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UK Consumers To Pay For Online Piracy
Wowsers writes "An article in The Times states that UK consumers will be hit with an estimated £500m ($800m US) bill to tackle online piracy. The record and film industries have managed to convince the government to get consumers to pay for their perceived losses. Meanwhile they have refused to move with the times, and change their business models. Other businesses have adapted and been successful, but the film and record industries refuse to do so. Surely they should not add another stealth tax to all consumers."
Anytime I feel bad about the current state of affairs here in America a story shows up with EU, UK, Australia, or Canada doing something that would be worse. It makes me remember that we haven't hit those points yet so we always have somewhere else to look at whatever policy in practice before we have to deal with it
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
Now when anybody in the UK contemplates pirating from the Big Ones, he'll know they are already reimbursed for it.
One that hath name thou can not otter
So it won't be piracy anymore, they will just be taking delivery on the goods they paid for.
On the contrary. They found that their old business model wasn't profitable enough so they switched to the far more lucrative business model of convincing the government to subsidize them. With the old model people could vote with their dollars (including piracy) but this new model removes all of those pesky market forces entirely.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
How much of this money will the artist see? Wouldn't suprise me if it was zero. Still, the real losses are worth $0 too so it's just another industry bailout in an industry posting record profits.
If everyone is being taxed for the "perceived loss", shouldnt that then make piracy legal? Wouldnt the pirated material being downloaded have been paid for by the people... thus making piracy completely legal?
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped or turned back, for their private benefit." - Heinlein
Seriously, if I were in the UK, spending money on music at all would feel like being double-charged after this fiasco. I'd feel I'd already "paid" for it through taxes. The irony is that the money will be wasted on punitive measures, so the industry won't even profit from it - and if it causes music sales to drop, they will be even worse off.
I honestly suspect that normally music piracy encourages more music sales, not less. But now the industry has managed to shoot even that in the foot.
What's actually happening is that the UK's government is forcing ISPs to warn people who they believe are breaking the law. Of course, ISPs are saying that this is expensive and that they plan to pass the costs along to consumers.
I think this is going to be a laughable clusterfuck.
It's worse than that.
The UK's government is forcing the ISPs to spend money to augment the benefits of the media business.
So, essentially, business A is paying the government to force business B to raise his prices and spend the money in business A's benefit.
And it won't be a clusterfuck because it's currently impossible to prove whether the imagined benefits will in fact exist.
With piracy, a company sells a copy and the buyer makes a copy for someone else(and whether that someone else would have bought a copy without piracy is debatable). If I buy a 99-cent song and give you a copy, that is "piracy".
With robbery, someone takes someone else's belongings. If someone takes your money without giving you anything and without your consent, that is "robbery".
This is robbery.
The music/movie industry want their cake and eat it too.
The content industries will NEVER accept the new world because they know that in the new world, they wont be the king of the hill anymore.
Right now in the old world, companies like Sony, Warner, Fox, Universal, Disney, EMI and Paramount are king of the hill.
With the new world order eliminating the huge production costs (you dont NEED a big studio full of gear to record a song anymore, you can do it in your garage with a PC, some software and some microphones to record with) and distribution costs (you can distribute your songs either for free or for pay online very easily without a middleman), you dont need the big dinosaurs anymore and they are doing everything they can to stop it from happening.
And unlike previous times when disruptive technologies were invented, those who stand to loose the most have the ear of government and are attempting to outlaw the disruptive technologies BEFORE they become mainstream.
Mr Petter said that the Bill, which is being rushed through Parliament before the general election next year, had been poorly thought out.
And they're not giving music guys free money (yet). The proposal is about cutting off repeated offenders from the net.
TFA seems to imply that the cost of "identify offenders, notify them, and cut them off" procedure would amount to 500m GPB, though it is not very clear about the numbers and whatnot.
Someone should have told them the cake is a lie.
One is the opportunistic thief that intends to merely take a copy of a product for their own use, the other is the opportunistic thief that wishes not only to copy your product but also wishes to make money from it.
The latter group sounds like it includes Sony, which has taken Idol outtakes and made albums that they don't feel obligated to pay the performer for their efforts. Sony also still owes the Bay City Rollers about $60 million from the 70s, which they haven't paid because Sony "lost" the original contract and isn't sure how to pay it out -- so they've kept it for 30 years. Then there is the list of 300,000 songs that all the majors put on compilation albums over the last couple of decades and never bothered to pay royalties on.
Now decide for yourself which is the actual pirate?
This bill is about requiring ISPs to shut off service to repeat copyright infringers, which the ISPs estimate will cost them (and by proxy, consumers) 500 million pounds.
It's not a "tax" and none of the money is going to subsidise the record and film industries, that's just complete crap from the summary writer, as is the crusty old "update your buisiness model, wah wah wah" copperlite.
The bill is also completely retarded, but you do no service to your cause by misrepresenting (and apparently, not even understanding) the enemy.
If you read TFA they actually want to spend the money on trying to chase people who pirate. So it's not officially to "pay for the music", it's to pay for punitive measures - so the music industry won't make any money out of it unless this strategy is effective in increasing sales (which I seriously doubt).
So in the eyes of the recording industry and the government, no, they're not going to be any happier about piracy or consider it paid for. In the eyes of the public being "taxed for piracy", maybe - I would not be at all surprised if piracy increased as a result of this bill.
I'd be happier if they did tax directly to support free music downloads. This money is a sheer waste. If only we could have an evil recording industry, instead of a stupid one... surely enlightened self-interest couldn't be as bad as what we have now.
So do a fair proportion of the 'consumers' of the movie and music industries - but we aren't allowed to talk about that side of it here on Slashdot...
Anytime I feel bad about the current state of affairs here in America a story shows up with EU, UK, Australia, or Canada doing something that would be worse.
Dont' let that lull you into a false sense of security - The US is the main actor behind most of these laws being passed so you will probably find that it is just the boiling frog method of shafting these laws in. Know your enemy. "THEY" are the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), and they have the full political clout of the US government behind them - working to subvert democratic process in just about every country in the world via stealth taxes/three strikes/no presumption of innocence for the sheeple. Countries sign on to this in exchange for "Free Trade" deals. Examples:
New Zealand Reintroduces 3 Strikes:
"IIPA testifies in support of the initiation of negotiations for a Trans-Pacific Partnership Free Trade Agreement (TPP FTA) with Singapore, Chile, New Zealand, Brunei Darussalam, Australia, Peru and Vietnam."... "Specific problems in some of the TPP countries are outlined in the Special 301 reports from 2009 for Chile, Peru, Brunei, and Vietnam".
Where "specific problems" mean: No three strikes laws, no trade deal.
Spain's Proposed Internet Law Sparks Protest:
IIPA report card on Spain. resulting US political clout result: local laws and taxes supporting mafiaa industry.
The sad part is that even though countries that want to be in on these trade "deals" are required to implement draconian anti-internet laws and filters, obliged to extradite civil cases to the US for trial (software piracy in this case), the resulting "Free Trade" agreement rewards generaly do not benefit the countries involved! Which begs the question, who does benefit... perhaps just the politicians who signed off on the deal?
The only way I can see to fight this kind of slide is to create a black list of any group/industry that lobbies any government in support these kinds of anti-democratic process trade deals. If any group supports trade deals that required destroying the internet, then the internet could become one humongous nightmare of bad press blog artices against your industry group. Seems only fair - shouldn't be able to have their cake and eat it too.
Don't come with that crap like: oh but otherwise I wouldn't have bought it anyway.. You watched it, so you owe them money, even though you might have found it crap...
Sorry, but you don't get to withhold arguments from the rebuttal.
The true "loss" that the industry suffers from piracy is the total they would earn if piracy did not exist at all, minus what they earned in reality; this magical "you watched it you owe them" concept doesn't apply to actual losses. The simple fact of the matter is that not every download would have translated into a sale without piracy. Be it a poor college student who cannot afford to purchase the same quantity of movies they download, or someone who's already purchased a copy, and is downloading a copy for convenience, or even a person who, should piracy not be an option, would buy a USED copy (meaning no money from that purchase goes to the movie industry), not every one would buy a brand new copy.
But don't confuse this with a defense of piracy; I believe quite strongly that people should be compensated for their work. I just believe a little more strongly that the entertainment industry's conduct towards it's customer base has been morally reprehensible, ie using scare tactics against innocent people because they're convinced that their half-assed unlicensed investigations are accurate. Not to mention to absurdity of decrying piracy as "killing the industry" while reaping record profits, all the while begging the government for "fixes" that erode the public's rights and cost innocent people money. This isn't even mentioning the outright fraud committed within the industry itself (do a search for "Hollywood accounting" if you want to know why most of the top grossing movies in history have either "barely made a profit", or in some cases made a "loss").
I will spell it out clearly, just for those of you who haven't caught on yet: this isn't about them recouping their supposed losses. This is about them raping our rights and making more money, any way they can.
My sig can beat up your sig.
Years ago it was rare for most people to regularly communicate with those in other countries, and if they did it was likely to be a very slow exchange involving letters written on paper... Movies would come out in one country and people in another wouldn't even realise until the same movie came out in their country 6 months later. And then there were format differences (NTSC, PAL etc) which made it more difficult to play foreign videos.
When i was younger, any media my parents bought me, they would make me copy and play the copy because as a child the chance of me damaging the original was pretty high.
Now, media is digital so the format difference becomes irrelevant, so they try to create an artificial difference (region coding)...
People regularly communicate worldwide, so when something comes out in one country people in another hear about it and get exposed to the marketing, only they have no legitimate way to obtain it... By the time it comes out in their country, it's already old news on the internet.
People want to copy the media they legitimately purchased onto multiple devices, portable players, media jukeboxes (large hard drives so lots of media is available immediately without the hassle of swapping disks), in-car players, backup copies...
People might want to play out of region movies/games, perhaps they bought some on holiday, perhaps some media isn't available in their country at all, although they will still be exposed to talk of it on the internet.
Nowadays, only "pirate" copies provide the fair use rights we were once able to exercise or would like to exercise using new technology.
Consider that the "pirates" are providing a superior product for a lower cost. In fact, if the pirates charged the same price their product would still be superior. Without artificial help from the government, the media companies business model simply couldn't exist.... Your tax dollars are paying to prop up a broken business model so that what little money you have left after tax can go to them too in exchange for a crippled product.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
So are seedboxes going to cause entire data centers or hosting providers to be disconnected? Users in the closed tracker communities pay for seedboxes at remote hosting facilities to help boost speeds and their ratio and they could single handily cause down time or disruption to 1000s of users if this laws consequences was applied to them.
My guess is that if this law goes through then seedboxes would become even more popular. Seed from the remote box, and VPN between the box and the home user. It has to be a much safer option already... bandwidth is cheap and disk space is always getting cheaper.
What about public WiFi projects and airports, hotels etc? As usual there are some fringe cases where this law just doesn't work.
Piracy is theft
Copyrights are not property, they are special, temporary rights granted by the government for a limited time to encourage particular kinds of activities. Therefore, copyright violations are not theft. Furthermore, we as a society get to define what actions constitute a copyright violation.
According to this fluff piece in the Times.
What's a poor citizen to do?
Every single UK broadband subscriber will be taxed / fined an extra £25 per year, to prop up the film and music industry.
Nice work if you can get it.
Why not subsidise the fax industry as well, and the cassette tape industry, and while we are at it, how about the buggy whip manufacturing industry?
Business has a thing called "externalisation", what it boils down to is putting as much cost as possible outside the business, a classic example is a textile mill that externalises the cost of polluting, simply by dumping the pollutants into the local river. Someone else, downstream, can pick up the tab.
The justification for this is that allegedly the latest Star Trek movie was downloaded 11 million times in 2009.
Around 150 million visits to the cinema per year happen in the UK, if you take the alleged 11 million star treks, add in the harry potters, avatars (holds hand up) etc etc it is no stretch of the imagination to claim that 150 million movie downloads happened in the UK in 2009.
According to this metric, and the false logic employed, if downloading was banned, cinema attendances would double.
Bullshit.
Here is why;
1. There is the false logic assumption that if I had not downloaded Avatar, I would have gone to the cinema and paid to see it. This is utterly false. You would have to pay me at least £5 to set foot in a cinema, to compensate me for the travel, mobile phones, noisy bastards, no smoking or drinking, inability to pause, crap seats, etc etc.
2. There is the false logic assumption that people like me with 46 1080p screens who prefer the comforts of our own homes would substitute the video rental shop for the cinema. Rubbish. The video rental shops don't have anything new, or anything good, or much choice of anything, and quite apart from that I have no interest in watching a Blu-ray that does not let me skip past 15 minutes of promo crap.
3. There is a false logic assumption that the media in question (whether it is cinema or rental) is value for money, I am simply not prepared to pay £5 per head for a cinema ticket, or £5 a night for a DVD, for 90 minutes of "entertainment" It is just way too expensive.
4. There is a false logic assumption, in short, that the 11 million downloads of Star Trek represent even 1 single lost cinema sale or DVD rental... You are reading this because it is free, would you pay £5 to read it? Stupid question. Would you pay £0.01 to read it? Stupid question.
5. There is a false logic assumption that the decline in cinema attendance figures, record sales, etc, say compared to 1970, is due to a change in people's attitudes, we have suddenly become a nation of thieves. Simply not true. These EXACT SAME ARGUMENTS were made about the compact audio cassette.
6. There is a false logic assumption that it is acceptable to impose a fine / tax / tariff on EVERYONE, that would be like mandating that I must buy a television licence, even though I haven't watched television for 20 years.
7. There is a false logic assumption that the technologies that they are going to deploy are actually going to catch people illegally sharing copyright material, ONLY, and NO-ONE ELSE, and indeed this is implicitly acknowledged in the desire to fine / tax / tariff ALL users of broadband, irrespective of what they do.
8. There is a false logic assumption that we are dealing with a static target, the ever evolving technology means that it really does not matter what methods you use to counter copyright violations (NOT copyright theft, no one is stealing your actual copyright, and no one is depriving anyone else of their use) because within the month (and I am being generous) they will be cracked.
9. T
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
This is going too far. Check through my posts and you've seen many many times I've been in favour of penalising people who pirate. I've lambasted TPB et al and the people who use them and been modded down many many times. BUT. As a UK citizen who will be paying this, if they're going to extort money out of me for something I've never done, then fuck em, I'm going to get my money back and in that case, that means jumping on the P2P bandwagon. After all, I'm now going to be paying for what I download. I reckon 3-4 MP3s a month is about fair compensation going on the average legal download service track price.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
He isn't comparing anything to the Holocaust -- that poem happens to have been inspired by events that took place during the Holocaust, but it is meant to be applicable to any situation where you have the power to help others but choose to mind your own business instead, only finding out later that your inaction comes back to bite you in the ass. Even if it was a comparison to the Holocaust, we are all intelligent enough to realize that there is a difference of degree here -- something can be similar to the Holocaust without being anywhere near as serious. Furthermore, just because you are comparing one aspect of a social phenomenon to a similar aspect of another social phenomenon does not even remotely imply that they are equal in any other regard.
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
So how should they "change their business model to move with the times?" And what other industry similar to music has already done this? People say all the time that the music industry is "just going to have to change their business model."
Ok ... so HOW?
I'm seriously looking for input and ideas here.