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Commerce Department Pushing For New "Copyright Czar"
TechDirt is reporting that those all-too-familiar "stats" surrounding the cost of piracy are being trotted out in an attempt to push through a new "Copyright Czar" position. "In urging President Bush to sign into law the ProIP bill, which would give him a copyright czar (something the Justice Department had said it doesn't want), the US Chamber of Commerce is claiming that 750,000 American jobs have been lost to piracy. Yet, it doesn't cite where that number comes from."
If we just hire 750,000 copyright czars, well there ya go. That would be mavericky, you betcha.
We know where those lost jobs went, India and Pakistan all pirated our IT jobs.
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Oh Well, Bad Karma and all . . .
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
The Commerce Department is not the US Chamber of Commerce.
Chamber of Commerce = non-for-profit business federation.
Commerce Department = Federal Government Entity.
As a matter of fact, the Commerce Department OBJECTS to a "Copyright Czar"
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
They got that number from Henry Paulson - he's so good at pulling out random large numbers that sound plausible while being founded on nothing of substance, after all.
Are there even that many people working in the music and movies/tv industry in this country?
The numbers came from The U.S. Department of the Posterior.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 383,000 people employed in the Motion picture and sound recording industries in September 2008.
My money is on the idea that they took the amount the industries estimate they lose from piracy and then divided that by some moderate wage.
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
It's too bad that one of the jobs lost wasn't Uwe Boll's. I'm just sayin'.
We figured out a long time ago that it's easier to elect seven judges than to elect 132 legislators.
We need a content producer bailout!!!
Easy. It comes from the set of real numbers.
This tagline is copyrighted material. Please send $10 for an affordable replacement.
YOU could turn on a radio or stream a station.
YOU also have a choice, but please, continue to justify it for us.
Steal it if you want to, don't steal it if you don't want to, but please don't expect us to believe that you're being forced to download music at gunpoint.
That 750,000 jobs number comes a very reliable source, the bird. Haven't you heard, about the bird?
stuff |
claiming that 750,000 American jobs have been lost to piracy
Overexaggerated number for sure, but jobs may very well have been lost because of piracy. But, so what? Let me formulate the matters in another light.
750,000 American jobs would have been wasted if piracy hadn't existed to combat the inherent inefficencies in the copyright and IP systems.
Jobs are good if they actually produce something useful to society. Otherwise they are just a big waste, and do little more than shuffle resources around because the current system don't have a better way to allocate it.
Even if more actual intellectual property were produced with stronger IP laws, it still isn't sure that it would be a better idea. The real value of IP isn't how much is produced, but how much is produced times how well spread it is among the population. Also, that total value has to be balanced against the cost of producing it.
Say that 700,000 more jobs would be created. That is a multi billion cost. And what would be the gain. More tv? More music? More movies? It isn't like there is a lack of choice right now.
It comes from the set of real numbers.
Funny, I could have sworn it looked imaginary.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Has any of these "czars" the US government has been fond of appointing the past decade or so actually accomplished anything except creating more serfs?
Why does the US government have people modeled on the most hated monarchs, who drove Russians so nuts that they went "Communist" on us for 3/4 of a century, and nearly helped us blast the world back to microscopic life?
How about Congress just returns copyright to its Constitutional basis: at most 17 years (a human "generation") of private monopoly on any content, but only when that monopoly will "promote progress in science and the useful arts". That regime doesn't need a czar, it needs a searchable content registry archive and an antitrust watchdog.
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make install -not war
Although it is more in the thousands, possibly as high as ten thousand, it is true that there has been a significant amount of job loss due to piracy in the companies that bring japanese anime over to the US. I've talked with voice actors as well as people who run those companies, and piracy really has hurt them. Some companies are closing up shop, others are just having to severely cut back to make ends meet. This was never a large profit business in the first place, and with people downloading it so much as opposed to buying the DVDs they can't manage to squeak by.
The irony of this is that the "copyright czar" would probably just ignore this as the MPAA and RIAA aren't involved. Not that I'm advocating law suits against people who do pirate it, as I think that is way over the top, just pointing out that people HAVE lost their jobs due to piracy.
Not sure if you're being serious or not, but the Russian "Tsar" has historically been tranliterated into English as Czar or Tsar. For a long time one might have found it spelled either way, but since "Czar" started being used to describe a high government official, e.g., "Drug Czar" the CZ spelling has tended to be applied to that use, while the TS spelling has now nearly always come to be applied to the rulers of the Russian Empire. The OED comments thusly: The spelling with cz- is against the usage of all Slavonic languages; the word was so spelt by Herberstein, Rerum Moscovit. Commentarii 1549, the chief early source of knowledge as to Russia in Western Europe, whence it passed into the Western Languages generally; in some of these it is now old-fashioned; the usual Ger. form is now zar; French adopted tsar during the 19th c. This also became frequent in English towards the end of that century, having been adopted by the Times newspaper as the most suitable English spelling.
Proverbs 21:19
Why does a free market economy need czars? Aren't they an invention of the same country that adopted communist central planning to such poor effect?
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Great idea. I nominate Lawrence Lessig!
YOU could turn on a radio
And sample it. Three or four hours of top-40 radio will have all the hits on your hard drive. Piracy? It's label-sanctioned piracy!
Steal it if you want to, don't steal it if you don't want to
Stealing: You walk into Best Buy or Walmart, stick a CD under your coat, and walk out.
Copyright infringement: Uploading your CD collection as MP3s on Kazaa. Or downloading with Morpheus and letting the downloads go into your "share" folder.
Stealing: misdemeanor retail theift, small fine.
Copyright infringement: Civil suit with a huge payment.
Downloading without sharing; sampling the radio, downloading or buying indie music: PRICELESS as it helps drive the copyright cartel out of business. I, for one, wish to see Sony and the other three evil mainstream labels GO UNDER. They are hindering the creation of art, hampering the independant artists who aren't in it for the dough.
They are, in my opinion, EVIL and should die horribly.
YMMV. HAND.
Free Martian Whores!
Sure, you could say that the lender and lendee are each about half responsible. But the difference is that the lender is supposed to have known better: their job is finance. By contrast, the average homeowner has no financial expertise.
Thus two sides mutually entered a stupid contract, but one of the sides was actually staffed by full-time professionals whose supposed expertise lay precisely in evaluating contracts for non-stupidity.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
No you don't. My cell costs less than 1/2 that.
Mine costs triple that. I couldn't bring it down to save my life. If I had your deal at ~$20/mo I'd end up paying hundreds a month in airtime. If he says he HAS to have a phone at $40/month, why not take him at his word. Maybe if he shaves $20 bucks of his plan, it will cost him hundreds. Sure he could talk less, but that might mean not talking to clients, again costing him hundreds...
Instead of being 'stuck in the house', a second job, or school to get a better job, might be in order. And NetZero is only $9.95/month..:)
1) Going to school costs money, and likely conflicts with work.
2) Getting a 2nd job likely conflicts with his first job, and usually results in massive stress. Lots of people CAN'T just get a 2nd job. If you work a mc-job or mall-job for example, where they seemingly schedule staff blindfolded with a dart board, you can't possible hope to find a compatible 2nd job, and if you limit your availability at one job to give your self some gaurantee for the other one, they more often than not retaliate by dropping you down to 1 shift every two weeks... meaning you now have no job.
Getting a 2nd job for a lot of people usually means finding a 1st job that has static reliable hours first, before they can even think about getting a 2nd job. And who knows, maybe he's looking for a new, better, first job, that's as good as his current job but with better hours. It doesn't happen overnight.
And Netzero? Please.
Don't use your apparent insolvency to justify why you think you are entitled to music for free.
He's not saying he's entitled. He's saying he's not costing the industry anything, because if he couldn't download the songs for free its not like he would buy them. He's saying, rightly, that "losses" due to copyright infringement are inherently false because the majority of the billions of dollars of "lost revenue" don't exist. For a lot of people, including him: if they couldn't consume for free they wouldn't consume at all.