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RIAA Wants $1.5 Million Per CD Copied
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Not content with current statutory damages, the RIAA is pushing for higher damages for infringement, damages that would total $1.5 million for copying a CD with ten songs. It's all part of debate over the proposed PRO-IP Act. William Patry, a lawyer who wrote the seminal seven-volume reference on US copyright law, called it the most 'outrageously gluttonous IP bill ever introduced in the US.'"
These people are just "engineering expectations".
They introduce this outrageous dreck, then suggest something which is still outrageous but comparatively mild, like, for instance, forcing ISP's to disconnect users a-la france, or forcing them to pull great firewall of china style 'filtering', or prison sentences for college students.
Then, they'll bloviate on and on about how these new proposals are a "compromise"
Or.. this dreck is merely a red herring to distract activist groups away from that rider they put into the college funding bill to force schools to 'filter' their internet on pain of losing their federal grants.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
If a single copy of a CD has a value of $1.5M, how can you justify letting hundreds of thousands of copies on it sit on the shelves of major retailers worldwide, priced at gasp $10-$20?
This suggests that if I were to publish a copy of a CD online , even assuming it retails at $20, I would have to serve 75,000 copies of it personally to justify that infringement penalty. Consider that the only feasible way for me to do such a thing is to torrent it, and in this case I personally am not responsible for the entire distribution, the total distribution must be subdivided across every single person who downloads a copy, because they are also uploaders. Claiming penalties against every distributor for the total distribution is like double taxation, but tens of thousands of times worse - I should not be liable for the activities of others, except to the extent you can prove that I facilitated the very first unlicensed distribution and that said unlicensed distribution was directly responsible for the entire cascade of further infringement, and that all other copies of the works were suitably protected.
Complete B.S.
I just copied Icky Thump by the White Stripes and Parsifal by Richard Wagner, conducted by James Levine. The Wagner is 4 CDs, so does that mean I owe them a total $7.5mil?
Let me get my checkbook.
Strange, because the last time I was in a record store (a few years ago, honestly) the price tag was only about 14 bucks.
What a bunch of wankers the RIAA is. Talk about having an inflated sense of worth.
You are welcome on my lawn.
if i was a multimillionare i'd do it just to see the reaction.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
To put this in perspective, the entire US GDP in 2006 was $13.13 trillion. That's 8.7 million copied CDs.
I wonder what that is in Libraries of Congress.
Buddy of mine was working on a yacht with a schnazzy sound system. Once they realized what they had access to, all the technicians bought portable harddrives and made themselves a copy.
Good thing I didn't copy the 50Gigs of mp3's from CD, or I could be on the hook for a lot of money!
Might want to check the numbers. Last I heard most major artists were costing 1 to 5 million in the studio, that's ignoring the Michael Jackson 25 mill per album in studio expenses. That's an average and some are more. Low end artist may be in the 100K to 500K in studio time. I'm talking major labels not Jim Bob buying a few hours of studio time or doing it in his garage. The actual studio cost is a tiny part of the expense the majority going to expenses and demands of the artists. Some expenses are legit like studio musicians and engineer time in post processing and mixing but the bulk tends to be conditions artists demand and their small army of people that are around them. Also for a major album 3 mill would be on the low end for advertising. They don't spend film money but they spend north of what they spend on producing the albums, once again ignoring Michael Jackson, in his case he just shows up in public sporting a new nose or weird outfit. The real expense though are the five or ten albums that tanked to get the hit one. Now that sales for even established artists are dropping like rocks they are going to be far less likely to go with new talent. Kind of the irony of the situation. Companies like to play it safe when things get tight. Better to spend 5 or 10 mill cranking out another Brittany album than give ten unknown artists a shot at it. With a lot of the singers these days it's in the post production anyway. Ole Paris Hilton helped let the cat out of the bag on that one. She can't sing a note but her album was passable once they got finished filtering it. It's why so many young artists don't sing live, you'd never recognize their real voice. The excuse is the dance numbers and difficulty getting clean sound. The real reason is a good share are there for looks and can't really sing.
I disagree with the notion that Republicans = Democrats = Sold out There are real and serious differences between the two parties and anyone who tries to marginalize those differences is usually agitating for a 3rd party or giving in to apathy.
Indeed. Back when I was getting my feet wet in the field of data mining, I decided to download the voting records of the US Senate, at least for the last 20 or so years. This data is publicly available on the government web site. A few Perl scripts later and I had reduced the entire voting record to a single CSV file. Each "issue" (an item being voted on) was represented by a single row. Each column represented a specific Senator, and the values were either "For," "Against," or "No Vote."
I also created a perpendicular data set, where each row represented a Senator and each column represented a specific issue, with the values again being "For," "Against," and "No Vote."
I loaded these data sets into a general data mining tool and ran some trials. Among other experiments, I ran J48 to produce decision trees to predict vote values for each Senator, based on how the Senator voted on some specific "model issues," such as gun control legislation. In other words, based on how a Senator voted on certain issues I could predict how they voted on some target issue. If somebody voted against a pro-life abortion bill, how would they vote on a matter of pollution control? Etc. I also ran the perpendicular analysis: based on how other Senators voted on issue X, how would any given Senator vote on the same issue? These decision trees achieved predictive accuracies of greater than 80% in standard cross-validation testing.
The decision trees are also very informative in that they describe the political influences between Senators. If the topmost branch of the decision tree for Senator X is Senator Y, then we can assume there is some kind of friendship, similarity, or power relationship between those two Senators, at least to some degree. These decision trees are powerful tools for political analysis.
But more to the point, one of the best tests I conducted was the application of EM-clustering to the Senators themselves, with the goal being to divide them into "camps," where each camp had similar voting preferences. I allowed the EM-algorithm to decide, on its own, how many clusters to produce, using an MDL principle. I was only somewhat surprised when the algorithm created three clusters. All the Republicans ended up in cluster 1, along with two Democrats. The rest of the Democrats, as well as all the independents, ended up in cluster 2. The third cluster contained Senators who had run for President. (My theory on why the algorithm created a "Presidential cluster" is because Presidential candidates often spend a long time away from the Senate, during their campaigns, and therefore have long stretches of "No vote" on their records. This makes them appear somewhat similar to each other from a statistical viewpoint.)
When "dumb," statistically based data mining software is capable of grasping the clear differences between Republican and Democrat, it becomes impossible to argue with a straight face that the two parties are the same. A fucking computer can tell the difference, why can't a human?
(By the way, one of the Democratic Senators the computer placed into the Republican party was Hillary Clinton.)