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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 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.
wow all you debaters are a big bunch of racists! lolz