MPAA Chases Uploads, Ignores Open Sales of DVD-Rs?

rbrander writes "Go to TVBoxSet.com and find a remarkable sales site for box sets of TV shows, including not only surprisingly cheap deals, but offerings not found elsewhere. For example, they have a set with all ten seasons of 'JAG'. The problem is that the production company is only up to season 4 so far. Google "tvboxset" and find every link below the first is to a complaint or news website complaining of the scam. Those who do shop at the site get a product that appears to be a DVD-R recorded off of cable. The really odd thing? They're still in business! A story at the Montreal Gazette about the scam is six weeks old. Now what's in it for the content industry to beat up private citizens with $220,000 judgements or scrambling to get DeCSS sites shut down within hours, while corporate scammers openly sell pirate DVDs for months on end, unopposed?"

Comments

What's the difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm confused about the redundant word usage: "corporate" and "scammer".

Re:What's the difference?

[StormyWeather]

Why in the world is this insightful? I own my own small business that is incorporated even though I'm a 1 man show, and I try to uphold the greatest ethical standards possible. I truly believe that the vast majority of rich people become rich through ethical means, and a horrid amount of hard work. All you hear about are the greed is good crowd just like all you hear about with professional athletes are the ones who are arrested and who do stupid things. I incorporated because I didn't want someone to slip on the curb outside, crack their skull open, and sue me for everything I own. The most they can get from me is the business, but not my kids college funds. Does that make me an evil person?

Most companies are full of good people, run by good people who try to do the right thing. Just because publicly traded companies are sometimes forced by the shareholders to do things that aren't cool it doesn't mean business is bad, or even that big business is bad.

Re:What's the difference?

[causality]

Just because publicly traded companies are sometimes forced by the shareholders to do things that aren't cool it doesn't mean business is bad, or even that big business is bad.

Most of the time, it's not that they are run by evil people, it's really just what happens when a (very) large group tries to think. It all becomes reduced to the lowest common denominator, causing the decision-making to be more selfish and more short-term, and replaces the ethics of an individual with a poor substitute, which is a need to follow any regulations and avoid legal liability. If there is to be a coherent organization, then there is simply no other mentality that a 10,000 person team could share other than "is this in the interests of the company?" with good employees separated from mediocre employees based on how much they care about that question. It's the effect that this singular focus has on any group consensus reached (either by being a decision-maker or by losing your job if you don't play along) that can be perceived as evil, although really it's amoral.

Most companies are full of good people, run by good people who try to do the right thing.

If you really look around you'll notice that most of the harm done in this world is not done by deliberate malice; it's done by people who have good intentions and fail to consider the full repercussions of their actions. No totalitarian government ever arose because "Do you want to live in a fascist police state?" was put to a vote. Even when this is the intention of a leader, it's always sold as a way to protect public safety, stop terrorists, etc. so that naive people can support feel-good measures with foreseeable negative side-effects while patting themselves on the back for how good their intent was.

The GP painted with a broad brush but your attempt to defend the good name of giant multinationals (the main cause of that perception) in terms of your personal, ethical, hard-working, money-for-kid's-college-funds-and-grandma-and-apple-pie one-man operation is not a valid comparison.

Re:What's the difference?

[confused_demon]

That's not really the problem with the RIAA, copyright laws or even counterfeiting laws.

IMO the problem is that copyright and counterfeiting laws were written when it was difficult to catch people that were producing forged goods or currency on a huge scale. For example, the minimum penalty for counterfeiting is a $250,000 fine, 5 years in prison, and the confiscation of all equipment used in the counterfeiting. That law makes a lot of sense when you're after someone that's made a printing press and is producing sheets of 100's. It's not so appropriate when you're going after a teenager that produced some shitty copies of a 20$ with an inkjet.

Similarly, RIAA is using laws designed to go after people selling pirated material on a massive scale to persecute people who aren't financially benefiting from copyright infringement. E.g. rather than reforming their distribution network, they're using copyright law as a club to try and fend off change and a new reality about how the world works.

If RIAA, the MPAA, and whomever else wants to make their customers happy and keep their businesses working properly, they need to switch to simultaneously release everything worldwide in pretty much every langauge. There's no reason I should have to wait 4 months to buy a DVD of a JP TV show for 30$, when someone in Japan adds subtitles and posts it on the internet the day after it airs in Japan.

Wow!

[Perseid]

A season of X-Files, presumably bootleg, is $56. I think I'm in the wrong line of work. Anyway, perhaps the reason they aren't being pursued is that they may not be in the US. If they are in, for example, Russia, allofmp3 has shown how much fun suing them can be. Single mothers with Kazaa, on the other hand, tend to be easy to pick off.

Re:Wow!

[ShaunC]

A season of X-Files, presumably bootleg, is $56. I think I'm in the wrong line of work.

Oh, and that reminds me. The X-Files is my absolute favorite television series of all time. Through Blockbuster Online or Netflix, you can rent all nine seasons on DVD for far less than $56. They appear in your mailbox on DVD, one right after the other. IMO, it's better to go the legit route. You get a real, honest-to-gosh DVD to hold in your hands, and watch, and do whatever else you might do with it.

There's really no sense buying the junky bootlegs on a street corner. I honestly don't understand how any for-profit duplicators make it these days. It was one thing in the age of VHS tapes, but in our current environment, it's far easier for the average consumer to get his hands on a legitimate, high quality copy (and "back it up") than it's worth attempting to purchase a counterfeit copy.

Alas, the penalties for downloading (or uploading) a movie via, say, BitTorrent are tens of times more harsh than the penalties for buying or selling a counterfeit DVD on the street, or for just shoplifting the damned thing. So I guess I don't understand why these guys get into the business. They'd face less potential jail time if they set up a rape/murder cartel.

Re:Wow!

[speaker of the truth]

IMO, it's better to go the legit route. The problem is people think TVBoxSet is a legit route.

Re:Wow!

[bruins01]

I think it has more to do with the public's perception of legality. What I mean to say is that the public, in general, knows that what this website is doing is illegal, so all of its customers will be people who know they are breaking the law and don't care. People who engage in the petty downloading and "making available" or songs, such as the defendant in the Duluth case, are choosing sides in a battle in which neither side has a great moral advantage over the other. It is well-publicized that many filesharers believe they are acting with moral superiority, and they make a pretty good point. As a result of this, the RIAA files lawsuits demanding ridiculous sums for damages in an effort to scare the hell out of filesharers. The RIAA and the MPAA are trying to win on two fronts, the moral front and the scare-the-hell-out-of-everybody front. They run commercials before movies explaining how you downloading Independence Day ruins the lives of the people in charge of applying Will Smith's makeup, and then they scare the hell out of the people who share files anyway with lawsuits.

In other words, there's no one to scare when you go after the website in Canada except other people who are running websites like that, and how many of those are there? I can't think of any.

It's very disconcerting that the **AAs care so little about winning the morality battle. They technically had the law on their side, even before the laws were changed to their current, even more Draconian form. But they chose instead to squander all their moral capital for dumb lawsuits and extortion schemes that couldn't possibly be worth the attorney's fees. Now they are alienating an entire young generation (I'm 22 and I don't know a single person who doesn't hate the them), who are eventually going to have kids who are going to be told all about the assholes that make up the **AAs.

They could have parlayed their moral capital into genuine concern from the public, but decided to go over their heads to their congresspeople and their courthouses and they are going to pay the price.

Re:Wow!

[Tweekster]

I find bootlegs to be of higher quality than the original. No FBI warnings, no user prohibitions on skipping more warnings etc.

Wrong purpose

[speaker of the truth]

If the purpose was to go after infringers in order to recuperate lost sales, they wouldn't be going after housewives or children who pirate for personal use, they'd be going after commercial pirates. Y'know, the people that the ridiculously high penalties were created for?

Instead the MPAA's purpose is to create an environment of fear. This is presumably so people will forget their fair use rights and give them up so the MPAA studios can put even more DRM on their products.

Re:Double standards!

[laughingcoyote]

If we really must use your poor analogy, it would be more like:

"I got caught speeding 10 miles an hour over the limit once, and got 15 years in jail for it. In the meantime, there's a guy who's running around hitting pedestrians all over the city. They know exactly who he is and where to find him, but they haven't even given him a ticket yet."

Re:They're safe because they are identifiable

[TubeSteak]

Personally, I believe they're getting off scott-free because TVBoxSet.com is a company That's a pretty dumb line of thought.
If anything, they're easier to go after since they have a business address & a bank account.

As a side note: Why would anyone contact the MPAA and not the CRIA about a situation with a Canadian company?

Re:They're safe because they are identifiable

[Harold Halloway]

I think you are right. eBay has probably hundreds or thousands of bootlegs for sale at any one time. Does the RIAA/MPAA does anything? Nope. The Federation Against Copyright Theft in the UK are similarly not interested in going after eBay. The reason is obvious - companies have huge legal budgets to throw at any lawsuits coming from RIAA/MPAA and there is no certainty that the latter would win. It's bizarre: distribute songs for nothing and get a $200,000 fine. Sell them and get away scot-free.

Re:No double standard -- Mail fraud proceedings

[Antique Geekmeister]

There's nothing to investigate: send one check for a pirated version, trace the transaction, seize the bank records and assets. This is basic behavior for credit card fraud, so it's not like it's a new procedure.

No, the federal and local police usually can't be troubled to pursue such "minor" crimes. Sometimes it's for jurisdictional reasons: the local police want the FBI to do it, the FBI thiknks the Secret Service should do it, and the Secret Service thinks it's not worth their effort. I'm tired of it, too: I get pirate DVD salespeople harassing me in parking lots, and taking up useful booth space at swapfests and trunk sales, interfering with honest businesses selling real DVD's, used DVD's, or freeware DVD's.

Re:They're safe because they are identifiable

[squiggleslash]

That's simply not true. My wife bought a DVD box set from eBay recently that turned out to be bootlag. In the process of trying to get a refund, the seller was shut down by eBay due to piracy complaints. The whole thing made matters worse for my wife, who was accused of turning the seller in and who generally went from "slightly nuts" to full-on "Maybe we should get a restraining order".

Generally bootleg sellers on eBay don't last long. The issue right now is that policing them is a little more difficult. Unless the eBayer is selling something that's never been on the media offered, or is stupid enough to directly admit the item is bootleg in the description, the copyright holder actually has to buy a sample before he or she can be certain that copyright violations are going on. This is in contrast to someone redistributing a studio's movie via BitTorrent, where the movie has never been released in a form that would allow for that redistribution legally. It's immediately obvious a violation of copyright is occurring and the studio can immediately start legal action.

Even then, the number of BitTorrent movie redistribution copyright violation cases is tiny. A lot of people here seem to be conflating the movie industry's efforts with the music industry's, but these are two entirely seperate actions, and the music industry isn't exactly reknowned for sitting on its hands when it comes to commercial piracy either.

Re:Double standards!

[Hal_Porter]

I got caught speeding 10 miles an hour over the limit once

I.e. you broke the law. Prepare to pay the price.

there's a guy who's running around hitting pedestrians all over the city. They know exactly who he is and where to find him, but they haven't even given him a ticket yet.

They fact that they haven't caught him doesn't give you a license to break the law. Neither does excessive penalties, the fact that enforcing the law is advocated by rich or nasty people, "information wants to be free", vague arguments that the people you're stealing from should change business models or any of the other pro piracy arguments that get moderated up here. Seriously, all this stuff is irrelevant.

If you break the law despite knowing the penalties for doing so are severe, you know what to expect.

Re:Double standards!

[Mathinker]

> They fact that they haven't caught him doesn't give you a license to break the law.

Correct, but unfortunately not connected with the point trying to be made (you missed it in your knee-jerk reaction against breaking copyright law), which is that the situation raised as an analogy in laughingcoyote's post would indicate that there is something wrong with the justice system (within his analogy). The justice system being analogous to "the content industry" in this case.

And before you lash out at me in similar fashion, note that I also have made no pro-piracy statements. The matter in question is whether the behavior of "the content industry" seems reasonable, not whether piracy is OK or justified or not.

In my eyes, the major problem with the argument in question is that the poster lumps a lot of relatively unrelated organizations (RIAA, MPAA, and all their respective "shadows" in non-US countries) into one cohesive "content industry", in order to criticize its behavior as being disjointed and arbitrary.

Re:They're safe because they are identifiable

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless the eBayer is selling something that's never been on the media offered, or is stupid enough to directly admit the item is bootleg in the description, the copyright holder actually has to buy a sample before he or she can be certain that copyright violations are going on.

So I'm guessing you've missed all the Slashdot stories about people who were selling single, legitimate copies of software they did not need or no longer needed getting their auctions quickly shut down by eBay for copyright infringement, just on the say-so of companies like Autodesk and Microsoft?

My thoughts

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, I don't care if something is "pirated" if it is otherwise unavailable. The only way to get DVD copies of things such as "Song Of The South" or early-80s Traci Lords movies is through so-called "piracy".
As for this TVBoxSet company, I'd be very leery of them.

Re:Motion Picture Association

[tepples]

Surely that's the point the MPA is what you linked to, but the MPAA is what he was asking about. If MPAA and MPA operations are so separate, then why is MPA Canada hosted on mpaa.org?

Re:Double standards!

[totally bogus dude]

some obscure and no doubt untraceable company selling a few pirate DVDs

I'm not sure how you figure they'd be "untraceable". I mean, they're selling stuff, ergo there's a money trail. It's pretty damned hard to be untraceable when you're receiving money, at least if you intend to be able to do anything with that money. The best you can hope for is to have the money trail go into a different & unfriendly jurisdiction (or several different jurisdictions) to hamper efforts to trace it to you.

people uploading millions of songs to the internet

I think it's highly unlikely that any individual on the P2P networks is uploading "millions of songs", and it's also highly unlikely the volume an individual on a P2P network uploads even approaches what a for-profit DVD pirateer would be doing. It's certainly not the case for any of the well-publicized cases of individuals being prosecuted for sharing stuff on P2P networks.

The only reason an argument this weak is so popular with the mods is because it justifies them getting free stuff.

I think it's also because it implies corruption, incompetence and/or misplaced priorities on the part of The Man, and everyone likes that.

Re:Motion Picture Association

[Raptoer]

But in this case the jurisdiction doesn't work that way. The copyright holders (no idea if its in fact the MPAA or whoever) have copyrights in America, however when they do sue they have to do so according to Canadian law. It's not that they cannot sue, it's that they have to do so in a different fashion.

The most likely reason nobody has gone after these guys is that the guy in charge of figuring out who to go after has never even heard of these guys or for that matter doesn't understand that its these kind of "pirates" (I hate that term) that are the real problem.

I have sympathy for those single mother/grandmother / dead people who get sued by the RI/MPAA. I have no sympathy for these guys what so ever, they are profiting off of someone else's work.

Re:They're safe because they are identifiable

[squiggleslash]

No, I haven't. The fact that Microsoft is making bogus copyright complaints and clearly abusing the law does not mean the movie industry has some obligation to do likewise.