I dialed their sales number at 800-726-8649. I kept going around in circles in their voicemail. It seemed like hours - the system isn't very smart. I don't understand what happened. Maybe if more people contact them and let them know that their legal action is bad for the industry, they may get the message ; )
* The airing of a very special "Buffy" episode poignantly demonstrating the evils of file sharing.
* The never-ending influx of penis enlargement spam has forced most users away from their PCs
* Kurt Kobain, Tupac and Biggy did not release a new album this week.
* Public turned off to the new breed of rockers that refuse to comb their hair. Marilyn Manson P2P file shares increase, yet many groups such as Creed, Matchbox 20 and the Goo Goo dolls suffer.
* The size of Brittney Spears brests did not seem to change this month.
* Madonna releases yet another album that makes her old fans question their taste.
* Consumers are still in a catatonic haze over the excitement of Puffy and Nelly teaming up on a song featured on the 2fast 2furious soundtrack.
* People are unimpressed that Rob Thomas from Matchbox 20 is "scared"
* Instead of sharing files online, people have discovered that Leptoprin really does work and are power shopping on QVC instead.
This doesn't surprise me. Mainly because labels, distribution and media conglamorates are so concentrated and dominant now that they can claim they are primarily responsible for the demand for an artist and therefor justify getting a piece of everything, including the traditional performance royalties (otherwise known as blood, sweat and tears). Unfortunately they are right.
A good example are the concerts that Clear Channel stations put on in their markets, often wildly superior to comparable tours or shows. CC can ask almost any band (and name their own price if one at all), even one not on tour to play a festival for one of their stations and most commercial artists know turning them down is the kiss of death. It's one thing to turn down a show in one market. It's another thing to turn down a CC station and piss off a company that controls 60-80% of the major radio stations nationwide.
We should not be surprised. The only alternative artists have left at this point is the Internet.
At this point, most of what you see/hear in the major media is formulaic and bland anyway. What I think is interesting is that P2P networks in my opinion are more threatening to the music industry not because of copyright/piracy issues but because they can introduce the public to non-corporate music that doesn't suck.
You are correct. The USPTO allows companies to register trademarks and service marks in specific classes, so that "XYZ Meat" can co-exist with "XYZ brand sanitary napkins", but there are special exceptions for what the court identifies as a "famous mark". If a brand identity is universally associated with a specific product (and "Coke" is a prime example) it may have greater lattitude in the way it can enforce its famous mark.
Dude, anyone can sue anyone. That doesn't mean the legal system is bad, or people or corporations are any more nuts. Before then people just hit each other over the head with clubs.
Any company that holds a trademark *must* actively protect their mark from dilution through other commercial uses of their name or else they run the risk of losing their trademark. It's not necessarily that Hormel wants to do this but they may have to in order to secure the integrity of their product brand. I wonder why it took them so long in the first place?
Let's start calling spam "Coke" and see how long it takes before that company starts calling.
The other day it occurred to me while I was watching this Discovery channel special on space walking with all the astronauts worried about micro-meteors flying around in Earth orbit. We have all this satellite technology floating around, doing all kinds of things in addition to broadcasting and communications. Maybe one major aspect of future warfare will involve satellite-to-satellite battles. What if someone launched a probe into Earth orbit which unleashed hundreds of thousands of tiny projectiles that would circle the Earth and eventually destroy all the artificial satellites? The interesting thing is that the technology to do this probably is already available and even smaller nations could negate the powerful corporate nations by eliminating their satellite networks. Hey, then maybe people would have to actually sit down and talk to each other?
The guy definitely broke the law and had unscrupulous intentions and needs to be punished, but awarding damages for "potential loss" is ridiculous and sets a scary precedent.
Likewise, we have the other extremes where juries award plaintiffs billions of dollars from companies that couldn't afford a fraction. I understand the significance of that being a "message" to those who would do wrong in either circumstance, but the exaggerated damage awards seem counterproductive to the degree that they are unrealistic.
We already have established an overriding precedent in this country that continues to be ignored: more rules & harsher sentences have not proven to make a more lawful populace. In a foolish attempt to turn up the volume on the static, we dole out even more ridiculous punishment. We give criminals "multiple life sentences" as if one life sentence isn't good enough! At some point, is anyone going to realize that maybe we need a new approach?
There's a difference between parody and superficial exploitation. When someone mirrors the characters' personalities, plots, history and style, even down to phoenetic rip-offs of the characters' names, that's not art or creativity, it's blatant exploitation and dilution of carefully developed intellectual property.
It is precisely due to ripoffs like "Tanya Grotter" that copyright protections exist. Rowling worked very hard to develop her characters and her universe, and as politically-incorrect as it might seem in this forum to defend the right of anyone to claim some semblances of intellectual property control, I think it's warranted here.
What if I created a web site called, "Slashdash.org" and copied exactly the structure, look and feel and the content of site? You don't think the owners of Slashdot would be upset? Absolutely and rightly so because such an effort would be an attempt to unfairly exploit the momentum that Slashdot has gained through a lot of time and hard work.
Let's give credit where credit is due to those who either through luck, resources or hard work manage to create an institution, and don't want some noob showing up and sampling the fruits of their labor for a quick, undeserved buck.
First, any time you implement filtering based on content you run the risk of blocking legitimate correspondence. This is unacceptable in many scenarios. And the only way to deal with the potential loss of legitimate mail is to have some facility to review messages flagged as "spam", which defeats the purpose of client-side filtering saving any time. It's just as easy to hit the delete key in that case.
As I've said before, the issue here is inappropriate exploitation (and in many cases downright theft) of resources. If you stop spammers from their currently completely uncontrolled behavior, then everyone's performance and cost to conduct business and communication online will be dramatically reduced.
There may be some filtering projects that aren't making money, but that's beside the point. Either way, it's plugging a leak in a boat by turning on a bilge pump, which just slows down the water draining in, but doesn't fix the problem, so the pump eventually has to be maintained in order to keep you from sinking. Eventually the Internet trafic noise level will cause everything to sink if we don't do something about it.
For the Bazillionth Time, client side spam filtering does not address the problem. It's a waste of time.
The more client-side filters that are in place, the more spam will increase. It's already a cat-and-mouse game between spammers and filters. In the mean time, almost 70% of existing mail traffic is UCE. Filters don't stop that at all.
You have to stop spam at the source. You have to force spammers to act responsibly and not exploit network resources without appropriate compensation. Only when this is done, will any of us ever have any real control of the spam situation.
Client-side spam filtering is a scheme devised by companies who actually have a financial interest in spam, and the more spam there is, the more money they make. Let's get smart about this and stop acting like the rest of the country's brain dead couch potatoes.
First off, most claims that p2p is seriously hurting the industry are arguable. But for the purpose of this argument, let's assume that p2p is making an impact on CD sales. (I contend sales are down because more people are broke and nowadays music is crap)
The big argument is that "artists" won't be able to make a living because of mp3 trade. This is ironic, because most artists make more money through performance royalties than they do mechanicals.
There are basically three types of revenues that artists collect:
Mechanical (aka Publishing) - Royalties from the sale of albums and use of music on other media and in public.
Performance - Revenue from concerts and other performances.
Merchandising - T-shirts and peripheral products.
While mechanical royalties can be exponentially more substantive than all other forms of payment, most artists make more money from performance and merchandising. If p2p has any effect on revenue, at worst it exclusively hurts mechanical revenue, but likely boosts performance and merchandising!
Now here's the clincher: Of all the revenue types generated, artists get the highest percentage for performance and merchandising. Publishing royalties are mostly divided up among big record companies, publishers, lawyers, managers, producers and a big list of tag-along carpetbaggers. This is why we pay $18 for a CD. The artist may be lucky to get $0.25 of that money!
In reality, if you assume p2p affects product sales, the end result of this probably isn't felt by most artists anyway. It actually helps the artist (turns more people on to the music who will go to the concerts), and if anything, just takes a few bucks away from monopolistic media conglamorates who are hell-bent on price-fixing creative media.
Linux = Communism? I think not.. let's work this out...
Linux = Multiparty Democracy to Monarchy at times
Oracle, Sun = Monarchy
Unix = Anarchy with various flavors being multiparty democracies
Windows = Single Party State Authoritarian Regime which occasionally morphs into a Military Junta, and occasionally pretends to be communistic to improve public image
The dinky sites are the future, but only when a search engine can come up with a truly useful relevence engine.
It has not been developed as of yet. The best Google and others can do as of yet are cross-link relevance formulae, which can be manipulated.
Ironically, Google has taken a step backwards with the intent to filter blogs. Blogs are generally more relevant to the content they reference than 90% of the crap that comes up in search results.
What does this have to do with the music business?
These companies have hemmoraged money since day one, on the premise that at some point they would make money. They've bought primo real estate, fronted outrageous costs, never really looking to see if the bottom line could justify the outlay. Surprise! Thanks for playing, "lets make the management team rich".
This has nothing to do with the music business. This is about crappy business planning.
This is the reality of our criminal justice system, but your friend need not dispair - we have a civil justice system as well. Given the amount of data he's collected, and assuming that he collected and stored it in a proper manner, he should have no problem bringing this hacker to court on civil charges.
This is the bullshit evolution of our system of "justice". In all likelihood this spamming loser doesn't have anything worth suing for in civil court, and if he did, he'd just do a Chapter 13 and weasel out.
There really isn't much justice available in civil court for the common man.
The blacklist is IP based, not e-mail based, so it's not relevant, and it's an extension of the existing relay blacklist technique.
The technique is in all likelihood, one of the most productive ways to nail spammers. Most spammers weasel the web, newsgroups, mailing lists, domain registration databases for their fodder. You seed these sources with "shill" addresses, and you have a very effective way of shutting down spammers in real time by populating a smtp relay blacklist.
Aside from the obvious of getting the authorities to crack down on the existing illegal activities (relay hijacking, violation of TOS of ISPs, header forging, etc.) which is the only true solution, I think there are much better approaches than this "greylisting" method.
The problem with the greylist method is it still slows down mail service, and potentially more than the relay blacklist features. The objective here is that end-user/networks should not be penalized in the fight against spam. We already waste too many resources, and according to my latest mail server stats, more than 65% of our inbound mail is UCE. I'm fed up with more than half my e-mail bandwidth being crap my users didn't request so more resource allocation on a local level in the fight against spam is counterproductive!
Here's a very clever, much more practical method I cound recently.
A company is Canada has set up what it calls SORBS: Spam and Open Relay Blocking System.
What's different from their blacklist is that they maintain "honeypots" strategically located around the Internet. These are servers they specifically set up as inbound mail relays, but never for legitimate purposes. If the servers get [select] mail activity, it's assumed to not be legitimate and it flags the source as a potential spammer... it makes a lot of sense. You create a domain name, but don't promote it in any legitimate manner, and/or you seed spam lists with these e-mail addresses and then let the spammers send to your key systems around the internet and *bam*, they're identified in real time, and then added to a blacklist.
I really like this idea. Like any other system, it has the potential for abuse but the beauty is the identity of the honeypot systems is kept secret, so it's very difficult for anyone other than spammers to exploit the network.
There's a bigger problem with the District Attorneys. You can get the FBI to investigate, but the DAs are the ones that have to choose to prosecute. Most of them don't know squat about computer crime and are politically motivated. For this reason, it's important for slashdotters to ask questions during election time for their DAs and find out what they know about technology and whether they have a stand on tech issues.
Doesn't matter. I had an associate claim over $100,000 in damages, with detailed logs and everything. They opened a case file, but couldn't get the D.A. to prosecute. Most of the Feds know very little about computer crime and the District Attorneys know even less, and don't seem interested in prosecuting these types of hackers... I guess they'd rather go after someone who digs a computer manual out of a dumpster or something.
An associate of mine had his server broken into. He clearly documented exactly what was done and prepared a detailed report with everything cross-referenced to the FBI. The activity was clearly malicious and illegal. The FBI opened a file and sent agents to meet with him. Even though the perpetrator of the crime had been identified (down to his cell phone number, place of employment and everything), the FBI presented the case to the D.A. for prosecution and the D.A. refused to take the case. Money was a major factor. Because my associate was quick to discover the compromise, and therefore reduce the damages to his system and his clients, the monetary damage was minimal. Nonetheless, the authorities refused to take criminal action against the perpetrator even though the whole case was laid out in front of them. His experience indicated that law enforcement was more about money than law.
Slashdot Mirror
I dialed their sales number at 800-726-8649. I kept going around in circles in their voicemail. It seemed like hours - the system isn't very smart. I don't understand what happened. Maybe if more people contact them and let them know that their legal action is bad for the industry, they may get the message ; )
* The airing of a very special "Buffy" episode poignantly demonstrating the evils of file sharing.
* The never-ending influx of penis enlargement spam has forced most users away from their PCs
* Kurt Kobain, Tupac and Biggy did not release a new album this week.
* Public turned off to the new breed of rockers that refuse to comb their hair. Marilyn Manson P2P file shares increase, yet many groups such as Creed, Matchbox 20 and the Goo Goo dolls suffer.
* The size of Brittney Spears brests did not seem to change this month.
* Madonna releases yet another album that makes her old fans question their taste.
* Consumers are still in a catatonic haze over the excitement of Puffy and Nelly teaming up on a song featured on the 2fast 2furious soundtrack.
* People are unimpressed that Rob Thomas from Matchbox 20 is "scared"
* Instead of sharing files online, people have discovered that Leptoprin really does work and are power shopping on QVC instead.
This doesn't surprise me. Mainly because labels, distribution and media conglamorates are so concentrated and dominant now that they can claim they are primarily responsible for the demand for an artist and therefor justify getting a piece of everything, including the traditional performance royalties (otherwise known as blood, sweat and tears). Unfortunately they are right.
A good example are the concerts that Clear Channel stations put on in their markets, often wildly superior to comparable tours or shows. CC can ask almost any band (and name their own price if one at all), even one not on tour to play a festival for one of their stations and most commercial artists know turning them down is the kiss of death. It's one thing to turn down a show in one market. It's another thing to turn down a CC station and piss off a company that controls 60-80% of the major radio stations nationwide.
And things have only gotten worse with the recent relaxation of media ownership restrictions.
We should not be surprised. The only alternative artists have left at this point is the Internet.
At this point, most of what you see/hear in the major media is formulaic and bland anyway. What I think is interesting is that P2P networks in my opinion are more threatening to the music industry not because of copyright/piracy issues but because they can introduce the public to non-corporate music that doesn't suck.
You are correct. The USPTO allows companies to register trademarks and service marks in specific classes, so that "XYZ Meat" can co-exist with "XYZ brand sanitary napkins", but there are special exceptions for what the court identifies as a "famous mark". If a brand identity is universally associated with a specific product (and "Coke" is a prime example) it may have greater lattitude in the way it can enforce its famous mark.
for my blender... it's contents are the only thing I'm willing to broadcast over the airwaves.
Dude, anyone can sue anyone. That doesn't mean the legal system is bad, or people or corporations are any more nuts. Before then people just hit each other over the head with clubs.
Any company that holds a trademark *must* actively protect their mark from dilution through other commercial uses of their name or else they run the risk of losing their trademark. It's not necessarily that Hormel wants to do this but they may have to in order to secure the integrity of their product brand. I wonder why it took them so long in the first place?
Let's start calling spam "Coke" and see how long it takes before that company starts calling.
The other day it occurred to me while I was watching this Discovery channel special on space walking with all the astronauts worried about micro-meteors flying around in Earth orbit. We have all this satellite technology floating around, doing all kinds of things in addition to broadcasting and communications. Maybe one major aspect of future warfare will involve satellite-to-satellite battles. What if someone launched a probe into Earth orbit which unleashed hundreds of thousands of tiny projectiles that would circle the Earth and eventually destroy all the artificial satellites? The interesting thing is that the technology to do this probably is already available and even smaller nations could negate the powerful corporate nations by eliminating their satellite networks. Hey, then maybe people would have to actually sit down and talk to each other?
Do you think that a little "This site powered by Windows 2000" icon on the bottom of the page be considered appropriate notification?
The guy definitely broke the law and had unscrupulous intentions and needs to be punished, but awarding damages for "potential loss" is ridiculous and sets a scary precedent.
Likewise, we have the other extremes where juries award plaintiffs billions of dollars from companies that couldn't afford a fraction. I understand the significance of that being a "message" to those who would do wrong in either circumstance, but the exaggerated damage awards seem counterproductive to the degree that they are unrealistic.
We already have established an overriding precedent in this country that continues to be ignored: more rules & harsher sentences have not proven to make a more lawful populace. In a foolish attempt to turn up the volume on the static, we dole out even more ridiculous punishment. We give criminals "multiple life sentences" as if one life sentence isn't good enough! At some point, is anyone going to realize that maybe we need a new approach?
Nothing's fair. It's about the Golden Rule: He who has the gold, makes the rules.
There's a difference between parody and superficial exploitation. When someone mirrors the characters' personalities, plots, history and style, even down to phoenetic rip-offs of the characters' names, that's not art or creativity, it's blatant exploitation and dilution of carefully developed intellectual property.
It is precisely due to ripoffs like "Tanya Grotter" that copyright protections exist. Rowling worked very hard to develop her characters and her universe, and as politically-incorrect as it might seem in this forum to defend the right of anyone to claim some semblances of intellectual property control, I think it's warranted here.
What if I created a web site called, "Slashdash.org" and copied exactly the structure, look and feel and the content of site? You don't think the owners of Slashdot would be upset? Absolutely and rightly so because such an effort would be an attempt to unfairly exploit the momentum that Slashdot has gained through a lot of time and hard work.
Let's give credit where credit is due to those who either through luck, resources or hard work manage to create an institution, and don't want some noob showing up and sampling the fruits of their labor for a quick, undeserved buck.
First, any time you implement filtering based on content you run the risk of blocking legitimate correspondence. This is unacceptable in many scenarios. And the only way to deal with the potential loss of legitimate mail is to have some facility to review messages flagged as "spam", which defeats the purpose of client-side filtering saving any time. It's just as easy to hit the delete key in that case.
As I've said before, the issue here is inappropriate exploitation (and in many cases downright theft) of resources. If you stop spammers from their currently completely uncontrolled behavior, then everyone's performance and cost to conduct business and communication online will be dramatically reduced.
There may be some filtering projects that aren't making money, but that's beside the point. Either way, it's plugging a leak in a boat by turning on a bilge pump, which just slows down the water draining in, but doesn't fix the problem, so the pump eventually has to be maintained in order to keep you from sinking. Eventually the Internet trafic noise level will cause everything to sink if we don't do something about it.
For the Bazillionth Time, client side spam filtering does not address the problem. It's a waste of time.
The more client-side filters that are in place, the more spam will increase. It's already a cat-and-mouse game between spammers and filters. In the mean time, almost 70% of existing mail traffic is UCE. Filters don't stop that at all.
You have to stop spam at the source. You have to force spammers to act responsibly and not exploit network resources without appropriate compensation. Only when this is done, will any of us ever have any real control of the spam situation.
Client-side spam filtering is a scheme devised by companies who actually have a financial interest in spam, and the more spam there is, the more money they make. Let's get smart about this and stop acting like the rest of the country's brain dead couch potatoes.
The value of an Intellivisions console at your local thrift store has now risen from $7 to $8!
First off, most claims that p2p is seriously hurting the industry are arguable. But for the purpose of this argument, let's assume that p2p is making an impact on CD sales. (I contend sales are down because more people are broke and nowadays music is crap)
The big argument is that "artists" won't be able to make a living because of mp3 trade. This is ironic, because most artists make more money through performance royalties than they do mechanicals.
There are basically three types of revenues that artists collect:
Mechanical (aka Publishing) - Royalties from the sale of albums and use of music on other media and in public.
Performance - Revenue from concerts and other performances.
Merchandising - T-shirts and peripheral products.
While mechanical royalties can be exponentially more substantive than all other forms of payment, most artists make more money from performance and merchandising. If p2p has any effect on revenue, at worst it exclusively hurts mechanical revenue, but likely boosts performance and merchandising!
Now here's the clincher: Of all the revenue types generated, artists get the highest percentage for performance and merchandising. Publishing royalties are mostly divided up among big record companies, publishers, lawyers, managers, producers and a big list of tag-along carpetbaggers. This is why we pay $18 for a CD. The artist may be lucky to get $0.25 of that money!
In reality, if you assume p2p affects product sales, the end result of this probably isn't felt by most artists anyway. It actually helps the artist (turns more people on to the music who will go to the concerts), and if anything, just takes a few bucks away from monopolistic media conglamorates who are hell-bent on price-fixing creative media.
Judging from the progress of ICANN, Dr. Cerf might want to resign and salvage what's left of his reputation post haste.
Linux = Communism? I think not.. let's work this out...
Linux = Multiparty Democracy to Monarchy at times
Oracle, Sun = Monarchy
Unix = Anarchy with various flavors being multiparty democracies
Windows = Single Party State Authoritarian Regime which occasionally morphs into a Military Junta, and occasionally pretends to be communistic to improve public image
The dinky sites are the future, but only when a search engine can come up with a truly useful relevence engine.
It has not been developed as of yet. The best Google and others can do as of yet are cross-link relevance formulae, which can be manipulated.
Ironically, Google has taken a step backwards with the intent to filter blogs. Blogs are generally more relevant to the content they reference than 90% of the crap that comes up in search results.
What does this have to do with the music business?
These companies have hemmoraged money since day one, on the premise that at some point they would make money. They've bought primo real estate, fronted outrageous costs, never really looking to see if the bottom line could justify the outlay. Surprise! Thanks for playing, "lets make the management team rich".
This has nothing to do with the music business. This is about crappy business planning.
This is the reality of our criminal justice system, but your friend need not dispair - we have a civil justice system as well. Given the amount of data he's collected, and assuming that he collected and stored it in a proper manner, he should have no problem bringing this hacker to court on civil charges.
This is the bullshit evolution of our system of "justice". In all likelihood this spamming loser doesn't have anything worth suing for in civil court, and if he did, he'd just do a Chapter 13 and weasel out.
There really isn't much justice available in civil court for the common man.
The blacklist is IP based, not e-mail based, so it's not relevant, and it's an extension of the existing relay blacklist technique.
The technique is in all likelihood, one of the most productive ways to nail spammers. Most spammers weasel the web, newsgroups, mailing lists, domain registration databases for their fodder. You seed these sources with "shill" addresses, and you have a very effective way of shutting down spammers in real time by populating a smtp relay blacklist.
Aside from the obvious of getting the authorities to crack down on the existing illegal activities (relay hijacking, violation of TOS of ISPs, header forging, etc.) which is the only true solution, I think there are much better approaches than this "greylisting" method.
The problem with the greylist method is it still slows down mail service, and potentially more than the relay blacklist features. The objective here is that end-user/networks should not be penalized in the fight against spam. We already waste too many resources, and according to my latest mail server stats, more than 65% of our inbound mail is UCE. I'm fed up with more than half my e-mail bandwidth being crap my users didn't request so more resource allocation on a local level in the fight against spam is counterproductive!
Here's a very clever, much more practical method I cound recently.
A company is Canada has set up what it calls SORBS: Spam and Open Relay Blocking System.
What's different from their blacklist is that they maintain "honeypots" strategically located around the Internet. These are servers they specifically set up as inbound mail relays, but never for legitimate purposes. If the servers get [select] mail activity, it's assumed to not be legitimate and it flags the source as a potential spammer... it makes a lot of sense. You create a domain name, but don't promote it in any legitimate manner, and/or you seed spam lists with these e-mail addresses and then let the spammers send to your key systems around the internet and *bam*, they're identified in real time, and then added to a blacklist.
I really like this idea. Like any other system, it has the potential for abuse but the beauty is the identity of the honeypot systems is kept secret, so it's very difficult for anyone other than spammers to exploit the network.
There's a bigger problem with the District Attorneys. You can get the FBI to investigate, but the DAs are the ones that have to choose to prosecute. Most of them don't know squat about computer crime and are politically motivated. For this reason, it's important for slashdotters to ask questions during election time for their DAs and find out what they know about technology and whether they have a stand on tech issues.
Doesn't matter. I had an associate claim over $100,000 in damages, with detailed logs and everything. They opened a case file, but couldn't get the D.A. to prosecute. Most of the Feds know very little about computer crime and the District Attorneys know even less, and don't seem interested in prosecuting these types of hackers... I guess they'd rather go after someone who digs a computer manual out of a dumpster or something.
An associate of mine had his server broken into. He clearly documented exactly what was done and prepared a detailed report with everything cross-referenced to the FBI. The activity was clearly malicious and illegal. The FBI opened a file and sent agents to meet with him. Even though the perpetrator of the crime had been identified (down to his cell phone number, place of employment and everything), the FBI presented the case to the D.A. for prosecution and the D.A. refused to take the case. Money was a major factor. Because my associate was quick to discover the compromise, and therefore reduce the damages to his system and his clients, the monetary damage was minimal. Nonetheless, the authorities refused to take criminal action against the perpetrator even though the whole case was laid out in front of them. His experience indicated that law enforcement was more about money than law.