Considering the massive declines in music sales over the past 10 years (music sales peaked in 1999, and Napster was first released in June 1999; per-captia inflation-adjusted music revenue from the US is 1/3rd what it was 10 years ago), I have a very hard time believing that piracy has helped music sales. Some people might end up buying more music after pirating it, but, as far as I can tell, that's the exception. I don't know why someone would buy music after they have a pirated copy and the option to pirate the latest copies. I've had pirates say that exact thing to me: they can't understand why I pay for stuff when I can get it for free on the internet via piracy. (I pay because piracy is not an option, and it's not an option because I insist on doing the right thing.)
All this study does is show that "Group A" which consist of people who are 'big fans of music and pirate' purchase more music than "Group B" which consists of a heterogeneous mix of people, composed mostly of people who aren't big music fans. It does not prove that piracy increases music sales.
Is that so? One of the more commonly used arguments for piracy is that it allows them to discover unknown content and trying it before buying. At least in my case, this is true. The only reason I got into music at all is because I got some pirated music from friends.
I'm confused. You wouldn't have gotten into music at all without piracy? That seems kind of odd to me.
Out of curiosity, why do you buy music at all? I mean, all of the music I buy now is in digital format (I stopped buying CDs a while ago). It seems to me that a pirated copy is the same as a digital copy I bought through iTunes or Amazon. I know a number of pirates who have told me that paying for anything digital is a stupid waste of money - they say, "why pay for something you can get for free?" Are you really interested in getting physical boxsets or are you paying money for content that you already got through piracy?
The reason the MAFIAA want to lock down the Internet and PC's isn't to stop piracy, it is to get back their position as gatekeepers of popular entertainment. How can they keep tricking artists into signing contracts that will see the artist get cents on the dollar, if the artist can simply market themselves via the Internet?
I think the flaw in this argument is that the RIAA and MPAA aren't locking down the internet. They have zero control over any artist who decides to sell their music outside the music industry. A few musicians have been doing that - people like Pomplamoose and Johnathan Coulton have been doing it and the RIAA/MPAA haven't been attacking them. Why not, if they are trying to destroy music outside the label system?
I have a much simpler theory: the RIAA/MPAA believe that piracy harms their bottom line. That's it. Companies care about money, and piracy is a illegitimate activity that harms their revenue. Why do I think they didn't publish this study? Because it appears to suggest that piracy helps sales. I think that's a flawed conclusion based on the data, but I could certainly see why someone would erroneously reach that conclusion from the study. Of course, we can ask the question of whether the RIAA/MPAA is right about piracy harming sales. I think they are right about that, and I do think piracy is an illegitimate drain on their business.
I really don't agree with this strategy of ascribing darkly sinister motives (they want to control us, etc) when "decreased revenue" is such an obvious motive that actually makes sense.
Maybe the economy has more to do with that then piracy.
And that may be a factor, I'm just very suspicious of the idea that piracy (piracy as it exists, and as it could exist in a future market of much larger piracy) is a positive force for sales. My point is that this data does not show that piracy is a positive force for sales. In order to argue that piracy is a positive force on sales in light of declining sales (especially in the music industry), you have to argue that sales revenue would be much lower (for example, having declines of 6% in 2010 and 15% in 2009), but piracy helped prop sales up so that only declines of 3% and 7.6% were seen in those years. One strategy of pirates has been to claim that piracy increases sales, but they always end up having to explain away the historical trends of declining sales.
Since the timing of sales declines seem to match piracy so well, I'm very suspicious. For example, the peak year for music sales was 1999 and has been declining ever since. Suspiciously, Napster was released in June 1999 and peaked at 26 million users by 2001. Similarly with the movie industry, the peak year happened a few years later (which makes me think movie piracy was more dependent on high-speed networks, which makes logical sense).
We know from other data that music sales (http://www.businessinsider.com/these-charts-explain-the-real-death-of-the-music-industry-2011-2) and DVD/BlueRay sales (*see below) are down. When adjusted for inflation and population growth, Box office revenues are down around 15% compared to 10 years ago.
It's also worth pointing out that saying, "pirates buy more than the average consumer" is not actually an argument for piracy, since pirates tend to be disproportionately from a class of people who were originally big fans. Thus, it's possible that "big fans" who start using piracy end up buying 1/2 as much as they used to, but still out-buy the "average consumer" who was never all that interested. (For example, I don't pirate and I own zero DVDs or BluRay disks, which makes it easy for pirates to buy more than me.)
* "Total revenue from DVD, Blu-ray and digital sales and rentals of movies and television shows in the U.S. declined 3% to $18.8 billion in 2010, according to new data from industry trade organization Digital Entertainment Group. Although the drops, particularly of DVD sales, are worrisome for the entertainment industry, studio executives can at least take some comfort in the fact that the picture isn't worsening as quickly as it did in 2009, when total home entertainment revenue plunged 7.6%." http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2011/01/home-entertainment-market-shrinking-slower-as-blu-ray-and-digital-make-up-for-more-of-dvd-decline.html
Those Austrian villagers got what was coming to them! If they had never outsourced the village's construction to China, then China would never have been able to duplicate it!
(Yeah, I'm making a joke about all the people saying China couldn't clone Apple Stores if Apple didn't outsource there.)
Worrying phenomenon for who? Not for me, for you? No? Then it ain't worrying. A new famine looms in Africa, China swears to brutally surpres discent in Tibet, hundreds are tortured and/or killed in Syria, the western world is embroiled in a near global war now and I am supposed to be worried about some stores in China that might mean Steve Jobs income is a few dollars lower? He didn't worry much about all the loss in income to westerners when he outsourced all production to China but I am supposed to worry when what everybody warned would happen (what is produced in China is copied in China) is happening?
Tell it to the marines, cry me a river, talk to the hand because the face ain't listening. I could go on but that might show I cared. Which I don't.
Cue Apple fanboys defending their gadgets being produced in slave labor camps with reaganomics.
Just so you know: anything bad that happens to you (whether rape, murder, theft, whatever) also measures pretty low next to famine in Africa, China in Tibet, torture in Syria, etc. I hope you use similar logic to remind people that they shouldn't have the least bit of concern for you no matter what the circumstances are.
You can call it a thin defense but it's been strong enough that it's still running...
No, it IS a thin defense, especially in light of their nasty-grams back to companies asking them to remove pirated content, even while the Pirate Bay removes child porn. It's a totally disingenuous "We have no control over the content! Unless we don't like it, then we'll do stuff. Did you blink? Because we just sent an email to the copyright owner telling them to go fuck themselves (thus proving what our intentions are), and now we suddenly don't have control anymore!"
The summary says, "the first known case of an adenovirus jumping from monkeys to humans". Is HIV an adenovirus? I couldn't find any information that it is.
Heh. Let's not forget that Republicans are also firmly behind farm subsidies. Heck, farm country is where a lot of Republicans get votes.
Republicans dodge farm subsidy cuts
June 15, 2011
Republicans have quietly maneuvered to prevent a House spending bill from chipping away at federal farm subsidies, instead forging ahead with much larger cuts to domestic and international food aid.
The GOP move will probably prevent up to $167 million in cuts in direct payments to farmers, including some of the nation’s wealthiest. The maneuver, along with the Senate’s refusal Tuesday to end a $5 billion annual tax subsidy for ethanol-gasoline blends, illustrates just how difficult it will be for Congress to come up with even a fraction of the trillions in budget savings over the next decade that Republicans have promised. ...
Direct payments to farmers have been a frequent target of fiscal conservatives and other critics of farm programs because they are paid regardless of crop price or yield. They have survived for years, along with tens of billions annually in other subsidies for farmers, because a powerful coalition of farm state lawmakers in both parties has protected them.
Shhhhhhhhh! This is part of the Republican 2012 election plan - the old story of painting Democrats as wasteful of tax dollars, and you should TOTALLY elect them to office. Strangely, other sources say that there's lots of people saying they either don't have broadband access or that there's no broadband service available.
Article from last year:
In a survey of more than 100,000 people in more than 50,000 households across the U.S., 40 percent reported no broadband or high-speed access to the Internet, while 30 percent said they have no Internet access at all.
Sponsored by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and conducted by the Census Bureau, the survey found that most of those interviewed said they either don't need broadband or find it too expensive. Some said they have no computer, but many of those in rural areas reported that broadband is simply not available.
If only the games industry made non-FPS games, then they could use this to motivate people to buy the game with the manual, instead of just downloading...
In general, games are designed to function without a manual. Why? Because a lot of people don't bother reading the manual - so game developers get better sales with an easy-to-learn game that requires no manual reading. I can't remember the last time I read a game manual. I think it might've been Civ 3, because I need to find out more detail about how something worked. Does World of Goo, Angry Birds, Starcraft 2, or Braid need a manual? I played all of them without a manual.
> Sounds like we need to build-in a 'panic' phrase that would scramble the data rather than decrypt it.
Which is why a smart person would make backups of the encrypted file before attempting to decrypt it. Besides, the process of scrambling the data would require software that could scramble it. I'm pretty sure there are ways to get your hands on modified versions of the software that would have the 'data scrambling' code disabled.
I think the answers to your questions would be a simple, "No, you do not have to arrange your papers and effects in such a way that the government can understand it. Yes, you can write in a coded manner, yes you can use euphemisms. However, if your documents are part of a criminal investigation, you have to be willing to 'decrypt them'." Afterall, if anyone answered "No" to your questions, then that would make cryptography illegal in all circumstances, and it's not being made illegal.
> "So, while you can be compelled to surrender a physical object (the key to the safe, in the previous analogy), the 5th Amendment is specifically is about something in your mind."
So, what you're saying is that the DOJ can compel someone to hand-over the key to a safe, but if that same exact safe had a combination lock, then the DOJ would be powerless because they can't ask you for the numerical combination that would open it? Seems like a bizarre distinction.
> "If the "locked safe" in the previous analogy is not locked, but hidden, can a defendant be compelled to disclose its location?"
It's not a hidden safe. The DOJ knows *exactly* where the hard drive is and that it contains data.
> "The only upside of the unmarked cars was that you could collect more ticket revenue easily. But ticket revenue was not the purpose of the department, so why should they give up ground in crime prevention for marginal gains in catching offenders unawares. It boils down to the question, is it better to prevent a crime or catch the criminal after the fact?"
Seems to me that marked police cars are preventing crime only in the immediate vicinity of the police car. For example, when I'm driving my car and I see a bunch of cars suddenly slow down around me, there's often a police car or photo radar immediately ahead. While the police car is "preventing a crime" of speeding in the immediate vicinity of the police car, I'm not so sure that it actually reduces driver's speeds anywhere but in the immediate vicinity. (I suppose you could argue that it "prevents the crime of speeding in the local area", but I'm pretty sure it only prevents speeding over a 2% distance of the driver's entire commute.) From that perspective, marked police cars are only preventing speeding in a negligible sense. One would also expect that unmarked police cars prevent speeding mainly through the vague threat of getting a ticket from a police car you can't see. Thus, I don't agree with your characterization that marked vs unmarked cars can be simply converted to "is it better to prevent a crime or catch the criminal after the fact?" (I'm not saying I'm pro-unmarked police cars, by the way. I'm just pointing out that your Criminal Justice teacher is taking one perspective on the issue, and I don't believe it's complete or the only valid viewpoint.)
I thought the deal with record companies was that they paid for things up-front -- i.e. an "Advance". The article seems to confirm this when it says, "but if the advance is $1 million... the band still technically "owes" $500,000"". So, in most cases, the label is setting up the contract so the artist won't get paid any royalties, but they band still have the Advance money to keep (and they don't have to pay back the money they "owe", which is why the word is in quotes) and the record company is paying for promotion in various forms. This also means that if a band flops (earning, say, $100,000 in sales), and the record companies paid an advance of $200,000 and another $200,000 in promotion, then the record company eats that $300,000 loss. According to a recent article written by OK-GO, that's the value of record companies - they're funding a lot of bands to try to make them famous, even though 95% of them will flop.
Okay, but that's a different argument than the "everybody's doing it, therefore it's time to change the laws" which was the point that I was responding to.
> "Notice he used "inflation adjusted" revenues. Blaming "piracy" when most of that "60-70% drop" is due to inflation. Pretty slimy if you ask me."
No, not using inflation-adjusted numbers is slimy (and I see it done by slimy pro-pirate websites all the time). Are you going to tell me that you'd be perfectly fine earning the exact same dollar amount in 1970 as you are today? Because you'd be a hole lot poorer today if you did.
> Of course the the numbers he used were pulled from his ass. Since he has shown his blatant dishonesty, we have no reason to believe his "60-70% drop" number in the first place."
Check out the chart of the per-capita, inflation-adjusted numbers in the second chart. On that basis, revenue has dropped from $71 per-capita in 1999 to $26 per capita in 2009. http://www.businessinsider.com/these-charts-explain-the-real-death-of-the-music-industry-2011-2
The movie industry is also getting hit. Per-capita revenue at the US box office is down about 15% in the past 10 years, while DVD/Blue-Ray are down much bigger amounts. (I forget exactly what the number was, but I thought it's down something like 50% in the past 10 years.)
> Brilliant solution, If it's easier to get it legally, most would prefer it to illegal methods.
Or maybe not. When you look at the music business, and consider that there are DRM-free ways to get music through iTunes and Amazon, or unlimited streaming services like Rhapsody, but then consider that per-capita, inflation-adjusted music sales have fallen by 60-70% in the past 10 years, it suggests to me that legal services are not preferred to illegal ones. (People talk about iTunes likes it's some massive monster for digital music sales, but it's actually a pretty small fraction of all music sales.) Besides, isn't there a streaming-movie service already available through NetFlix? Amazon and YouTube have video on demand for TV shows and movies.
Indeed. And let's look at the percentage of the population who breaks traffic laws. I'd bet it's a much higher percentage than the percentage of pirates. Clearly, we need to eliminate traffic laws.
> "It really is sad to see US and UK companies playing this territorial-creep card... oh well, maybe when their citizens start getting called for extradition to other countries they'll either explicitly acknowledge the double standard, or live with it and start making their citizens subject to laws from random places."
Most of the time, when someone does some action, it only affects the local people. For example, if some country wants to legalize drugs, then it's the local population who is most affected. On the other hand, since the internet is international, there is no "here" or "there". So, on the internet, if one country legalizes drugs, it's the equivalent of people in that country being allowed to legally ship drugs *everywhere* in the entire world. I don't agree with extradition in this case, but the problem still exists that things on the internet are international in a way that other crimes are not. That issue is not going away, and it will continue to cause problems going into the future.
> "Mostly, I find it sad that copyright is the thing that these countries are most interested in protecting... who needs liberty and democracy when we need to be sure nobody is ripping off some lame boy band that Sony has decided needs to be protected by the full brunt of the us DoJ."
Where did you get the notion that "copyright is the thing that these countries are most interested in protecting". You sound like a person who got a parking ticket, and you complain that the police aren't out solving murders and concluding that "I guess parking violations are the thing that these countries are most interested in cracking down on".
> "And, I guess the UK only require that they "feel" they have jurisdiction... that's a brilliant legal standard."
Regarding the "jurisdiction" issue (and ignoring this particular case - since I feel the UK generally has reasonably decent laws to deal with it themselves), I don't think it's always unreasonable for the US or UK to do something, although extradition is probably going too far. Given the international nature of the internet, and assuming that the local legal system is a lame duck, then it might be reasonable for the US to intervene, but I'd lean more towards putting pressure on the local government. For example, when the russian website AllOfMp3 was up and running, they were selling music for a few pennies a song. It was obvious that they were pocketing all the money for themselves, but it was legal in Russia because of a loophole in Russian law. I never bought anything from the site because I could see they were just for-profit pirates, which is a really crappy thing to do. So, AllOfMp3 was (1) Legal in Russia, and (2) On the internet, so it was available to internationally to everyone, without respect for national borders. Do you think what AllOfMp3 was doing was completely fine simply because they were hosted in Russia and legal under Russian law, or do you, like me, think what they were doing was screwing over people and the international nature of the internet means it's perfectly okay for the US to put pressure on Russia to close the loophole?
Also, if I remember correctly, the US has gone after international computer crackers. (Again, another symptom of the internet being an international space.) What the crackers are doing might be entirely legal in their own country, but I can completely understand why the US might go after someone located in another country. Out of curiosity, are you going to argue that the US has no jurisdiction and it should just go sit on its hands and continue to let crackers wreak havok?
> "This is truly sad, and it means American laws have been totally taken over by corporate interests."
You seems to think protection of copyright is entirely equivalent to "corporate interests". But, then, I suppose you could also claim that laws against shoplifting are also "protection of corporate interests" - while that's technically true, it sounds far more ominous.
Slashdot Mirror
Considering the massive declines in music sales over the past 10 years (music sales peaked in 1999, and Napster was first released in June 1999; per-captia inflation-adjusted music revenue from the US is 1/3rd what it was 10 years ago), I have a very hard time believing that piracy has helped music sales. Some people might end up buying more music after pirating it, but, as far as I can tell, that's the exception. I don't know why someone would buy music after they have a pirated copy and the option to pirate the latest copies. I've had pirates say that exact thing to me: they can't understand why I pay for stuff when I can get it for free on the internet via piracy. (I pay because piracy is not an option, and it's not an option because I insist on doing the right thing.)
All this study does is show that "Group A" which consist of people who are 'big fans of music and pirate' purchase more music than "Group B" which consists of a heterogeneous mix of people, composed mostly of people who aren't big music fans. It does not prove that piracy increases music sales.
Is that so? One of the more commonly used arguments for piracy is that it allows them to discover unknown content and trying it before buying. At least in my case, this is true. The only reason I got into music at all is because I got some pirated music from friends.
I'm confused. You wouldn't have gotten into music at all without piracy? That seems kind of odd to me.
Out of curiosity, why do you buy music at all? I mean, all of the music I buy now is in digital format (I stopped buying CDs a while ago). It seems to me that a pirated copy is the same as a digital copy I bought through iTunes or Amazon. I know a number of pirates who have told me that paying for anything digital is a stupid waste of money - they say, "why pay for something you can get for free?" Are you really interested in getting physical boxsets or are you paying money for content that you already got through piracy?
The reason the MAFIAA want to lock down the Internet and PC's isn't to stop piracy, it is to get back their position as gatekeepers of popular entertainment. How can they keep tricking artists into signing contracts that will see the artist get cents on the dollar, if the artist can simply market themselves via the Internet?
I think the flaw in this argument is that the RIAA and MPAA aren't locking down the internet. They have zero control over any artist who decides to sell their music outside the music industry. A few musicians have been doing that - people like Pomplamoose and Johnathan Coulton have been doing it and the RIAA/MPAA haven't been attacking them. Why not, if they are trying to destroy music outside the label system?
I have a much simpler theory: the RIAA/MPAA believe that piracy harms their bottom line. That's it. Companies care about money, and piracy is a illegitimate activity that harms their revenue. Why do I think they didn't publish this study? Because it appears to suggest that piracy helps sales. I think that's a flawed conclusion based on the data, but I could certainly see why someone would erroneously reach that conclusion from the study. Of course, we can ask the question of whether the RIAA/MPAA is right about piracy harming sales. I think they are right about that, and I do think piracy is an illegitimate drain on their business.
I really don't agree with this strategy of ascribing darkly sinister motives (they want to control us, etc) when "decreased revenue" is such an obvious motive that actually makes sense.
Maybe the economy has more to do with that then piracy.
And that may be a factor, I'm just very suspicious of the idea that piracy (piracy as it exists, and as it could exist in a future market of much larger piracy) is a positive force for sales. My point is that this data does not show that piracy is a positive force for sales. In order to argue that piracy is a positive force on sales in light of declining sales (especially in the music industry), you have to argue that sales revenue would be much lower (for example, having declines of 6% in 2010 and 15% in 2009), but piracy helped prop sales up so that only declines of 3% and 7.6% were seen in those years. One strategy of pirates has been to claim that piracy increases sales, but they always end up having to explain away the historical trends of declining sales.
Since the timing of sales declines seem to match piracy so well, I'm very suspicious. For example, the peak year for music sales was 1999 and has been declining ever since. Suspiciously, Napster was released in June 1999 and peaked at 26 million users by 2001. Similarly with the movie industry, the peak year happened a few years later (which makes me think movie piracy was more dependent on high-speed networks, which makes logical sense).
We know from other data that music sales (http://www.businessinsider.com/these-charts-explain-the-real-death-of-the-music-industry-2011-2) and DVD/BlueRay sales (*see below) are down. When adjusted for inflation and population growth, Box office revenues are down around 15% compared to 10 years ago.
It's also worth pointing out that saying, "pirates buy more than the average consumer" is not actually an argument for piracy, since pirates tend to be disproportionately from a class of people who were originally big fans. Thus, it's possible that "big fans" who start using piracy end up buying 1/2 as much as they used to, but still out-buy the "average consumer" who was never all that interested. (For example, I don't pirate and I own zero DVDs or BluRay disks, which makes it easy for pirates to buy more than me.)
* "Total revenue from DVD, Blu-ray and digital sales and rentals of movies and television shows in the U.S. declined 3% to $18.8 billion in 2010, according to new data from industry trade organization Digital Entertainment Group. Although the drops, particularly of DVD sales, are worrisome for the entertainment industry, studio executives can at least take some comfort in the fact that the picture isn't worsening as quickly as it did in 2009, when total home entertainment revenue plunged 7.6%."
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2011/01/home-entertainment-market-shrinking-slower-as-blu-ray-and-digital-make-up-for-more-of-dvd-decline.html
Those Austrian villagers got what was coming to them! If they had never outsourced the village's construction to China, then China would never have been able to duplicate it!
(Yeah, I'm making a joke about all the people saying China couldn't clone Apple Stores if Apple didn't outsource there.)
Just so you know: anything bad that happens to you (whether rape, murder, theft, whatever) also measures pretty low next to famine in Africa, China in Tibet, torture in Syria, etc. I hope you use similar logic to remind people that they shouldn't have the least bit of concern for you no matter what the circumstances are.
Well, they say "information wants to be free" and I've never heard "information wants to be permanently deleted".
You can call it a thin defense but it's been strong enough that it's still running...
No, it IS a thin defense, especially in light of their nasty-grams back to companies asking them to remove pirated content, even while the Pirate Bay removes child porn. It's a totally disingenuous "We have no control over the content! Unless we don't like it, then we'll do stuff. Did you blink? Because we just sent an email to the copyright owner telling them to go fuck themselves (thus proving what our intentions are), and now we suddenly don't have control anymore!"
To followup on this comment, HIV is a retrovirus (meaning its genome as stored as RNA). Adenovirus' genome is in double-stranded DNA.
The summary says, "the first known case of an adenovirus jumping from monkeys to humans". Is HIV an adenovirus? I couldn't find any information that it is.
http://articles.boston.com/2011-06-15/news/29661688_1_farm-subsidy-cuts-farm-programs-direct-payments
Article from last year:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10454133-94.html
If only the games industry made non-FPS games, then they could use this to motivate people to buy the game with the manual, instead of just downloading...
In general, games are designed to function without a manual. Why? Because a lot of people don't bother reading the manual - so game developers get better sales with an easy-to-learn game that requires no manual reading. I can't remember the last time I read a game manual. I think it might've been Civ 3, because I need to find out more detail about how something worked. Does World of Goo, Angry Birds, Starcraft 2, or Braid need a manual? I played all of them without a manual.
> Sounds like we need to build-in a 'panic' phrase that would scramble the data rather than decrypt it.
Which is why a smart person would make backups of the encrypted file before attempting to decrypt it. Besides, the process of scrambling the data would require software that could scramble it. I'm pretty sure there are ways to get your hands on modified versions of the software that would have the 'data scrambling' code disabled.
I think the answers to your questions would be a simple, "No, you do not have to arrange your papers and effects in such a way that the government can understand it. Yes, you can write in a coded manner, yes you can use euphemisms. However, if your documents are part of a criminal investigation, you have to be willing to 'decrypt them'." Afterall, if anyone answered "No" to your questions, then that would make cryptography illegal in all circumstances, and it's not being made illegal.
> "So, while you can be compelled to surrender a physical object (the key to the safe, in the previous analogy), the 5th Amendment is specifically is about something in your mind."
So, what you're saying is that the DOJ can compel someone to hand-over the key to a safe, but if that same exact safe had a combination lock, then the DOJ would be powerless because they can't ask you for the numerical combination that would open it? Seems like a bizarre distinction.
> "If the "locked safe" in the previous analogy is not locked, but hidden, can a defendant be compelled to disclose its location?"
It's not a hidden safe. The DOJ knows *exactly* where the hard drive is and that it contains data.
> "The only upside of the unmarked cars was that you could collect more ticket revenue easily. But ticket revenue was not the purpose of the department, so why should they give up ground in crime prevention for marginal gains in catching offenders unawares. It boils down to the question, is it better to prevent a crime or catch the criminal after the fact?"
Seems to me that marked police cars are preventing crime only in the immediate vicinity of the police car. For example, when I'm driving my car and I see a bunch of cars suddenly slow down around me, there's often a police car or photo radar immediately ahead. While the police car is "preventing a crime" of speeding in the immediate vicinity of the police car, I'm not so sure that it actually reduces driver's speeds anywhere but in the immediate vicinity. (I suppose you could argue that it "prevents the crime of speeding in the local area", but I'm pretty sure it only prevents speeding over a 2% distance of the driver's entire commute.) From that perspective, marked police cars are only preventing speeding in a negligible sense. One would also expect that unmarked police cars prevent speeding mainly through the vague threat of getting a ticket from a police car you can't see. Thus, I don't agree with your characterization that marked vs unmarked cars can be simply converted to "is it better to prevent a crime or catch the criminal after the fact?" (I'm not saying I'm pro-unmarked police cars, by the way. I'm just pointing out that your Criminal Justice teacher is taking one perspective on the issue, and I don't believe it's complete or the only valid viewpoint.)
I thought the deal with record companies was that they paid for things up-front -- i.e. an "Advance". The article seems to confirm this when it says, "but if the advance is $1 million... the band still technically "owes" $500,000"". So, in most cases, the label is setting up the contract so the artist won't get paid any royalties, but they band still have the Advance money to keep (and they don't have to pay back the money they "owe", which is why the word is in quotes) and the record company is paying for promotion in various forms. This also means that if a band flops (earning, say, $100,000 in sales), and the record companies paid an advance of $200,000 and another $200,000 in promotion, then the record company eats that $300,000 loss. According to a recent article written by OK-GO, that's the value of record companies - they're funding a lot of bands to try to make them famous, even though 95% of them will flop.
Okay, but that's a different argument than the "everybody's doing it, therefore it's time to change the laws" which was the point that I was responding to.
> "Notice he used "inflation adjusted" revenues. Blaming "piracy" when most of that "60-70% drop" is due to inflation. Pretty slimy if you ask me."
No, not using inflation-adjusted numbers is slimy (and I see it done by slimy pro-pirate websites all the time). Are you going to tell me that you'd be perfectly fine earning the exact same dollar amount in 1970 as you are today? Because you'd be a hole lot poorer today if you did.
> Of course the the numbers he used were pulled from his ass. Since he has shown his blatant dishonesty, we have no reason to believe his "60-70% drop" number in the first place."
Check out the chart of the per-capita, inflation-adjusted numbers in the second chart. On that basis, revenue has dropped from $71 per-capita in 1999 to $26 per capita in 2009.
http://www.businessinsider.com/these-charts-explain-the-real-death-of-the-music-industry-2011-2
> "This might be why music and movie sales are up these days."
"Sales" as in discounted prices, or "sales" as in revenue?
Here's the revenue numbers. Be sure to check out the per-capita, inflation-adjusted chart - there's a 60% to 70% decline in the past 10 years.
http://www.businessinsider.com/these-charts-explain-the-real-death-of-the-music-industry-2011-2
The movie industry is also getting hit. Per-capita revenue at the US box office is down about 15% in the past 10 years, while DVD/Blue-Ray are down much bigger amounts. (I forget exactly what the number was, but I thought it's down something like 50% in the past 10 years.)
> Brilliant solution, If it's easier to get it legally, most would prefer it to illegal methods.
Or maybe not. When you look at the music business, and consider that there are DRM-free ways to get music through iTunes and Amazon, or unlimited streaming services like Rhapsody, but then consider that per-capita, inflation-adjusted music sales have fallen by 60-70% in the past 10 years, it suggests to me that legal services are not preferred to illegal ones. (People talk about iTunes likes it's some massive monster for digital music sales, but it's actually a pretty small fraction of all music sales.) Besides, isn't there a streaming-movie service already available through NetFlix? Amazon and YouTube have video on demand for TV shows and movies.
Indeed. And let's look at the percentage of the population who breaks traffic laws. I'd bet it's a much higher percentage than the percentage of pirates. Clearly, we need to eliminate traffic laws.
> "It really is sad to see US and UK companies playing this territorial-creep card ... oh well, maybe when their citizens start getting called for extradition to other countries they'll either explicitly acknowledge the double standard, or live with it and start making their citizens subject to laws from random places."
... who needs liberty and democracy when we need to be sure nobody is ripping off some lame boy band that Sony has decided needs to be protected by the full brunt of the us DoJ."
... that's a brilliant legal standard."
Most of the time, when someone does some action, it only affects the local people. For example, if some country wants to legalize drugs, then it's the local population who is most affected. On the other hand, since the internet is international, there is no "here" or "there". So, on the internet, if one country legalizes drugs, it's the equivalent of people in that country being allowed to legally ship drugs *everywhere* in the entire world. I don't agree with extradition in this case, but the problem still exists that things on the internet are international in a way that other crimes are not. That issue is not going away, and it will continue to cause problems going into the future.
> "Mostly, I find it sad that copyright is the thing that these countries are most interested in protecting
Where did you get the notion that "copyright is the thing that these countries are most interested in protecting". You sound like a person who got a parking ticket, and you complain that the police aren't out solving murders and concluding that "I guess parking violations are the thing that these countries are most interested in cracking down on".
> "And, I guess the UK only require that they "feel" they have jurisdiction
Regarding the "jurisdiction" issue (and ignoring this particular case - since I feel the UK generally has reasonably decent laws to deal with it themselves), I don't think it's always unreasonable for the US or UK to do something, although extradition is probably going too far. Given the international nature of the internet, and assuming that the local legal system is a lame duck, then it might be reasonable for the US to intervene, but I'd lean more towards putting pressure on the local government. For example, when the russian website AllOfMp3 was up and running, they were selling music for a few pennies a song. It was obvious that they were pocketing all the money for themselves, but it was legal in Russia because of a loophole in Russian law. I never bought anything from the site because I could see they were just for-profit pirates, which is a really crappy thing to do. So, AllOfMp3 was (1) Legal in Russia, and (2) On the internet, so it was available to internationally to everyone, without respect for national borders. Do you think what AllOfMp3 was doing was completely fine simply because they were hosted in Russia and legal under Russian law, or do you, like me, think what they were doing was screwing over people and the international nature of the internet means it's perfectly okay for the US to put pressure on Russia to close the loophole?
Also, if I remember correctly, the US has gone after international computer crackers. (Again, another symptom of the internet being an international space.) What the crackers are doing might be entirely legal in their own country, but I can completely understand why the US might go after someone located in another country. Out of curiosity, are you going to argue that the US has no jurisdiction and it should just go sit on its hands and continue to let crackers wreak havok?
> "This is truly sad, and it means American laws have been totally taken over by corporate interests."
You seems to think protection of copyright is entirely equivalent to "corporate interests". But, then, I suppose you could also claim that laws against shoplifting are also "protection of corporate interests" - while that's technically true, it sounds far more ominous.