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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?
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
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
> Really? Is the time and effort put into creating entertainment, imaginary? If someone pirates entertainment, can all that be gotten back?
Err... if someone produces entertainment that no-one buys or pirates, can the time and effort put into that be gotten back? I don't see your point. Just because time and effort are put into the creation of entertainment is real, doesn't mean that the "losses" caused by someone pirating that entertainment are real. It's entirely possible that every person who pirates the entertainment would never have paid for it, even if it were not available for pirating. Then again, it's entirely possibly that every person who pirated the entertainment would have paid for it were it not available for pirating.
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).
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...
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
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.
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'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)
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.
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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!!!
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 $25 DVD.
The most ridiculous part is the proposed punishment. Let's assume Blow Joe gets cought copying for himself the world's best, most valuble movie ever made to mankind. He is ssent to trial and sent to jail for 2 years. The cost of getting him cought, the cost of the trial and then keeping him in jail would be quite astronomical, compared to the actual demage. Multiply this with the alleged number of theft and thiefs: you would bankrupt the country, or tax payers would have to pay at least as much as the budget for education.
It's nonsense.
There's also the case where people first saw something through "pirated" versions on the internet, then went out and bought it because they liked it so much.
Take the case of Jay. Jay never even caught Firefly when it was on the network (they always screwed with its time slot) but after seeing two episodes on the internet he went out and bought the DVDs. This was before Serenity, and his purchase probably, to some incredibly small degree, helped them justify making the movie. Of course, Jay immediately bought the Serenity DVD when it was available too, hoping it shows them there's interest in more Firefly.
In Jay's case, they made multiple sales they wouldn't have made without the "pirates". So, the pirates actually made them money by giving the product free promotion.
Now, not every product can be thrown out there and make money the way Serenity did. No, the secret is that your product has to be *good*. But, if your movie sucks, aren't you really ripping off people that expect a good product when they paid for your movie?
So, the actual cost to the media moguls are an unknown value between -($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/
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
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!
"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.
but you sure as fuck can't read: 'intangible' ne 'imaginary'
Were that I say, pancakes?
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.
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.
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.