that the vast majority would not or could not. Therefore, there would be no economic or social benefit to preventing illegal media and software distribution. In fact, you could argue that it would do social harm by limiting access to music and films. On the other hand, not preventing armed robberies would have very real and nasty social and economic consequences.
2. If, indeed, intellectual property theft is that high, one could probably make an argument that it is actually helping the world economy. If people/companies actually had to pay out a few hundred billion dollars more to buy legal copies, it would result in a few hundred million dollars less for silly things like capital investment and salaries.
3. I suspect that the bulk of that "hundreds of billions" would be going to a few very large companies that are already making extremely high profits. Making a monopoly stronger through punitive legislation is probably not in the public best interest.
The problem with this comparison between bank robbery, theft etc. is that the police do not allocate resources to bank robbery, theft etc. because these things hurt financially. This is not the issue at all, and trying to compare these acts based solely on monetary damages is a misrepresentation of reality.
The moment that copyright infringement starts taking place at gunpoint, you can be quite sure that the police will reallocate its resources. But nobody is robbing record stores here! No innocent civilians are having to go to a shrink for years on end, simply to get rid of the nightmares of the day that somebody pointed a gun at them and forced them to hand over their entire CD collection.
What was not said in the article was that many of the worst IP pirates are corporations themselves (e.g. Microsoft).
This concept further erodes the rights of the individual, favoring corporate interests.
Things got really fucked up when corporations were granted individual rights, they have since taken that privledge and gone too far (think RIAA and MPAA)(guilty until proven innocent, etc.).
When law places interests in, protecting itself, and protecting buisness it has failed it's primary objective of protecting the rights of the individual. (think about the person who was arrested and charged for filming police activity)
This is just WRONG!!!!!
Rick B.
Back about 4 years ago I didn't download movies or music I also didn't buy any. Now after downloading roughly 2 a month of movies and 4 of music I spend $75 on DVD's with another $30 to the theaters and normally $300 a month on music CD's and another $100 a month on concerts. If I didn't download chances are I may stop buying, 30 second previews and all that crap just arnt enough to make me want to buy their products I like to "Test drive" for a week or so, see if its worth the hype.
If you rob a bank, you're taking physical money. If you download a DVD rip, you're taking a concept of money.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
but you sure as fuck can't read: 'intangible' ne 'imaginary'
Were that I say, pancakes?
"an attempt to impose scarcity on an unlimited resource ... [can't] work". I know you said "doesn't" rather than "can't" but the tone of your post makes it clear you think it's a waste of time to pursue DRM not because current attempts don't work but rather because you believe artificial scarcity is an impossible dream.
As I already said -- go tell DeBeers that it's impossible to scarcity on an effectively unlimited resource.
The problem with their numbers is they assume for every illegal download equal 1 lost sale. It is an assumption that is false. Let's take for example, Adobe Photoshop. It's probably one of the most pirated software. Does everyone that downloaded it illegally can afford to pay $600 to buy it? I've asked people and the answer is No from the majority of people I've asked. (I really did ask) Best way to combat piracy is by MSRP price reduction. It would be the first step.
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Rick Cotton is not talking to pirates, but to the Justice Department. He is saying, "Enforce the law. Devote more resources to it." That's why the U.S. Attorney General wants to make it a crime to even attempt copyright infringement, because it would reduce the cost of criminal prosecution to a manageable level. P2P and bittorrent publicize the downloader's IP address, after all.
The media companies have a trump card--election campaigns can go a whole lot more smoothly with their endorsement. It's trivially easy for them to inject their own bias into a campaign, to besmirch a candidate either overtly or subtly. The Justice Department is no longer politically neutral (if it has ever been), but does the bidding of political parties. Want to stay in office? Want your candidates to get favorable treatment in the media? Then just do us this little favor, enforce the copyright laws with more of the tax dollars "we" pay you.
Media bias has a profound effect on the masses. Nobody is immune. The real issue isn't copyright freedom, but who gets elected.
For this behavior, Mr Cotton should be sentenced to corruption charges and when released made to live in a high crime area. See where he puts his priorities after.
All our intellectual property is build on someone else's intellectual property, i.e., knowledge is inherited from those who came before us. I did not Bill Gates steal DOS in the first place? Don't get me wrong, research and discovery needs to be rewarded, but not at teh expense of depriving other of their life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. A reseacher discovers a cure for cancer, patents his discovery, then withholds it for his billions from the wealthy before the poor are cured. The drug company's do the same and so does Microsoft.
chtank
Retired dinosaur, simple user, volunteer, guinea pig
I WANT to download. I CAN pay. Why doesnt they gimme? There is some little-advertised services out there (iTunes and stuff). But them i cant play. There is a very few services selling products i can play. They are US only and doesnt have anything i listen to or watch. I am the customer. I am RIGHT! Gimme what i want to pay for, and ill pay them.
Piracy is like a word of magic.thats my def. of piracy that said. corp. greed is why poeple turn to piracy if they would drop prices instead inflate them thier be no piracy come on 15$ d for music cd and 20$ d for a movie and software like windows vista ultimate 400$ d that is crazy
I believe your argument is flawed in several ways.
Historically, the rise of the software industry coincided with personal computers becoming commodity items. One might just as well argue that IBM or Apple is responsible for the foundation of what we might call the "software industry" today, for creating the PC and Mac. Indeed, arguing that it was Microsoft alone is surely incorrect, since at the time there were several other similarly powerful companies developing end user software; Microsoft's rise to supremacy in areas like desktop operating systems and office suite software did not occur until many years later.
In today's personal computing industry, the hardware is generic, and it is the software that provides specific applications. There are many application domains. Within each, there is much scope for customisation. Thus we have a variety of software products available today, and "universal software" such as an operating system that almost everyone will use is the exception. This immediately undermines your view of hardware and software as a combined unit: the wants and needs of one person who buys a PC may be completely different to those of another person who would buy identical hardware.
Finally, there is a simple economic fallacy in your argument. You are considering only the marginal cost of creating software products in your economic model, and from the fact that this is near zero for software products, you have inferred that the value of the industry is near zero. However, you have ignored the initial development cost. Even if software were only priced to cover the development cost, and development incurred no overhead in sales, marketing, legal, administration and so on, the money involved for a major software project must pay for the full-time labour of hundreds of highly skilled people over a period of years.
One of the major benefits of the copyright economic model, often ignored in these discussions, is that it provides a mechanism for a market to pay a realistic price for a product that they would all like to have but no one person could afford individually, by splitting the cost. If the product in question has a high development cost but low marginal production cost, then in a competitive industry, one would expect the cost per unit to converge on the value of the software divided by the size of the available market. Charge less than that, and it is not financially viable to build the software product, and everyone loses out because it doesn't get written. Charge more, and a competitor with a product of similar quality can undercut you. This naturally accommodates the uncertainty where the size of market cannot be predicted accurately ahead of time.
In your alternative reality, where software is not a useful industry in its own right, how do you deal with the generality of hardware and the economics of software development to make sure that code actually gets written to make the hardware useful?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Remember back when massive civil disobedience to a point where the vast majority of the population defied the law got the law changed, or a revolution going? I miss those days.
Holey Bat shit Batman..
The big lie, that is counter to the most basic micro-economic principles is that every copy was a lost sale. The people making these claims are either out-right lying or so incredibly ignorant of buisiness priciples that its no surprise they would be in trouble.
Also consider this, why would record companies pay large amounts of money to US radio stations to play their songs? Shouldn't radio stations be the ones paying? There are other factors here.
Have these media distribution companies EVER been correct/honest about the effects of copying? So far they've claimed VCRs would destroy the movie industry and cassette tapes would destroy the music buisiness. Now they say digital is different. So the typical mp3s/movies traded on the internet are equal quality to what they sell? Well, they do seem to be trying to lower the quality of their products ...
Remember society created these laws to benefit society and that is the only obligation. Whether it harms or helps a particular buisiness model is irrelevent.
Now maybe their buisiness model really does help make more/higher quality art available to the public, but one final question should be considered. Why are they trying so hard to convince the public and politicians with flawed buisiness logic and making it so hard to make a fair assessment?
Sure, piracy is a problem ... there is no easy fix. I would be all for forming a new law enforcement group to help keep it under control. However, trying to compare piracy to bank robbers is ludicrous. Don't know if the author knows this, but bank robbery is typically done using some form of a weapon. The chance of getting killed during this event is rather high.
... but come on. This is just common sense.
... that will learn em.
I just can't believe someone would think that dangerous crimes like this aren't as big of a problem as piracy. Sure, money wise is much higher
I hope who ever suggested that gets mugged on their way home from work
until (succeed) try { again(); }
If you add up all the various kinds of corporate fraud (both blatant and specious) perpetrated by multi-national corporations on the American economy, both public and private sector, every year, it costs the country $3 trillion dollars a year. Of course, sending law enforcement after that (instead of violent and personally destructive crimes) would also wreck our GDP, and send the US into a police state and a depression, as opposed to the state that still values liberty over money.
Idiot. Don't these still teach any economics and logic at fine pre-law programs; you know: the kind where you SHOULD find your asshat general counsels? Too bad they don't make sure their graduating attornies don't need remedial a cl00fone. Perhaps he aced his corporate personhood constitutional law.
Congratulations on your successful continuing legal education, and your complete detachment from our common societal values as a modern civilization. Ever wonder why the really great legal minds are heavily involved in civic organizations?
Anyone seen my low uid? last seen 10 years ago while panning the #@$# out of Taco's 'web based discussion system'
Some ideas cost REAL MONEY to bring to the masses.
Support the ones that have REAL VALUE to you....
Buy them...don't steal them!
Google search for terms
Rick Cotton NBC email
First page has it.
'Our law enforcement resources are seriously misaligned,' Cotton said. 'If you add up all the various kinds of property crimes in this country, everything from theft, to fraud, to burglary, bank-robbing, all of it, it costs the country $16 billion a year. But intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions [of dollars] a year.'"
99% of copyright infringement isn't a crime, it's a tort. There's a difference. If I were NBC/Universal, I would probably start looking for new general counsel - preferably one who didn't sleep through three years of law school.
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
In your alternative reality, where software is not a useful industry in its own right, how do you deal with the generality of hardware and the economics of software development to make sure that code actually gets written to make the hardware useful?
We,ll, it is pretty simple if you just think about it for a second.
If Apple or Dell just sold white box hardware without any softwar eat all, their business would plummet. Why? Because without software , hardware is useless. Similarly, without software, hardware is useless.
The difference between the two, is hardware ins a tangible good that has actual value. Software is a virtual good that has virtual value.
Soon, the buying and selling of virtual goods is going to go the way of the do-do bird. It will do this because it has to. DRM, patents, etc. are all trying to put the genie back in the bottle, but it is way too late for that.
What is going to end up happening, is all the companies who make the hardware will simply give the software that uses that hardware away fore next to nothing or free. What *WILL* be sold, are consulting services related to that software (whereby the vendor consults to make specific improvements for a given customer), ans support agreements.
We are already starting to see this movement with companies like IBM. IBM backs Linux because they see the trend, and are already in this business. They sell the servers, and they sell their consulting skills. They do not sell the software (for the most part - of course IBM still has software divisions but they do not make up the majority of sales anymore, and they are decreasing all the time) - rather they give it away (Linux).
This reality change has been going on for awhile now, andis spurred on by a number of things - The Internet, Open Source, cheap massive storage, global interchange withc countries without IP laws - all these things push us more and more to the point where it is IMPOSSIBLE to sell intellectual property anymore.
My biggest worry is that, BEFORE the paradigm shift finally takes hold in everyone's mind, the western countries of the wold will have turned into near police-states trying to avert the future formthe inevitible. We are already seeing this too.
Let's just hope our current and future leaders can see the future coming before it goes too far.
I think part of the problem at least with movies is how much studios demand we pay for a personal copy. When you got to a theater to watch a movie you pay anywhere from 5-10 dollars US for the experience. You get to see it on the big screen with great surround audio. At home, well, most cannot afford to upgrade to that standard. Nearly all new releases I see come out start at $15-20. This will get you a nice but no where near as good presentation as what you see in the theaters. It just isn't a good value at that price. People will pay what they think something is worth and if movie companies want to sell more legit copies then they need to consider this fact. I am not condoning piracy or trying to justify it, however, it is symptom of the real problem, new release DVDs are over priced and greed is killing legitimate sales.
I certainly wouldn't call subsidies for out-dated dogma 'critical' in our complex society. Maybe we can cap the 'child tax credit' at 2, while we're at it. Plenty of low cost labor clamoring at the gates to get in.
Blar.
Despite the fact that people can get hurt in a bank robbery, the bank still has some kind of insurance on the stolen money. Software manufacturers don't have that luxury.
Population of the US(with internet access): 204 million Proposed "intellectual property crime": "hundreds of billions [of dollars] Assuming we go with a VERY safe margin of 300 billion dollars, that means that each US citizen is meant to have pirated 1400 dollars. I think thats a little extreme, dont you?
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
You know, the RIAA and MPAA should concentrate on creating experiences that can't be recreated for free, in the comfort of your own home. They should realize by now that they can't fight internet downloading, and they should quit wasting resources doing so. Instead, improve the product you're trying to sell. I've probably gone to see 3d IMAX movies twice as often as i go to regular theaters, because it's just not the same watching Deep Sea 3d at home. Actually, I can't watch Deep Sea 3d at home. James Cameron is supposed to be working on a 3d sci fi flick he says will revolutionized the industry, and frankly, I can't wait to see it.
I download music all the time, too. Like, all the damn time. I have so many mp3s i can barely keep up. 10 years ago i listened to 3 bands: smashing pumpkins, radiohead, and nine inch nails. I didn't know of any others and i wasn't willing to experiment with my money (cos i didn't have any). These days, i might not buy many albums at all (probably like 2 a year, of the stuff i really really REALLY like), but in the past week alone i've spent over $200 dollars buying up concert tickets to concerts i'm gonna be attending in the coming months. The only reason i'm going to these concerts is cos i downloaded these mp3s and liked them a lot and i wanna see the band live, becuase that's an experience that can't be recreated thru bittorrent for free.
So, for example, a band like Do Make Say Think is not getting the $10 they charge for their cds this time around, but they're getting $30 for two concert tickets. Now, is my "pirating" a gain or a loss for do make say think? Seems to me like, in the end, they came out ahead. Not even gonna factor in that this is the 4th time I'll be seeing them, and that i've dragged along about 10 people into their shows in that span.
I mean, the internet has been extremely good for music and art in general. 10 years ago, bands like Pavement starved for success but couldn't find any because they couldn't get exposure. Today, everybody has listened to Pavement and if they hadn't broken up due to the frustration of getting exposure they might still be around today. These days, because people "steal" music, bands like Modest Mouse and Arcade Fire and crazy weird shit like sigur ros and aphex twin have millions of listeners and millions of fans, and when these "unknown" bands go on the road today, their shows sell out and people buy tshirts and even, ocassionaly, they'll sell a cd as well. Anyone saying file sharing is bad for music is pouting bs and is just greedy.
Software engineers "They provide instructions to the computer on how to do things. It is simply a necessary component of the use of the hardware."
Composers "They provide instructions to the musician on how to do things. It is simply a necessary component of the use of the hardware."
So composers are artists but software engineers aren't, interesting. Granted many things that software engineers do is very mundane, but i have always seen software engineers akin to architects. They both can create art and can create pure functionality depending on what they are assigned.
Split recording companies in 2. Recording-ONLY companies, and publicity-ONLY companies. Then the problem will take care of itself.
I might argue that theft of IP actually stimulates innovation. I'll take a turn of the century example. If the US entrepreneurs hadn't stolen a lot of tech from Britain, there wouldn't have been as big of an industrial boom as there was in the industrial world. The reason: the knowledge would not have been in so many different creative minds to make so many improvements.
Theft of IP, while it hurts the original innovator, may benefit society in the long run because everyone will have a chance to improve upon the original. It's the same idea behind Open Source Software.
Granted, the counter argument is, if there is no protection for the original innovator, no one will innovate... but that's just stupid, people who get brilliant ideas will create... if nothing else because it improves their own life. (This is like the RIAA saying music won't be created if people keep stealing it. It'll still get created, the talent will just go into other professions and play the music for fun.)
...I wonder how this guy's family feels knowing that he's more concerned with unauthorized copying than their physical safety.
I wonder if he'd change his tune if he was violently assaulted. Or simply mugged.
-- "Driving drunk on the information superhighway since 1986!"
I claim that the sketch I just drew on this napkin is worth 10000000000000000000 dollars. If someone stole it, police everywhere should dedicate more time on finding it - it's worth more than all other criminal acts in the world! The police would laugh - the value I place on something has no baring on its *real* worth. Same with these supposed numbers for music piracy...
The main driver of piracy is the ridiculously high prices charged by the MAFFIA and software producers.
Big firms charge big prices in part due to their overhead and their desire to profit from their endeavors.
Now Joe Schmoe comes along tries the same thing to make a buck out of his bedroom and he is ignored/derided.
Even if Joe priced his downloadable IP to sell ($2.00 or less) you can bet the download link will be up on del.icio.us within minutes of the first sale ('information wants to be free, right?')
The only workable solution is 'ransomware' where the work is 'held hostage' untill enough donations for it are collected then the work is released into the wild for free.
But few people are willing to pay AT ALL under such a 'lopsided' model ('What if Joe rips us off?!?').
So we're at an impasse:
The IP creator wants to get paid for his creation, and the public at large want the created item for free if possible.
People even hate the free stuff when it is 'tainted' with any form of advertising/surveillance/copyright enforcement such as adware, spyware, and DRM.
People living in money-based societies NEED MONEY to continue living.
The alternative for them ultimately is DEATH or ANARCHY.
What do you chose?
There's ONE important difference between "It's not selling" vs "There's piracy". In the former the "customer" doesn't have the entertainment in their possession. In the latter they do. There's a loss there in that the "customer" has not only broken an oath made to the artist (loss of trust), but has intentionally taken themselves out of the loop that the honest enjoy (right to vote with their money, right to auxiliary services.). Finally there's the loss of both quality and talent because no right-minded artist is going to intentionally suffer abuse at the hands of their customers (I've known those either not getting into, or leaving the profession for these reasons) And those left may not have the motivation to do their best (hence the protection of the GPL against abuse so that quality code may continue to be produced)
It's a huge problem. Back where I come from, people are getting hurt from armed piracy all the time. It's just terrible.
They both can create art and can create pure functionality depending on what they are assigned.
They can create art, but that's only because art can be expressed in just about any medium. A fast food worker could theoretically create burger art. I'd wager than the ratio of purely "artistic" code to functional code is extremely small. Most software is written with a functional goal in mind, however elegantly or creatively that goal is achieved. There's a word for this sort of thing: a "craft".
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
The whole idea of property, even for the physical things, is just a convention.
We all (soft or) agree that there is a mapping between things and people and we call that mapping property.
Nothing says that this "mapping" is real or tangible or even agreed to by everyone. Mostly, it exists originally from physical threats used to hold onto a thing - "grab this and I attack you" that has evolved with human society into a more civilized understanding that we can "hold onto" certain things. This is extended by our laws and the creation of widely accepted money. Some religious extremists argue divine right or natural order to support property, but that is rare.
The further extension of the convention of property to ideas is done through laws alone. This extension is NOT agreed to by everyone the way it is done now. It is tenuous at best, ridiculous at worst. At this point I flatly reject all arguments about enforcing current laws until copyright is fixed to balance the social good with the private rights. The situation is so far out of balance now, it is completely obvious why people pirate: copyright is effectively infinite.
The difference is, people don't get killed, beaten up or otherwise assaulted when someone copies an mp3.
This whole attitude problem of the media companies is going unchecked, it's about time people fought back against it.
is his house was burgled, along with his car and identity stolen. What bothers me is when people assume virtual worth == real world worth. If a non-physical material is being sold for $2 and 10 are obtained illegally, that doesn't necessarily mean that $20 worth of stuff was stolen. Who says that if they weren't stolen that the company would have made the $20 in the first place? The worst crimes are the ones that affect peoples lives. Average Joe's are the ones having their possessions and identities stolen, while only corporate big wigs are really being affected by piracy (darn, can't get that $1 million raise I wanted to give myself this year, better layoff 30% of the company so I can still get me raise).
Yes, realign the funding so that digital piracy is taken care of, it's always been my dream, to rob a bank, with a rubber chicken.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
I don't want the movie or music industry to appear sensible. I want all their representatives to look like raving lunatics.
My hope is that eventually these guys will make the Taliban regime look reasonable. Maybe eventually these organizations will ask for copyright infringement to be punishable by death.
Once that happens, it might just be political suicide for a congressman to support the MPAA or RIAA.
One can hope.
-ted
All property owners are thieves and pirates. The moral outrage from powerfully dominant pirates against marginally powerful pirates is hilarious. The minuscule detail obsessed wanna-be lawyering on this thread is hilarious.
The only people who are not pirates are the many people who own nothing - because their countries have been colonized by land, market, labor, and resource pirates like the UK, Denmark, France, Spain, China, etc. Or because of neo-colonial institutions like the IMF and World Bank (aka United States of America), which all former colonial powers have switched to by now. Even in those countries, there are local pirate elites who help the bigger transnational and nationally powerful pirates to torture and murder the locals who want to unionize, squat land, "steal" what they have produced from the transnational owners, or otherwise offer affront to the global regime of property.
The United States of America, specifically (where I've seen the most IP outrage) was first stolen by murdering an entire continent of diverse peoples, then was built on the labor of stolen human beings, aka slaves - who since slavery was legally abolished have never been paid comparable wages to those whose ancestors were "merely" indentured servants. And, of course, the aristocrats who founded the USA and their progeny who were not complete bungling idiots have never had to worry about salaries or wages - other people work for them.
When property-rights advocates work out how to redress all those grievances, and the rest I didn't mention, that issue from the existence of legal property, then maybe I'll take seriously any argument you have about the morality of property, "intellectual" or no. Until then, no thank you, I'll apply the same morality to transnational corporations that they apply to human beings and ecosystems - that is, none. I'll reserve my moral outrage for real human beings and the ecosystems we all depend on for life.
Don't you know that jacking off to an unauthorized digital picture of someone is the moral equivalent of rape! The **AA told me so. Millions of women have been violated billions of times. The **AA told me so and I believe them.
I understand it too. In both cases, the woman is denied her rightful "income" from the transaction while the rapist gets off for free. What is wrong with you people, can't you see the truth?!
Damn cops wasting their time chasing down so called "real rapists." A serious misalignment of law enforcement priorities...
Our government has some serious problems, when piracy is seen as a more worse crime than a
bank robbery. Physical crimes should take presidence over intellectual property crimes.
Although it could be worse as in we could have a government policy were in all crimes
were treated with a death sentence regardless of the intent or severity of the act.
Some may say that the death penalty is to severe and no crime is deserving of death.
This following comment is copyrighted by Ultra-Loser. In order to read this comment, you have to pay me $10.
Assuming everyone pays me their money, I'll make around $1,000,000 today.
*twiddles thumbs, checks back account*
What, no money whatsoever?! You lost me a million dollars! $*&@# pirates!
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/monopoly
what a twat, armed robbery is a violent crime which scares people for years and ruins their lives, and he is saying the money is the only reason to go after people who commit crimes? speaks VOLUMES about his understanding.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
OK, but what about the global wars NBC/Universal shamelessly champions with several of their shows. That is costing us over a Trillion dollars, thousands of American lives, hundreds of thousands of Arab civilian lives, and unimagined pain for families. If we are going to add up losses, lets do a complete job.
The whole issue to me with crime is victims. And logical to that the punishment. To me the sentence should be proportionate to the number of victims hurt. So a murder for example is obviously one point for the victim (max on the scale), perhaps a 1/2 for each immediate person who would be considered family (so very close friend, partner) and then declining to 1/4 and so on into extended family and work colleagues. The total in the end fits the chart for punishment (chart written locally so those states can still execute if they want).
A corporate boss who defrauds a pension scheme of tens of millions for instance then scores perhaps a 0.1 per victim but the scheme caters for some 3000 people giving them a total crime harm rating of 300, way up into execution levels on the chart for states that have it.
So I then only count the company as one person so the rating against a company can only be a 1 for it's loss. And a small real loss versus a hypothetical loss (the would a person with no money have bought the illegally copied item if them hadn't downloaded it - no - scenario) scores pretty low because the loss to the already well of company rates only perhaps a 1/100 or less.
So in the end such acts of illegal copying would rate as minuscule for actual harm rather than theoretical harm. Where as a bank robbery taking actual money and terrorising people with guns and perhaps shooting and wounding someone would come out still quite high.
In other words their whole argument is a joke.
charging 20 for one music cd. I think the hole industry just went money crazy. I buy lots of film dvds, cause after 6 months in the market i can buy a film for 5 to 10 euros. I simply can't stand the idea to pay so much for a cd. If the price was more " real " then they would sell much more. Not everyone is a millionaire.
...
Just sell it at a price that doesn't makes people think that they are being robbed
I have a payed version of trillian and winrar and i would have one of windows if it didn't cost so much too.
For the OLIGARCHS (pronounced with a thick accent that even Elya Baskin could appreciate; let's be brutally honest), I don't think so. No true capitalist would find oneself sympathizing for the rabble. After all, he is of a different subspecies than they (Homo sapiens patricis vs. Homo sapiens plebes). Copyrights make money; human rights take money. The little people (LeonaHelmsleySpeak) are of no consequence apart from the payment of the taxes, obedience to the laws, and service in the military. These are merely cogs in the machin[Pwrrt!-THuD!bagtagdragdragdrag...]
Submission as evidence constitutes plaintiff and/or prosecutorial misconduct.
I hope its not based on how many copies of pirated software are used, because a person can own/use a copy of a software that they never would have purchased, using a cheaper alternative instead. Do you know anyone that has dropped $300 for their own personal copy of photoshop?
Piracy losses are actuarial calculations based on the highest probably loss scenario. If a video or mp3 is placed on a P2P then it's assumed that everyone who ever participated in that P2P stole the video or mp3 and did not go our an purchase it. If the same performance is there twice with two different CRCs then double the loss.
I have two problems with this thinking.
but the number one reason this is a bogus statement.......
I haven't heard about any innocent bystanders getting shot as the music pirates attempted to make their get away from the P2P...
I do believe there are several assault suits pending against idiots wearing an RIAA jacket pretending to be law enforcement.
Anonymous Coward?....
Um, yea, when the vigilantes dupe LEA, I get scared.
Lets get some perspective.
.....i.e. "Shreck the third". Lethal Weapon IV, "Charlie's Angles anything", nuff said.
Piracy..... according to Merriam Webster "the unauthorized use of another's production, invention, or conception especially in infringement of a copyright b : the illicit accessing of broadcast signals"
"I would expand this to include the "lack of innovation in Hollywood" recycling anything and everything that has been done before."
"Imagination" pirating may be a good term.
The movie industry has "Pirated" the concept of motion pictures and the "movie magic" that is now sadly lacking. they blame the loss in revenue in new movies and recordings to "Pirates", not the poor quality of their product.
The RIAA members have "Pirated" the excitement and thrill of experiencing new and unique motion pictures and music from the youth of today.
Remember the feeling you had when watching "Jaws" for the first time? how about "Star Wars", or "Back to the Future" or "ET", or any one of a hundred other really good motion pictures.
how about when groups like the Beatles or Rolling Stones had a new album.....would you have been satisfied with a Best of, or better yet, the Beatles II??
Copyright Infringement is being used to capitalize on the past while stagnating the future.
Some of the movies and music Kids pirate are older than they are.
If the movie and recording industry were keeping up with the times, they would have a case.
It is not like Hollywood is producing epic motion pictures any more.
Even new ideas get beaten to death
Let's get some perspective here! and back to the original premise of the post.
* Illegal immigration is more serious than Bank Robbery.
* Confiscatory Taxes are more serious than Bank Robbery.
* Out of control Gasoline Prices are more serious than Bank Robbery.
* Fixing the state of education in the United States is more important than Bank Robbery.
* The elimination of the middle class in the United States is more important than Bank Robbery.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke
Thank you for agreeing with my point that there is no competition. So again, back to the original point, the outrageous pricing set by the MAFFIA and some software producers is making piracy very attractive to people. The old business model is dead.
Trent Reznor only has one more record to make to fulfill his slavery obligations. He says he will go direct to the fans with $4 CDs (this was linked from Slashdot a few weeks back). Will he actually do it...time will only tell, but the writing is on the wall. The days of the leeching MAFFIA are numbered. My money should go directly to the artist...they are the ones with the talent. They are the ones producing the art. The internet is the distribution channel.
Lower prices mean more sales. It really is that simple.
Your analogy fails....computers and music are totally different. Apples to Oranges. Music was overpriced _then_, and it _is_ today. So you validated my point. Thank you.
Lower prices mean more sales, does not necessarily mean more profit. You don't realize because you don't understand economics, as has been clear from the start. But now you've fallen back on the tactic of misrepresenting what I'm saying, this discussion is over. Believe what you wish.
We have to stamp out entertainment piracy, for the good of the U.S. economy.
Think about it. In a few years, what other wealth-generating industry will be left in the U.S.? We can run our economy entirely on exporting entertainment to the rest of the world, and paying one another for service-industry stuff that requires physical presence. Everything else is leaving the country.
huh? if you sell CDS....100 at $20 or 1,000,000 at $10, which earns more profit? The cost of manufacturing a CD is pennies. You fail again.
BTW - Nice, job modding yourself up only to keep getting modded down by the community. How much do you get paid to post astroturf forums?
Yes, and the $1 trillion and counting spent on the War on Terror so far could be much better spent dumping it into cancer and heart disease research, as far as net saving of lives is concerned.
Yes, even if you take into account a nuked city.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I read the headline and thought, I bet you that whoever said that doesn't work in banking.
And surprise--I was right!
If I had to watch that ad every time I started my car, and then be forced to watch 5 minutes of ads prior to being able to go anywhere... I probably would! [Assuming that stolen cars came without that ***shit*** they make you watch if you spend your money on a dvd.]
ISO certified == THX certified
Alternate forms of distribution of IP provides a threat to mainstream media(books,tv,radio), as the public no longer gets a steady diet of dictated crap. The powers that be want to be able to form public opinion through traditional media outlets and p2p is a serious threat, some may say more serious than bank robbery, as public opnion cannot be dictated through traditional media outlets as long as the growing number of p2p users rely on alternative news sources and other IP located on these p2p systems. Sharing is cool anyway you cut it and p2p enables the wisdom of the collective masses who uses p2p to dictate news topics to to traditional media outlets vs. the other way around. Many ppl find alternative news sources available on bittorrent, as do I when looking to find out what's really going on any given subject.
"if you wouldn't have bought it that's great: you shouldn't HAVE it then"
That's a moral judgment. Personally, my morals allow for this. Yours may not allow you the luxury. You see, i don't find a problem with it since no theft occurred. I disagree with the basis of the law because of this, so i don't adhere to it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----