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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!
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
Could I send them a drawing of a spider instead?
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."
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.
“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.
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
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
Yeah I tried that once, it said something had performed an illegal operation and my whole PC shut down!
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
If you MP3 encode them it will reduce them to a legal size.
JoeR
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.
Or you could helpfully send a copy of the currency to the Secret Service and report the *IAA for incitement to counterfeiting.
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.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
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.
We only ever ran into this issue twice.... at a police station which needed to make copies of counterfeit bills for use as evidence in a trial.
that's hilarious.
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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".
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.
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.
There is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation
I know that trick wouldn't work with the new 100s and 50s in Canada (and soon the rest of the "paper" money). They are plastic now, like Australian money. And the Canadian bills have windows in them and holograms as well as monopoly money colours. :) Mind you, thanks to the low tech watermark it didn't work that time either. I find it aggravating sometimes in the 'States when I go to pay and pull out a wad of green and can't tell the ones, fives, tens, twenties, and fifties apart right away if they happen to have become bunched up. Colours and coins for smaller values help a lot there.
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