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Campaign Urges People To Send MPAA and RIAA Copied Currency
An anonymous reader writes "In response to the still-raging MPAA & RIAA, a kind of reverse piracy campaign has arisen. The "Send Them Your Money" campaign urges pirates and landlubbers alike to send scanned images of American currency to these agencies. According to the campaign's webpage, 'They've made it very clear that they consider digital copies to be just as valuable as the original.' The operation gained fame via sites like Reddit and Tumblr, inspiring citizens of other countries to send their legal tender to the MPAA and RIAA."
Just make sure your money is slightly bigger than real money or you might end up in Guantanamo bay.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Haven't they found proprietary code/hardware in scanners that obscures images of money ?
I would think that a "law abiding" group like the MPAA/RIAA would report people to the Treasury department for counterfeiting .
UPS Sucks
You might want to think about it first. http://www.secretservice.gov/money_law.shtml
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
Actually, they tend to have the firmware, yes...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation
I was going to say, isn't this a felony?
Sounds like an easy way to get everyone that opposes you in a whole heap of trouble, all in one hit. So let's not do them any favors, eh?
Apparently it's ok as long as:
The copy has to be one-sided
The copy has to be the wrong size. It has to be at least 75% smaller or 150% larger than an actual bill
You have to destroy the negatives, graphic files, or “digitized storage mediums” after their final use
INAAL so if you go to jail after following this advice, I'll just laugh at you. But i read it on the internet.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
“Now wait,” you say, “isn’t copying money illegal?” Not if you do it right. Reproducing images of money (in the United States at least) is perfectly legal under three conditions:
The copy has to be one-sided
The copy has to be the wrong size. It has to be at least 75% smaller or 150% larger than an actual bill
You have to destroy the negatives, graphic files, or “digitized storage mediums” after their final use
That won't work.
Scan it in, and add in the text in a white box "This is a copy. Not worth the same as the original, is it?"
Distributing a copy of money, even if the size is different to make it clear it is fake is sometimes considered counterfeit by the secret service, particularly if someone is already gunning for you. If you include a very clear disclaimer on the bill, any case should be thrown out by the courts because it will be obvious there is no intent to pass off your copy as the real deal.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
It shouldn't matter, as long as you're sending them only scans and not printouts. A scan or photograph could not be reasonably considered a counterfeit bill as long as it's not printed. The title and article misleadingly say "copied" bills, but the actual campaign says to send scans and photographs.
You can read all the rules about copying money here: Rules For Use
"False hope is why we'll never run out of natural resources!" - Lewis Black
Incorrect, as long as you follow the rules. Rules For Use
"False hope is why we'll never run out of natural resources!" - Lewis Black
No, this is very real in color photocopiers and color laser printers. They tend to place a copy of their serial number at regular intervals on color printouts, in such a faint yellow that it's impossible for the human eye to see. This makes any color printout traceable to the machine that printed it. Commonly in use by law enforcement for tracking things like death threats, ransom notes, etc.
Google for "hidden yellow serial number" and find lots of information from reputable sources. First hit I glanced at just now is from PC World. Good quote from there, Peter Crean, a senior research fellow at Xerox, says his company's laser printers, copiers and multifunction workstations, such as its WorkCentre Pro series, put the "serial number of each machine coded in little yellow dots" in every printout. The millimeter-sized dots appear about every inch on a page, nestled within the printed words and margins. "It's a trail back to you, like a license plate," Crean says.
No tinfoil hat necessary, this one's for real. Last time I looked this up I ran across a technician that works at one of those in R&D telling how every one of their color copiers has a dedicated board inline in the image processing chain whose only job is to "insert" the serial number into the image stream before it goes to the imager.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
A digital bit-for-bit copy of a movie has almost the same value as the original dvd/bluray/stream
Or more. After all, it's probably going to be easier to transcode and use if it isn't on a medium where the reader enforced DRM. Playing back a ripped DVD has several advantages over playing back the original. For example, if I pause the movie for a few minutes and the disk spins down, I get a stutter when I resume with the DVD. I don't with the ripped version, even if it's a bitwise copy. If the machine goes into power-saving mode, the player needs to reauthenticate with the drive, and often fails so the movie skips back to the start with a DVD. It doesn't with the ripped version, even with the CSS intact, because the encryption is handled entirely in software. So, from the perspective of a user, the copy is more valuable...
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http://www.27bslash6.com/overdue.html
GENERATION O98346: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig and remove a random number from the generation. T
MPAA and RIAA often argue that piracy is theft. The whole point of this campaign is to illustrate the difference between piracy and theft by providing an example of object which copy is worthless while theft isn't.
I don't think so. If everyone went to the bank and asked to withdraw all accounts, banks would not have the physical assets to do so.
Banks are required to keep at least a specific percentage of their deposits on hand to deal with withdrawals. For the rest, they'll tell you to come back tomorrow or the day after and they'll be ordering what they need from either another branch or the Federal Reserve. In either case, there is a physical object that you can get for that digital ledger entry, you just might not be able to get it the moment you demand it. If you look carefully, you'll note that your bank probably has a clause in their terms of service that tell you a time and quantity limit on taking your money out as cash.
See here, or here. It is called "fractional reserve".
There is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation
Ok, I'll try to make it simple.
The idea behind the campaign is that the MPAA thinks that the copies that float about the internet is money lost to them. Because the value of that copy is the same as the one they would have sold to you. Value, by definition, is determined by the one who WANTS a commodity, not the person who wants to get rid of it. Because the value of a commodity is by definition only what a prospective interested party is able and willing to pay for it.
Allow me an example. I want a bigger TV. But not enough to pay the price a bigger TV would cost. Hence I am not willing to pay the price for it and thus no sale happens. As you can see, my willingness to pay the price, not the seller's willingness to sell it for a certain price, determines whether a sale happens.
People copy content. I hope I'm not spilling breaking news here, I guess it's pretty much common knowledge by now that this happens. The question now is whether this constitutes a lost sale. That in turn is determined by the question whether people would be willing to pay the price they would alternatively have to pay if they could not copy.
The content industry now claims that they do. It is very likely, though, that the number of people able and willing to pay the price would be much lower than the 100% they claim. Will nobody buy? Certainly not, there's of course people who would buy if they cannot copy, but I would guess we're a far cry from the windfall they claim.
And the price for that, the loss of the internet as we know it, is far too steep for such a petty gain.
The idea behind the protest is now exactly that claim. That the copy someone made is a lost sale, and hence lost money to them. So it's only logical to send them a copy of money for the copy of their content. Sounds reasonable if you ask me.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.