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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."
I think I might do the same.
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!
i keep reading how scanners and copying machines are programmed not to scan or copy money
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
Even if you're just screwing around? I thought all scanned money had to have the huge NOT LEGAL TENDER shit on it, otherwise you were breaking the law...
Could I send them a drawing of a spider instead?
When you deposit money in a bank, it's put into digital space. So what's the difference?
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
You might want to think about it first. http://www.secretservice.gov/money_law.shtml
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
You're basically emailing a photo of a bill. Shouldn't be illegal, now should it?
You'll be accused of counterfeiting.
Of course the best option is to just throw the letter in the trash. I doubt the MPAA/RIAA will come after you, since they are just using a shotgun approach to extort money from the millions of uploaders they have in their database. They are hoping to dupe you into paying $5000. (Like the nigerian lottery scammers.)
Oh and send some real money to the people who deserve it. Like JMS of Babylon 5 or the Writer/Artist of the Walking Dead, because they certainly aren't getting paid by the corporations (somehow these TV shows never show a profit).
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
To scan money.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
What a bunch of genius's. Now, instead of just being a pirate and having the RIAA & MPAA after you, you can also be a counterfeiter and have the feds after you.
I'll send them my own currency in the form of whatever I feel like it should be (images, sound,...).
According to them, it's as good, if not better than money.
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?
That assumes someone is dumb enough to do it and send their address on the envelope. I often send stuff that I want to get to a destination with the same return address as the sending address.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Given that the **AA are likely to sue even if the filename sounds like one of their movies/songs, and given that mp3/ogg etc. are lossy codecs, you don't have to send them a scan of a bill at all. Just scrawl "Ten Dollars" on a piece of paper, scan it, and send it in.
That should have exactly the same effect.
I wish I had thought of paying them in this way when the MPAA sued me.
“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
In the US at least it's a federal crime to copy or scan and print (potentially even just scan) US currency, so this is one of those lame things you really don't want to do.
You can end up with a visit from the FBI and potentially even prosecution if someone simply finds your copies in the trash and reports it.
Just fooling around or having no criminal intent probably will not protect you, and the RIAA/MPAA will probably be more than happy to report you if you mail copies to them.
G.
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.
Make sure you put a mark on it as well as change the size so people can't mistake it as being real, even if you think it is obvious it is a copy. The secret service (in charge of counterfeiting as well as protecting the pres') doesn't have a sense of humour in these matters.
On a side note, I read a story outlining one of the most successful counterfeiters ever. When they arrested him he was an old man. He'd been printing and passing off one dollar bills and five dollar bills for a few decades before he was caught. Seems his success was because he wasn't greedy only using them for himself and when he needed to. And since the bills weren't large denominations people didn't check them carefully. In the end when they caught him, it also turned out the counterfeit job wasn't even that particularly good. But because of the previous points, no-one noticed till he was quite old. And only then because he hadn't changed the printing job, but the currency had been upgraded/changed a couple times since. The bills looked newly printed but with an old style; that's when people noticed. I remember reading this in a magazine or readers digest or something years ago, otherwise I'd post a link.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
If they claim an mp3 is as valuable as the original then a fuzzy image of money should be the same. I just consider them both a lossy compression.
Funny, but I expect they won't even get it!
"For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert"
A digital copy of a music file still has inherent value to the recipient, while a copy of a bank note does not - all you are doing is showing them you are as petulant as you consider them to be.
The value of a music file is in the content, not the form of the file while the value of a bank note is in the ability to exchange it for other things, not the art work on the note - copies work fine in one case, and not at all in the other.
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
By default it is, it's missing an entire dimension, thickness (or depth) of 0. With no Z, it's just not the same size.
Fortunately there isn't anything useful on the edges of the money, so you don't really have to worry about scanning that.
>^_^<
Users of download services such as file upload sites or Usenet or P2P services like SLSK do often pay for the privelage of being able to download copies of original IP like music, tv episodes and movies. This proves that there is an intrinsic value to such copies; they can be exchanged as goods for money or other goods and/or services. But a digital copy of cash cannot be exchanged in such manner. It's becoming increasingly embarassing for me to be a programmer when I have to be associated with moron ideas like this one by default.
Some scanners and scan software will refuse to capture the image of what they think is actual currency. Don't know the current list of which ones are affected by that, it's not like people do it a lot.
Just send them a digital copy of the copyrighted material. It has exactly the same value as the one you kept.
Heck, send them two or thee copies. That way they make a bigger profit. They'll like that.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
If you MP3 encode them it will reduce them to a legal size.
JoeR
IMHO, scanning coins would be a good way to send the same message, but not risk running afoul of counterfeiting laws.
No, not just slightly bigger. There are regulations on this. Either less than 50% or greater than 150%, if I recall correctly.
Or you could helpfully send a copy of the currency to the Secret Service and report the *IAA for incitement to counterfeiting.
I enjoy reading interesting comments. Unfortunately interesting comments are rare.
Sometimes I think people might come through. Sometimes I think I can predict what the comments will look like. Sometimes I have questions about the news story that I hope I can figure out with the comments.
In this case, no dice.
First of all, I think digital copies are worth less than the physical product. That's probably the message they were trying to get through. But I couldn't even confirm that because the comments are so utterly pointless.
If a disclaimer does the job, then just include one on the copies of music/movies to make those copies worthless.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Not that long ago, there was another slashdot article asking about people who had been sued by the RIAA... several responses admitted as much, but what I found intriguing was that *EVERY* person who said that they just ignored them when they get a letter, and did not try to respond in any way, did not ever have anything come of it beyond the initial threats.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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.
My understanding is that those scanners won't just refuse to copy the image, they'll voluntarily brick themselves and not scan anything at all.
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
Of course, the law doesn't say digital copies have value either...
But that's not the point. It's an attempt to try and highlight the absurdity of the position the Mafiaa have chosen to take with regards to digital copying.
And since you seem to be a bit uninformed on these arguements, Mafiaa is a derogatory way to refer to both the MPAA and the RIAA that also attempts to cast scorn on their chosen business practices be creating a mental link to the organized crime syndicates.
So send them Zimbabwe dollars instead. Better message, and legal. I have a few quadrillion Zim dollars laying around here somewhere, but you can buy yours on ebay.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I know that in my country, that's called counterfeiting, and it's incredibly illegal. You might not want to do that. Not at any size, not at any quality, and not even in black and white. Quite frankly, if you can do it at all, that's probably covered under owning counterfeiting equipment and that alone is probably illegal enough.
You're talking about federal currency here. That's not a joke.
Already tried --- look up the ``EURion Constellation''
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Ok, so I take this song, and I print it out on paper.
Like 01000100100100001000010110010100101 etc.
Is that copy illegal?
You appear to only be focusing on the type of counterfeiting that is large scale (ie done by foreign governments) and is intended to devalue legitimate currency. All those protections you listed are to protect against that. Those types of operations do not use scanners and ink jet printers.
However, another type of counterfeiting is only concerned with generating wealth for the counterfeiter. For that type of operation to be successful, the money only has to change hands once. And that mostly involves giving it to people who are not going to do any sort of authenticity checks on a $20 bill. Like, pretty much everyone. When you get cash from an ATM, do you check it? How do you know the guy who filled the ATM didn't take the real money and substitute counterfeits? How about when you get change at a store? How do you know the clerk didn't change real bills for fake ones? By the time the counterfeits are detected it is too late, and you are out the money (and may land in trouble of your own for trying to pass counterfeits).
The biggest problem is the paper, and people have found ways to bleach the ink off smaller denominations and reprint with larger denominations.
Scanned/printed counterfeiting is real, and the people most often hurt by it are regular individuals.
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.
But transcoding is lossy!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Be careful if you are going to do this. Some stand alone scanners won't allow you to scan currency. Some color photocopiers at FedEx or the UPS store will lock up if you scan currency. Most newer machines have a "black box" that looks for stuff like that. If it locks, then whoever owns the machine may have a visit from someone to unlock it. The workaround that some use is if you scan it in b&w mode, or scan it at 75% under size or over 125% over size. I've seen my fare share of photocopiers over the last few years lock up because some church group wanted to print "fake money" for some sort of event. They got a visit from the manufacturer, and the government to unlock it.
technically while this case the bill still exists, there is a counterfeiting law that was made roughly 100 years ago intended to prevent banks from making their own money, this law never conceived electronic banking. apparently there only exists about 2% of actual money the rest is even more imaginary as it only exists as ledger entries. Banks all the time make up money out of thin air when you go in and sign a promissory note.
The thing I never got is that the promissory note supposedly has value with the intention that we use cash to pay for it. but English pounds are marked AS promissory notes. how do they ever get paid off?
The Counterfeit Detection Act of 1992, Public Law 102-550, in Section 411 of Title 31 of the Code of Federal Regulations, permits color illustrations of U.S. currency, provided that:
1. the illustration is of a size less than three-fourths or more than one and one-half, in linear dimension, of each part of the item illustrated;
2. the illustration is one-sided; and
3. all negatives, plates, positives, digitized storage medium, graphic files, magnetic medium, optical storage devices and any other thing used in the making of the illustration that contain an image of the illustration or any part thereof are destroyed and/or deleted or erased after their final use.
Even in child or xkcd style. After all they claim ownership even for whistled songs. It could even count for as difference in quality between a cd version and a low quality mp3.
Maybe even better, you get sued by hundreds of dollars for copying songs, and you just draw that amount of money (in big enough currency) as payment. If copies worth even more than original drawing an one dollar bill should be enough.
Replace the picture on the Federal Reserve Note with a picture of a 1 finger salute.Edit the name under the pic too.Change the value shown(like 1,5,10,ect) to a 3.THEN SEND IT
Geek Hillbilly
Nowhere more appropriate I can think of to post this again.
Photoshop does this, too.
There is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation
Years ago my organization printed a bunch of bills as a promotion. They were clearly fake at first glance, with our organization's name instead of the US, promotional print on the back instead of a normal bill's backside, etc.
One day very serious guys in suits show up, seems someone tried to pass one of our bills as a real one in a foreign country. They kindly "asked" for our plates and "suggested" we don't do that again.
We weren't in legal trouble since our intent was not fraudulent, but let's just say I wouldn't want to be in that position again. Best to just stay far away from the issue in the first place.
or you could put an ad on the back and send proceeds to the original creator!
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
Obviously, the copy idea has lots of problems. Perhaps, better would be when paying for music, send real money along with a license agreement stipulating how the physical currency may be used and/or transferred. Include the serial numbers as part of the license agreement.
Whoever dreamed this up didn't think it through very well. Illegally copied money is devalued specifically by law, not because it's inherently less valuable. The fact that counterfeiters exist is clear evidence that copied money *does* have value, and in fact all legal currency is copied anyway by the mints who print it. It's hard to think of a *worse* way to make an argument that copied material is not just as valuable as the original.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
To point (3). Does that mean scanning a dollar bill, resizing in Gimp, and posting on the internet require me to uninstall the browser, erase the image from the HD, remove Gimp, destroy the scanner, and burn the original dollar bill?
Because well enough copied money does have value, even if illicit.
This "protest" makes their argument for them.
Check your premises.
More on the value of copyrights and copies
TED Talk Video
Comic author Rob Reid unveils Copyright Math (TM), a remarkable new field of study based on actual numbers from entertainment industry lawyers and lobbyists.
Web Page
http://www.ted.com/talks/rob_reid_the_8_billion_ipod.html
Download 18MB mp4
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TEDTalks_video/~5/S3_r1Bi3kc4/RobReid_2012.mp4
The music and other content put out by the content producers is almost all garbage which no one would choose to buy if they were to see or hear it first. That's why they want to stop copies that you can try for free. They know you won't buy it if you know how bad it is. Only by controlling the market and internet can they sell their product to people who are only allowed to know of it by advertising. They are selling counterfeit art as if it has value for real money which they refuse to refund when you realize you have been fooled. Most houses have drawers full of lousy product they bought because they weren't allowed to use it before they paid for it. The industry should be forced to accept all returns for a full refund. Then they would have to produce real product instead of the counterfeit stuff they flog now.
That's one way to read it. But it also qualifies the directive "after their final use." It does not necessarily define when "final use" must be determined. The scanner, hard drive, etc, can all still be in use. But once they are no longer in use, it must be destroyed.
Not a great method of making a difference, but it's an awesome prank.
Maybe you could hire J.S.G. Boggs to create your notes. What you don't want to do, however, is copy U.S. currency, because that can get you thrown in the slammer.
Coincidentally, we recently watched The Man Who Copied, which was a pretty good film with a slow start. You might enjoy it.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
One moment here... isn't one of the current arguments of the .*AAs that being in possession of, or initiating the act of downloading a digital copy in itself illegal?
Doesn't that mean that THEY are guilty of multiple acts of trafficking in counterfeit goods?
What if you fax them? No illegal printing/copying on your side, just theirs.
Here are the top two ways the RIAA continued to post profits despite rampant piracy:
1 - Massive staff layoffs, I've seen the _floors_ of empty cubicles and offices at Sony/BMG's New York offices, one building of many.
2 - Massive cuts in artist royalties, aka the 360 deal. Where labels used to only take a (large) percentage of retail album/single sales, they now take large percentage of everything from publishing to endorsements to merchandising to ringtones.
In short, everybody in the music industry is suffering except the RIAA executives. There is a finite amount of effective music promotions that can be done, and the RIAA owns them, all of them. There are only so many appearances on TV shows, awards shows, major tours, only so much radio listenership, etc etc. Making a good career of music requires access to that level of promotions to some degree. The more you promote piracy, the bigger a cut labels take to provide access, and the harder you make it for musicians, not the label executives.
So you keep on saying how RIAA profits prove piracy doesn't hurt anyone, and I'll keep playing gigs for the same rate musicians got in the 1970's. Nothing to see here. Move along.
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
$10,000 in fact.
http://moneyfactory.gov/100002greendenom.html
Enjoy.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
IS illegal.. unless its done in a way that prevents its from being mistaken as real currency, which sort of defeats the intent.
While I'm all for making a statement, committing a crime in the process isn't overly productive.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"Ethics aside, why should one be stupid enough..."
Oh no, AC, you're square in the middle of it all.
Of course the Pirated copies are "better value". But we have a tricky mix of Ethics and Draconian Law, that leads many people to try desperately to "play by the rules". Then the clear cognitive tension at all the hoops shows up. This is *absolutely* the heart of it all.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
No. The language is pretty simple here; you have to erase anything that contains an "image of the illustration" or "any part thereof". The tricky part would be erasing any swap or other temporary files, but there's no need to destroy the browser, Gimp, the scanner, or the original dollar bill, since none of those contain an image of the illustration (the dollar bill is not an image of the illustration, it's merely the model for it).
However, if you never printed it out, none of that applies. You then run into 18 USC 474, which provides in part
So on paper you're OK lacking intent to defraud, but despite all that nonsense authoritarians tell you when they're passing the latest overbroad law, lack of intent means shit in court. They can "impute" intent from the act, making a total farce of any mens rea requirement, and you're going to PMITA prison.
Name the brand, so that people know what companies to avoid.
I use a Cannon MFP, the scanner happily handles ID cards, including driver's licence. I hadn't, but just tried currency. Not only scanned it, auto-switched to a high enough resolution to pick out the micro-printing.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Define "actual" currency. The currency of the manufacturing nation (Yuan, probably) ; the designing nation (euros, US Dollars?) ; the nation of sale (whatever); the nation of delivery (as whatever) ; or any of the nations of transmission of the equipment or the data?
Maybe, sending scans of a currency whose export from the home country is flat-out illegal, to their local embassy, would be a better test? Manats, or Shillings (Tz).
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Not true; I have manipulated very high res (3300DPI) copies of the dollar bill in Photoshop. Source
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever