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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.
Woah.. as much as I really hate the copyright kingpins... these guys were selling counterfeit items. They were making money off from other people's work.
It's not the same as the ridiculous crackdowns on people who download a fucking song and find themselves being sued for thousands in damages.
"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.
They were mis-describing it when they sold it, if you read TFA. That's bad because it means that the purchasers weren't making an informed decision. By and large, counterfeit box-sets will have lower quality packaging etc than the originals. If they're just burns of TV-rips, then they may also have on-screen network watermarks and other artifacts missing from the official home release.
Plus the people buying it might actually have wanted their money to go to the creators of the show. Even if you're the neckbeard type who believes that all intellectual property is theft, you don't want to say that selling by deception is right?
The people buying them intended to give that money to the legal owners. These people pretended to be that, so yes, they should be punished.
If they would have said that they were selling copies, then you would have been right and that would have been a different discussion.
e.g. If I buy a watch and I pay 10.000USD because it is a Rolex and afterward it isn't a Rolex, then I have been mislead and the Rolex company has been illegally taken away income.
If they say upfront that it isn't a Rolex (and even indicate it as a Rolox or Rollex or whatever) and I depart from my 10.000USD (or 10USD) then there is no problem.
So for me it has nothing to do with copyright.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
They were selling a product that people decided to buy. All they had to do was copy the original data over and over, so no theft was involved; there were no damages.
I can't stand hypocrites who think that selling copyrighted works is magically harmful, but copying it freely is not. Either you are pro-freedom or you are not; if you support copyright, you support censorship and the loss of control over private property.
Oookay. Now I can conclude that the views on piracy of some people here really have reached insane levels.
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"