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."

Comments

Genius.

[Severus Snape]

I think I might do the same.

Re:Genius.

[clodney]

I think you missed the point. If you make a copy of a dollar bill, you can't use the copy. It is by definition not as valuable as the original. If you make a copy of a CD, you can use the copy. It is just as valuable as the original. Only a moron wouldn't see the difference.

If I make a perfect, bit for bit copy of a dollar bill, it is worth almost exactly as much as the original. Because by saying I made it perfectly, I have said that it is undetectable and I can pass it without fear of getting caught. It is worth ever so imperceptibly less than the original, because I have increased the money supply, leading to some inflation. And note that I didn't just devalue my new shiny dollar bill, I devalued all the money in circulation.

Put in those terms, the government's anti-counterfeiting laws and the MPAA/RIAA anti-copying campaigns seem very much equivalent - both are designed to preserve the scarcity of something that has little intrinsic value, but instead has value in part because of its scarcity. Allowing unrestrained production of either leads to devaluation.

So I think that this publicity stunt of sending images of currency to the RIAA is just proving their point - copying is bad, m'kay?

Re:Genius.

[Fned]

If you print up a trillion dollars worth of perfect copies of money, are you now a trillionaire? Of course not. It is just paper.

If you distribute that trillion dollars worth of perfect fakes to a hundred million people, have you done any harm? Hell yes. All money just became worth a whole lot less. The people who legitimately own the money supply (ie all of us) have been harmed.

1. You've made perfect copies of a physical object, so those copies have a discrete value.
2. The copies represent an even greater value -- that is to say, each copy GRANTS ACCESS to a specific unit of real value. If you falsely get access to something valuable, that hurts the people who have legitimate access to that value.

Does illegally copying a song reduce access to everyone else who has a legitimate copy? No. They can still listen all the way to the end of their own copies, anytime they like.

(Unless they have a DRM'd copy, then they might not be able to access the content they legally own a copy of).

If digital copies have no value, why do so many people want them (to the point that they are willing to break the law to get them)?

They don't. They want access to the content. Here's the problem: giving someone a copy gives them access to the content. But since the copy has no value, the person with access can create infinite copies at will. In fact, they have to make and destroy multiple copies every time they want to access the content.

This is why there is no technical solution for DRM: you have to grant access to make copies, and deny access to make copies, to the same party simultaneously This works perfectly with physical copies, since one person having access to that copy automatically means someone else doesn't, and there is an inherent cost to making more physical copies. Not so with digital copies.

Even if, science-fictionally-hypothetically here, you could get it to work, it wouldn't make the copies valuable; it would just allow you to conveniently monetize access to the work, sort of the way a theater does.
 

Your point that digital copies have zero value is demonstrably 100% false.

You are 100% wrong. They have no intrinsic value at all. Period. All value assigned to them is based on crude modifications to laws designed for physical objects.
Creating them is valuable, and accessing them is valuable, but copying them is not valuable. You cannot make them valuable by saying so over and over.

Value is determined by the desirability of something, not its cost to produce. Is a gold nugget found in a stream while fishing any less valuable than one that was mined at great expense?

So, you were in Econ 101, and the professor was talking about the relationship between "supply and demand", and, what... you woke up during "and"?!

DIGITAL FILES ARE NOT PHYSICAL OBJECTS. THEY DO NOT BEHAVE THE WAY PHYSICAL OBJECTS BEHAVE. Is a gold nugget that you created by waving your magic wand at it worth anything? If everyone has a magic wand, the answer is "no." If everyone can create gold nuggets with a wave of a magic wand, gold nuggets become worthless. You cannot sell them at any price under that condition.

Infinite supply always drives price down to infinitely small, unless demand is also infinite.

Re:i thought scanners won't scan money?

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually worked for a copier company once upon a time.
When users tried to make copies of money the copiers would display an error code and lock the machine until a technician was called at which time we were "required" to inform the manufacturer and the authorities.

We only ever ran into this issue twice. Once at an office which though it would be funny to make copies of dollar bills with the employees photos on them and another time at a police station which needed to make copies of counterfeit bills for use as evidence in a trial.

Re:i thought scanners won't scan money?

[slaker]

Ages ago I was teaching a bunch of people how to work scanners in a training session. We scanned a whole bunch of stuff and most people were clearly able to see that commercially printed content doesn't look appreciably different when scanned at 600dpi or 1200dpi. Eventually I had the bright idea to try to scan a $20 bill since they're actually fine fabric and not paper. It scanned fine at 600dpi and previewed OK at higher settings, but every time I tried to scan it at a higher setting, the area of the bill would be replaced by black pixels in the finished image. My students and I decided it was probably an anti-counterfeiting measure and after about 40 minutes of experimentation with things like discoloring the bills, tearing them so they no longer resembled whole bills (we used a couple $1s for that), zooming in on small areas etc. we determined that whatever was going on was actually pretty tough to fool.

Re:Just an FYI

[microcars]

or just ask your accounting department what they think. *cough*

Years ago I used to work in the film biz and we did a good number of commercials for the State Lottery.
There was always a call for lots of "money" floating about in various forms.
We got the most realistic "fake" money that was available from The Earl Hays Press in California.
Their website does not list it but I'm pretty sure they still provide it. It looks pretty real unless you compare it to another "real" bill.
Once, when I was visiting, someone there told me that the current incarnation was as far as they could go. They had apparently made something a bit more realistic, the Secret Service decided it was "too" good and confiscated the plates.

Anyways, for some jobs when we only needed a few bills to film for something we STILL had to use "fake" money.
The accounting dept people at the Ad Agency would always demand it to cover their asses. They read the rules as "any photographic reproduction" to apply to filming money so it could appear on a TV set as being involved in counterfitting.
So then I would bring out the "best" fake money available and they would complain that it did not look real enough. (???)
I once did this dance back and forth on a job and finally relented and showed them the most advanced "fake" money available for movie use, -it just became available this month-!
It was a real $100 bill. They fell for it and filmed it.
No one went to jail or lost their job.

Re:

[Obfuscant]

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.

Except that by sending the copy to **AA as "legal tender" and trying to pay for your copy of digital content with it, you are unambiguously showing an intent to pass off the copy as real.

There was (is?) a guy who hand-draws copies of paper money and uses them to pay for things. He has to be very clear up-front with anyone he deals with, "this is a piece of artwork that I am selling you, if you want to buy it", and then he can use that money to pay for his stuff. If he simply handed it over in exchange for goods he'd be counterfeiting. It doesn't matter how bad the copy is (and his were pretty good), it is still counterfeiting if you try to pass a copy as real.

Re:i thought scanners won't scan money?

[Sperbels]

Back in 2003 I tried to use an HP scanner on a twenty. It wouldn't do it. It even opened up a browser window and sent me to a government anticounterfeiting site. Which could also give my IP address to the Secret Service...and potentially result in a nice little early morning raid. I decided I'd never try that EVER again.

Be careful

[Vrtigo1]

Lots of newer copiers and MFPs that do color scanning will actually lock themselves out if they think you're trying to scan and/or copy money. We didn't know that until we tried to scan a $100 bill to use as part of a PowerPoint presentation, and then had to wait 4 days to get the necessary unlock codes to make our copier function again.