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.

Comments

Re:It's a problem of analysis

[thc69]

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.

Nobody steals those worthless trinkets, they take cash from the bank or the stereo from your car.

during the height of Kazaa, they were posting record breaking profits.

That's been my observation too -- profits seem to follow piracy. When piracy is up, profits are up. My theory is that most people, like me, got excited about music when pirating and bought lots. Now that we're afraid to pirate, we're not spending as much time on music and are just not as excited about it. I know that's the case with me; since I quit pirating I just haven't had the urge to buy many CDs.

These days, on the occasion that I do want a CD, I refuse to buy CDs that are RIAA-affiliated. They hate and attack their customers; therefore I don't want to be their customer. Thank you, RIAA Radar.