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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!
Could I send them a drawing of a spider instead?
Actually, they tend to have the firmware, yes...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation
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.
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
I just copied this text from another comment:
Whoosh!
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
I don't think he did miss the point. A digital bit-for-bit copy of a movie has almost the same value as the original dvd/bluray/stream. On the other hand a photocopied/scanned/printed copy of a dollar bill has zero value. Not even the people who are pushing this idea believe the equivalency proposed. If they did they would be perfectly happy with receiving photocopied cash as pay for their day jobs. Or they would be willing to receive 4 gigabyte streams of random bits in lieu of actual copies of movies, as long as the titles of the files were correct. Neither of these are true, so this whole thing is bunk.
I just copied this text from another comment:
Whoosh!
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+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
If you MP3 encode them it will reduce them to a legal size.
JoeR
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
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...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
That's kinda the point.
That you missed.
Now who's the moron?
I'm still missing the point, then. Is this not an attempt to make a statement that copied money is equivalent to copied files? Please explain what I've missed, since I'm so stupid and you're so smart.
It's making a statement that by the way MPAA & RIAA considers virtual copies of a film/game/song to be worth as much as the original, you might as well put the same logic to currency. Which doesn't make sense the same way that virtual copies of a film/game/song being worth as much as the original.
I can get the same entertainment value from a copy of a movie or song as I can from the original. It can even be argued that a copy is even more valuable than the original, because it's easier to use on whatever device I prefer due to lack of DRM. I didn't enjoy the movie or song any less because it was a copy since the quality of the experience was the same or better.
I can only use a photocopy of money to wipe my ass with since I cannot even buy toilet paper with it. I do not enjoy the copy at all because I couldn't use it as currency and all it did is hurt my ass.
How are those two things at all similar?
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
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.
I like microcars
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 live in Zimbabwe, you insensitive clod!!!!!!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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...
Bingo, a DRM free version of movie has more value than the corresponding DVD/Blu-ray version.
I mean when you have people spending on recordable blu-rays that cost more than a pressed blu-ray you know that what the MPAA is legally offering is so crippled as to be less valuable than a pirate copy.
A ripped blu-ray film I can watch on any HD screen or computer monitor. There is no HDCP not contend with. I can transcode to whatever format I wish and use on any media player. And I can think of many more uses.
The time when the MPAA shouted jump and stupid masses of people gladly threw out perfectly functioning equipment to replace it with time limited revokable hardware is at an end. The pirates are effectively offering a superior product.
Ethics aside, why should one be stupid enough to be ass fucked by the MPAA ? Your nice blu-ray player that you spend 300 $ on ? After 2-3 years no more firmware updates so new movies won't play because of updated revocation lists. This is not a good business model for consumers. Piracy is a good thing for the consumer at least until those holywood dickheads start smelling the coffee. Drm free files with watermark of personal information. The way mp3 files are sold on itunes. Anything less and it is a non starter at least for me.