Slashdot Mirror
Two Birmingham Men Are Arrested By UK's New Intellectual Property Crime Unit
cervesaebraciator writes "The Guardian reports that the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit has arrested two men from Birmingham and have seized 'suspected counterfeit DVD box sets worth around £40,000, including titles such as Game of Thrones, CSI and Vampire Diaries.' The claim is that the men were buying foreign counterfeit copies and selling them online as genuine. London police commissioner Adriad Leppard offers commentary indicative of the thinking behind these efforts, saying, 'Intellectual property crime is already costing our economy hundreds of millions of pounds a year and placing thousands of jobs under threat, and left unchecked and free to feed on new technology could destroy some of our most creative and productive industries.' The article offers £51 billion as an estimate for the cost of illegal downloading to the music, film, and software industry, a figure they say will triple by 2015."
Meanwhile, Netflix is paying attention to piracy via torrent sites as well. The difference is that they're using that data to decide what shows they should buy.
i don't get it. can somebody provide insights into why this is a big deal and is on slashdot? criminals break law, get arrested. what is the sizzle here?
Who do I have to pay to get corporate police?
an unauthorized/unlicensed download does not equal a lost sale. is it that hard a concept to comprehend?
"It not only damages the UK economy, but substandard goods and services can pose real threats to consumers too."
if it's actually "substandard" then it means it's not a copy of the original because there is no original to copy. meaning they were selling the latest seasons of the shows which aren't on sale yet. if you want the latest season of game of thrones, you are going to have to wait until 2014.
the industry needs to learn that when there is a demand, someone will fill it. if you aren't filling that demand, someone else will.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
No, neither the US nor the UK has any provisions saying that "if a show isn't sold in this country, copyright doesn't apply to it". Even if it did, that wouldn't apply in this case, as you can buy DVD box-sets of all of those shows in the UK.
Of course, there are instances where copyright holders take a relaxed view of whether or not to pursue people from territories they don't operate in downloading their stuff. Anime's probably the biggest example here; the odds of being sued for torrenting fansubs of an anime show that isn't licensed in the West are next to zero (though the people who upload them in Japan can and do get prosecuted over there). Even if the show is licensed, you're still much less likely to get hit than you might be with Western shows. The main reason why? Overseas sales are so marginal to the business model for making these shows that it's not worth the cost of cross-border prosecutions. Plus watching the popularity of torrents is, as referenced with Netflix in the summary, sometimes an indicator of which shows are worth licensing for a Western distributor.
But that isn't to say that they couldn't go after people in the West downloading their shows, or even that it hasn't happened. We've seen a harder line on people torrenting Ghost in the Shell material (certainly to the extent of chasing fansub groups, if not individual downloaders) - possibly because GitS is a bit more "made for export" than the norm.
In this case, fraud - they were buying counterfeits and selling them as if they were genuine. They were deceiving consumers into believing they were buying something they weren't. That's a definite attack on English consumers, even if it doesn't hurt their economy per se.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
It harms the bit of it that's reselling the genuine articles, as they lose out on sales, which has a knock on effect on various things, such as being able to maintain a profitable business, paying your employees, collecting VAT...on which point, I suspect the gentlemen in question were almost certainly not collecting VAT on their sales; so that's denying HMRC tax revenue. And I'm willing to bet they either weren't paying import duty on the DVDs or they weren't paying the correct import duty.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
This is precisely what copyright laws are supposed to prevent - the bootlegger making money by illegally selling multiple copies of someone else's content.
The problem with Copyright is the *AA has been trying to use these laws to penalize the filesharer (who makes a single copy for themselves) as if they were full-blown bootleggers. The "making available" argument is bunk because if you take the number of illegal copies made via filesharing, and divide by the number of people doing the sharing, the math says there's one illegal copy made per offender. Ergo each offender is responsible for one illegal copy. Totally different from the bootlegger case where the single bootlegger is making thousands of copies available (the buyers are not guilty of anything because they paid for what they thought was a legal copy).
That's why copyright fines are so high - to discourage bootleggers who are trying to sell thousands of copies for profit. Not to bankrupt for life someone trying to make a single illegal copy for himself. The law really needs to distinguish between these cases.
Did you know that piracy increases lifespan by 5.7 years on average, boosts the national GDP by 3.2% (4.1% adjusted for inflation), and increases overall subjective happiness by no less than 18.5%?
Writing random numbers is so easy. I don't know where they pulled that "£51 billion" crap out of, but they're welcome to shove it back in there.
There's deliberate mixing of issues going on. This new unit is supposed to police "illegal downloads" and "counterfeit DVDs". There's a huge difference between a counterfeit of a physical item, and a digital copy. As you say, counterfeits can be of inferior quality. Counterfeits are fraudulently misrepresented as the real thing.
I have no problem with going after counterfeits. What I object to is calling this an "intellectual property" enforcement action, as if there is no difference between busting a counterfeit goods operation, and busting ordinary citizens sharing data. They should call the crime what it is, fraud, and not try to say the chief crime was copyright violation. Physical items were misrepresented. These items happen to be media that contain copyrighted data. Money was fraudulently collected, by deliberately fostering a misunderstanding of where that money was going. Some buyers may have figured out their game, but undoubtedly, many buyers thought they were supporting the artists.
Many people purchase physical media not because they are compelled to, but because they genuinely want to support the artists, and that's the only means the idiot industry has blessed. Yes, the industry grudgingly allows downloading for a price, but they don't like it. A purchase of physical media is really a donation to the artists. Let's not pretend that the content can't be easily copied for free. Pretending to collect donations for some cause, and then pocketing the money, is fraud and theft. Big Media loves it whenever that kind of crime is equated with simple downloading. Most file sharers are not trying to misrepresent the data in any way at all, or collect money. Unfortunately, there are plenty who try to use downloading as a vehicle to commit other crimes, such as injecting viruses into computer systems. And they get away with it because they know no one is busting people for that, not when the attitude is that the "thieving" downloaders got what they deserved.
Once again, Big Media has tricked government into wasting taxpayer money on trying to force their sick, dark fantasy world of total ownership of all content on the public. This new police unit should at the least be given a more accurate name, and its duties more carefully defined. Or it should be dismantled. Too much chance that they will now wade into file sharing, seeing rampant crime everywhere in activities that shouldn't be criminal at all. Police are wont to see crimes where none exist, out of sheer self-interest. They get to stay employed that way. They're real suckers for sob stories of alleged victimization of those poor little giant media conglomerates, I mean, starving artists, by mean, delinquent teenage pirates.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
When I consume a sandwich in a restaurant, the restaurant has that much less meat, bread, cheese, and alfalfa. That and the labor used to make sandwich are direct losses to the restaurant. Furthermore, no one else can have that sandwich once I have, so the restaurant will have to make new ones before they can sell more. There is nothing about this that is directly analogous to what's called piracy.
Which brings up another point. I know the pirate community has embraced the term piracy (case in point, TPB). It's probably too late to change this, but I think the term inappropriate. A pirate takes things from other people (violently at that) and once the thing is taken its original owners no longer have access to it or control over it. The making and distributing of digital reproductions we term piracy is nothing like this. A better term than piracy, I would suggest is smuggling. A smuggler takes goods from one place to another for distribution, in contravention to bans, embargoes, and government enforced monopolies.
There may, for example, be a royal monopoly on tea. The pirate steals the royal tea ships, representing a theft and a direct loss of royal property. The smuggler sneaks tea from other sources into port, never personally laying a finger on the royal tea. The exchequer will claim, and this is admittedly true, that the royal monopoly on tea is challenged by this act and it is hard for the market to bear the monopolist's high prices when there are cheaper alternatives. He is mistaken, however, when he calls it theft or even when he claims that each purchase of the smuggler's tea is a purchase which otherwise would have supported the revenue, for even tea has an elasticity of demand and there may be many who will buy from the smuggler who could never afford the monopolist's prices.
To find out just how strong it is, follow their claims to the end. 51bn * 3 * 12 = £1.836 trillion per annum. Now, just for the fun of it, take the IMF's number for the nominal GDP of the UK, and covert it into pounds. You'll come up with about £1.5 trillion. In other words, the industry is claiming that by 2015 losses due to piracy will exceed the value of all sectors of the UK economy in 2012.
I, too, agree that the men were involved in fraud but I think we're missing the point by talking about the guilt or innocence of these two individuals. If the article only said that two jerks were selling bad copies of The Vampire Diaries, then it'd hardly be worth mentioning.
The revealing thing about the article is the way that a new police unit, funded with £2.56 million over two years, is justified. Of course the first people they arrested were engaged in fraud, for who can complain about arresting such people? But the hyperbolic claims made about piracy here would, in fact, make the girl who downloads a One Direction album partly responsible for the destruction of one of the world's largest economies. And this unit is, as parent recognizes, charged with prosecuting "illegal downloads" as well. £51bn per month, to triple by 2015? Just think about that claim for a moment. That's larger than the British economy! If you take these people at there word then you could blame illegal downloading on the world-wide recession. You needn't bother with accusing innocent financiers and speculators who, after all, are just trying to make a better life for their families and provide a public service.
Such hyperbole is reported as fact, except on alternative, online news sources. And it is little wonder. Is MSNBC or FoxNews apt to disagree with the figures given by major media conglomerates? It would be rather shocking if Comcast and Rupert Murdoch allowed anything but the inflation of such figures.
Such hyperbole is also a matter of course when those in power seek to shape public opinion and have new policies accepted. To give a parallel, look at the rhetoric of hawks in the U.S. They constantly inflate the size and significance of every possible threat in order to drum up support for their cause. Hussein was a Hitler-like madman bent on world domination. Never mind that in reality he lacked the capacity and further invasion was not in his interests. Iran will start WWIII by blowing up Israel since they're religious zealots who think to welcome the 12th imam thereby. Never mind that intelligence show Iran is not building a weapon and the religious authorities in Iran have declared the deployment of nuclear weapons haram. Not one year ago, I heard John McCain declare the world a more dangerous place than he had ever seen it. This from a man who lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis. But without the fear, the hyperbole, the little bin Ladins around every corner, the wars will not go on and without the constant wars the apparent need for an ever growing state security apparatus might falter. Then we might devolve to a pre-9/11 world where our lack of war threatens the peace.
Whenever someone in power indulges in hyperbole, threat inflation, and encourages an exaggerated fear know that they're trying to manipulate the public into accepted a policy which, examined with a clear head and a calm heart, any decent person would reject.