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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.
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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!!!
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
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.
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!
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?
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.
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.