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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.
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.
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
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.
No, but i might take a digital ( or film, im the ludite around here ) picture of your car for *personal* use. You still have your unaltered car afterwards and are free to do whatever you had originally intended to do with it. Its value has not been effected.
Copying a bunch of bits that i wasnt going to purchase is no different. The owner has not had his product reduced in value and he still has possession of it to sell to a buying customer ( which im not, nor was i ever going to be ).
People that twist the facts around and inflate the numbers in order to invade/reduce my privacy disgust me. ( though for the record, i dont agree with 'for-profit' or 'purchase avoidance' piracy.. )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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
Today, every single Slashdot reader failed to give me $10. Do you realise that this has cost me and, by extension, the economy, over $10,000,000 for today alone? Over the course of a year, that means that not devoting law enforcement resources to fulfilling my every whim costs me (and the economy. Won't someone please think of the economy?) $3,650,000,000. That's right, well over three billion dollars.
Has any bank robber come close to stealing three billion dollars? Even Nick Leeson only cost Barings $1.4bn. Obviously our priorities are very, very wrong.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I believe this to be wrong on two points.
Firstly define 'wasn't going to purchase' for me. If I know absolutely 100% that I can not get a piece of software / movie / game for free, I am pretty sure I am much more likely to admit to myself and others that I want it, and will purchase it, than if I have a big demon sat on my shoulder whispering "don't be a mug, you can warez it!".
Most films have trailers, software has demo's (as do games), if you see the demo and wish to enjoy the product for longer, then its pretty hard to argue that you will be getting entertainment or use from it no?
People can NEVER be honest about saying "I wouldn't have bought it" once they have the full thing for free. Our brains are great at backwards-justification. We can easily find all sorts of ways to make what we have done seem justified, we may well even delude ourselves. But that doesn't mean it's true. It's like telling yourself you would have resigned anyway if you get fired, or that she was a pain in the neck anyway when someone dumps you. Anything to make you feel like the good guy.
I spoke to a guy who does DRM for an online game publisher. Once, they rewrote their algorithm which instantly rendered all existing cracks for the games useless. Sales jumped by 40% that month. Why? surely none of those who cracked the stuff would have bought it anyway?
Secondly, your comparison is not accurate. A car is made for a single user, and priced accordingly. A movie, game or application is made with some estimation of sales, based upon the market size and product quality. Nobody makes Photoshop or Lightwave and expects to sell one copy. If you are in the target market, and get use from the product, yet you take it for free, then of course you are affecting the producer of the product. The fact that nothing physical was moved from a to b makes no difference.
People will make all kinds of rationalisation to justify taking other peoples work for free. The problem is, their philosophy never scales up to the whole of society. Why the fuck should I pay to see the new Pirates of the Caribbean film, it was made anyway, and I probably wouldn't have paid for it right? so what's the harm?
Until everyone thinks that way, in which case the whole business model collapses. That's the problem with people who leech, it works out fine for them (in the short run) but they fuck things up for everyone else.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
I'd say that doesn't hold for those who view the destruction - or at least marginalization - of a particularly bad industry, with its attendant effects on the culture of music, as a desirable long-term consequence. I doubt the demise of top-down music culture counts as a "loss" that "mak[es] everyone suffer."
Tags != Comments, and -1 (Troll) != -1 (I Would Respond Angrily To This Poster So They Must Be Trolling)
An excellent question in itself.
Gee, I thought the whole point of a free market was to let businesses succeed/fail based on their ability to deliver a product that people are willing to pay for. There are obviously enough people still paying to see shitty movies that the industry that produces them is being sustained. When there aren't, then I guess it shows that not enough people gave enough of a fuck about that industry's products.
Tags != Comments, and -1 (Troll) != -1 (I Would Respond Angrily To This Poster So They Must Be Trolling)
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.
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
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!!!
Gee, I thought the whole point of a free market was to let businesses succeed/fail based on their ability to deliver a product that people are willing to pay for. There are obviously enough people still paying to see shitty movies that the industry that produces them is being sustained. When there aren't, then I guess it shows that not enough people gave enough of a fuck about that industry's products.
And your point is? Given that the guy you were replying too was talking about piracy, how does your point relate?
If people don't want to see a thing because its shit, it stands to reason it is also less likely to be pirated, because of being shit. 'failure to deliver a product that people are willing to pay for' is nonsense as a justification for piracy. If there was no way for piracy to take place, people would buy more movies. This is self evident. Piracy cannot be used as justification for piracy, that's just silly.
There's also the case where people first saw something through "pirated" versions on the internet, then went out and bought it because they liked it so much.
Take the case of Jay. Jay never even caught Firefly when it was on the network (they always screwed with its time slot) but after seeing two episodes on the internet he went out and bought the DVDs. This was before Serenity, and his purchase probably, to some incredibly small degree, helped them justify making the movie. Of course, Jay immediately bought the Serenity DVD when it was available too, hoping it shows them there's interest in more Firefly.
In Jay's case, they made multiple sales they wouldn't have made without the "pirates". So, the pirates actually made them money by giving the product free promotion.
Now, not every product can be thrown out there and make money the way Serenity did. No, the secret is that your product has to be *good*. But, if your movie sucks, aren't you really ripping off people that expect a good product when they paid for your movie?
So, the actual cost to the media moguls are an unknown value between -($NUMBEROFPIRATECOPIES x $PRICE) and ($NUMBEROFPIRATECOPIES x $PRICE). If you average that out, you get $0.
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/
"If there was no way for piracy to take place, people would buy more movies."
And if you were only allowed to buy telephones from AT&T, more people would pay more for AT&T phones. If you were only allowed to breathe metered air from Standard Air Corp, people would be spending a whole lot more for air.
The question is wether paying more for AT&T phones and metered air benefits the economy and market at a whole. Or if a free market could produce better phones cheaper without the monopoly. And if air could maybe be provided to everyone without a high overhead if you dont have hundreds of thousands of people employed to account for everyones breathing...
Yes, denying AT&T a monopoly on phones, and not creating an air monopoly means those companies (or potential companies) will be employing fewer people and they'd 'lose' a lucruative source of income. Allowing them the monopoly, however, means that the ones paying for it will be unable to pay for some other service, costing jobs in _other_ sectors instead. Implementing tranfer systems as monopoly rights is no different from other forms of taxation; it shifts money from one sector to another. The question is wether it's the most efficient way to accompish the purpose and produce the desired good. And frankly, anyone who's read a public filing for any company involved in the IP industries would say no.
The failure of monopolies to produce competetive products cannot be used as a justification for maintaining or strengthening monopoly enforcement.
That "advertisement" for anti-piracy always bothered me, and one day I realized what it was that bothered me about it. The only time you see it is when you have legitimately purchased/rented the movie that you are about to watch.
That's right, the only people that see the "please don't pirate this" message are the only people who DIDN'T pirate it. Man, talk about alienating your fan-base.
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!
If you had the technology, would you clone/build a popular car without paying for the intellectual rights to do so?
Um... value doesn't work that way. "Value" is not a fixed quantity that gets divided up among all the instances of an item. Value is really the subjective trade-off between a thing and the things given up to have that thing, and doesn't matter how many people have that thing.
The reason price tends to drop for an increased supply and increased demand is that the creator can increase revenue by dropping the per-unit price but, overall, the income increases.
The thing that the content industry needs to realize is that people are no longer paying for copies of content like we had to do before it was easy to make copies; now people are only willing to pay for the efforts of the content creators.
That subtle difference is the important thing - copies are not what has value, the merit of the content is what has the value. Tying payment to the distribution used to work fine, but that just isn't going to work any more, and instead of trying to come up with an appropriate solution, the current industry is trying to litigate instead, which actually increases the costs for everyone involved rather than reducing them.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Tags != Comments, and -1 (Troll) != -1 (I Would Respond Angrily To This Poster So They Must Be Trolling)
You don't have the right to try product. You have the right to not buy products that you can't try and thus encourage creators to make a sampler version of whatever the product is.
If you aren't the target market then you won't get the product. No company has an obligation to provide a range of products scaling from hobbyist to professional. A lot of hobbies are out of the range of a lot of people because the literal cost of entry is too high. That's just how life is.
Columbia Records has been in business since 1888.
The Victor Talking Machine Company - "His Master's Voice" - was incorporated in 1901 and was aggressively recruiting artists for exclusive contracts from Day 1. It was - even then - using "loss leaders" to build sales.
Artists became successful on records because they recorded well. The technology has always shaped the industry.
Caruso had a splendid voice for acoustic recording and sold to enormous audiences who knew nothing and cared nothing for Grand Opera. Bing Crosby's career in the vacuum tube era follows a similar arc.
Let's go back in time 100 years. It's 1897.
When the number of American cities with significant concert venues could be numbered on one hand. New York, Chicago, San Francisco... Scott Joplin plays the brothels, Sousa takes his band to the streets.
Your town might rate a one-night stand on the vaudeville circuit. [and if you that was a good living to all but the headliners, you are delusional.] The big money was in sheet music sales for the pianoforte in the front parlour.
Of course, you have to still buy the parts, and you have to put it together, but if you copy a film, you have to buy a CD-R to put it on, and you have to download and burn it. Although you can't really make a Locost for £250, it will still cost you a fraction of the price it cost's to buy a Super 7 from Caterham or one of it's licensees. Obviously the resulting Locost will not be as fine as a real Super 7, but neither is a Divx CD-R scribbled on with a marker pen as fine as a nice shiny DVD in a fancy box.
Fact is, if I go and built a Locost, I have certainly ripped of the designs including the copyrightable bodywork designs of the Lotus designers, which are rightfully owned by Caterham, and have supposedly denied caterham income in the same way that I would have suposedly denied income to film studios if I pirate a movie.
So, maybe we should change it from, 'would you steal a car?' to 'Would you build a Locost?'
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
but you sure as fuck can't read: 'intangible' ne 'imaginary'
Were that I say, pancakes?
Your argument doesn't hold water. The parent says that HE would not have bought it. You have founded your entire argument on the jump from one person to all people that violate copyright are makeing the same argument. And have tried to discredit the original argument by proving that one perosn bought material after illegal copies no longer worked. Some people just don't have a problem with stealing anything that is not bolted down. I don't think that these people would even entertain a thought about wether or not something is fair use. Unless you can prove that the the people that caused the 40% jump in sales were not in this group, and have numbers on how many people refrained from playing the game after there cracked copy no longer worked then it is just a random number.
To emphasie that people can NEVER be honest also just defeated your own argument. You are trying to sensationalize. If you would like to argue that MOST of the people USUALLY can not be honest about saying "they wouldn't have bought it" then you might have a leg to stand on. However your argument is for NEVER, to disprove your argument all that is needed is one case where someone did not purchase an original copy of copyrighted material when the illegal copy was rendered inoperable. This is a valid argument because you did not start it out by stipulating a single person. You started out by stipulating an absolute for all people. When I was in school I received several copies of bootleg demo cassettes through the years. Some of them caused me to go out and purchase an album when it was released. Others got lost or deystroyed through the years, and I still have not replaced them. Some of those were descent, but not worth the price that stores were asking.
Your argument about the comparison not being the same because one hurts the "producers of the product" is flawed in that copyright was intended to protect the artist not the producer. The artist is now forced to hand over the copyrights in todays market in order to make the producer the legal copyright holder so that they can use copyright laws to protect their profits. This forces the artist to make what is the equivilent of a one time sale. Even if there are stipulations for the artist to receive a fractional amount of money for each movie/cd/software sale, the artist is no longer the one with the incentive to protect copyrights in order to produce more artistic works.
I do think that distributing copyrighted material without the copyright holders permission is wrong. I was telling several of my friends back in the late 1990's that downloading copyrighted material is wrong, and they would not be allowed to do it from my broadband connection, and I encouraged them not to do it period. However, I think that the current tactics that are being used are also wrong, and will fight them when I can. The current companies are using a lot of misinformation to persuade public and political opinions to protect their enforcement of copyrights. I keep reading about people getting into lawsuits for downloading music, but then reading how the actual charges are for possible distribution, and they want payment for all the people that could have possible downloaded the file, not the number of people that actually did. At some point this will create an overlap of people. They will be fining two people for distributing to the same person. This is why their numbers of loses are so inflated.
Instead of download protected software I download open source. Instead of downloading protected music I have stopped buying mainstream CDs and just listen to the radio. I am looking at my entertainment center, and everything says Sony. It was all purchased before the rootkit fiasco, RIAA lawsuits, and trying to use the PS3 to push their proprietary formats. I will not purchase another item from that company. They are losing sales by being overly agressive and taking away my rights in the name of enforcing theirs, but I am sure that is put on the line labeled "sales lost from piracy"
You've failed spectacularly, however. And if you were only allowed to buy telephones from AT&T, more people would pay more for AT&T phones. If you were only allowed to breathe metered air from Standard Air Corp, people would be spending a whole lot more for air. This is true. However what you're talking about now is competition for similar (but different) products. Your post suggests that the creation and distribution of movies is somehow a monopoly. It's not--in fact, I've known people who wrote, filmed, and gave away movies. No one came knocking on their door claiming that they were doing something illegal.
Copyright law exists to create an incentive for people to make a living by creating art. Everyone human in America is allowed to do this. What they aren't allowed to do is take art created by someone else and distribute copies of it. This is because copyright exists so that, should I choose to do so, I can work hard to create my own art, and then sell copies of it. The US doesn't give me a guaranteet hat I'll make money--but they give me a guarantee that no one is allowed to make money from my art. The failure of monopolies to produce competetive products cannot be used as a justification for maintaining or strengthening monopoly enforcement. And this really says it all. You can create a competing product right now. Go! Do it! Just don't use someone else's product in your own.
With so-called 'intellectual property', the product is separate from the medium on which it is delivered.
what is this monopoly obsession about? There is no monopoly in the world of movies, music, software or games. Any dork can write software or games in his bedroom, I know, I did it, and yet people pirate my stuff, whilst whining about teh evil monopolies. How much sense does that make?
How is a discussion of monopolies even vaguely relevant to a debate on piracy? Show me the monopoly.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
For any given work only one entity, the copyright holder, is allowed to distribute it. How is that not a monopoly?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
This is by far the most important argument against the MAFIAA's claims of the economy losing billions of dollars to piracy. The economy is not losing billions of dollars, it is gaining "hundreds of billions" of dollars of intellectual property for free! Well, that is if everyone truly believes that every song is possession of every person on the planet is worth $1.
If anything, the MAFIAA's intellectual property is just being revalued at a much lower cost, and they'll have to meet the market realities by wasting less on themselves and marketing and lobbying, and focus on the actual business of letting musicians make music at a low enough cost to turn a profit in the new economy. So some rich chumps are taking it in the ass economically because they are too stupid to read the writing on the wall 10 years ago. This is bad, how?
Not only that lets think of it this way When is the last time you heard about an innocent victem being wounded or killed during a violent bank robbery or break in? When is the last time you heard about an innocent victem being wounded or killed during a torrent of mp3s? Try putting a price tag on that.
First post = troll. Cleverly worded post designed to enrage others = flamebait.
innocent victem being wounded or killed during a torrent of mp3s?
I don't know if I would call a MIAA witchhunt, wounding, but certainly damaging. Lives have been seriously disrupted.
We are all just people.
Anyway, that '100's of billions of dollars' comment annoys me because ... w p.php
"The total annual gross revenues of the music industry today are estimated at $11 billion."http://www.eff.org/share/collective_lic_
So the music industry is just bullshitting to be talking about loses that are an order of magnitude higher than the total industry gross. While if you want to talk about Hundreds of Billions being stolen we should talk about things like insurance fraud, corporate embezzelment, and public corruption.
"White-collar crimes cost the United States more than $300 billion annually according to the FBI."http://www.karisable.com/crwc.htm
We are all just people.
Mr. Cotton's BIO
i os/cotton_rick.shtml
http://nbcuni.com/About_NBC_Universal/Executive_B
Exceedingly wealthy people in these kinds of positions are often detached from reality. The guy probably hasn't pumped his own gas in 10 years (if ever, no that's not a shot against you New Jersey-ians).
He probably sees bank robbery as a victimless crime, that's what insurance is for right? No people in the bank get traumatized, no one had to pay for that missing money, besides everyone out there has more money than they know what to do with, right? Why can't he afford that 12th Porches? Poor guy.
In all actuality, he's simply missing perspective. We all are. I can't tell you how hard it is to live in the projects, I don't live there. It's easy to look down on people who you aren't familiar with. Perhaps, it's easy for me to look down on a millionaire jackass making these comments because I just don't understand him.
If he got mugged and beat half senseless he'd probably have a different view of things.
You're right, drawing on the public domain to create works which you guard jealously from falling into the public domain is pretty bad, however Disney is as much blame for extending copyrights as your lawmakers, and as the SCoTUS, who found that the extensions were constitutional. I'd rather fix the government problems than try to enforce morality on corporations.
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 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.
Also the current population of America is 300 million. In order to steal $100 billion, each man woman and child would need to download $333 worth of stuff.
Infact the CIA estimates that there are 205,327,000 internet users in the US. So if every one of those is a dirty little pirate, the total is more like $487 each. This looks like filthy lies to me.
Yup definite underestimate in my opinion. I think I'm closer to around $10,000 worth of things in the past year myself, between software, movies, music, textbooks, and other things - how about you? By my estimate, we're closer to $2x10^12 in losses each year due to piracy ($2 trillion (US/Canada trillions not british trillions)). Not that I expect everyone to grab as much stuff as I do - but knowing my family, friends, acquaintences, even my parents download habits, I'd say I'm "median" for my circle of people. Of course of that $10,000 - If I couldn't have pirated them - I probably only would have purchased $500 - multiply that out by the 200 million internet users in the US and we're closer to the $100 billion stated. And yes I'm posting A/C even though I have an account. The whole world doesn't need to know how much I pirate Microsoft, Adobe, Autodesk, and others.
Oh - and for the open source zealots - yes I do use the open source alternatives as much as humanly possible - but my counterparts in the world still tend to use the proprietary tools and sometimes I have to have same said tools to open their files and have them appear correctly - I prefer to create using the open source equivalents - but sometimes they just can't open or work with what I need - and that is one of the reasons I pirate my software - I'm just not willing to spend $700 for a software package to simply open and edit a project one time in a year (or longer) just because someone else isn't using F/OSS - and I can't force them to - that's not being very free or open in my thinking.
As for movies and music - that's about all I would purchase - and sometimes do purchase - but usually I just can't find what I want in a store (has anyone tried to find "A Muppet Family Christmas" VHS version in the last 5 years?).
Cheating a company's pensioners out of £100 million may not be as evil as bashing an old lady over the head with a claw hammer to nick £15 for drugs, but it's still a crime. So this is a very dangerous argument to use if you are trying to defend the copying of mp3s.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it