Tainted "Piracy" Statistics 401
newtley writes, "The music, movie, and software cartels claim 'piracy' is a Number One problem not only for themselves, but for the world as a whole and so successful are their continuing dis- and misinformation propaganda campaigns that they've been able to dragoon entire governments and police forces into acting as industry enforcers. But, says p2pnet, far from being at the top of the pile, movie and music piracy rank 16th and 20th, respectively, on a global index of illicit markets. (Software piracy ranks 7th.) And even those positions are subject to considerable doubt."
Sounds like a great waste of time all around (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Marijuana -- The State says what you can put into your body (doing no crime to no one else), probably funded by the big medical business
2. Counterfeit Technology Products -- This is why you shop at stores that guarantee their products with a refund. If there was no law against counterfeit goods, I'd let the retailer find out what is best for me. In some cases, something counterfeit might be of the same quality as the "official and legal" version. Look at Fendi handbags and their knock-offs
3. Cocaine -- See #1. No crime committed against anyone else. Now if you kill someone (when on drugs or off), I can agree that a crime is committed, but the intoxicant shouldn't matter. Sometimes that intoxicant is adrenaline.
4. Opion/Heroin -- See #1 (doing crime to no one else).
5. Pirated Web Videos. Supply and demand here. The supply of digitally transmitted products is nearly infinite, therefore the price falls to the floor. Then again, I am I am against copyright [www.nocopyrightstudios].
6. Counterfeit Pharmaceutical -- Here's another place that the retail and distributor can excel at. Don't trust your distributor? Shop at one that's insured and bonded against dispensing dangerous drugs, or knock-off ones.
7. Pirated Software. See #5 (supply and demand).
8. Human Trafficking. Here's a place I can understand goverment being involved in, but it is also one they're doing a terrible job in fighting. The worst concern is my thought that a lot of States might even be involved in this problem. I know the U.S. government trafficks in human lives and bodies. See Guantanemo Bay.
9. Amphetamines/Meth -- See #1 (doing crime to no one else).
10. Animals and Wildlife Smuggling. Here's a problem better solved through groups like PERC [perc.org]. If you care about rare animals, spend YOUR money to make wildlife habitats to keep them out of the open arms of the State that is part of the problem with extinction.
11. Ecstasy -- See #1 (doing crime to no one else).
12. Counterfeit Auto Parts -- See #2 (shop at trustworthy retailers if you're concerned).
13. Trash Smuggling. A friend of mine is a famous pastor in Uganda. I told him we should go into business to take trash from the U.S. on boats to Uganda and let people find value in the trash. He loved the idea. He deals with the absolute poorest people in Africa every day (I'm going there again in December) and he loves the thought that one man's trash is another man's treasure. They'd probably find millions of dollars worth of treasure in our trash.
14. Human Smuggling -- See #8 (State's failure).
15. Art and Antique Smuggling. I insure against theft, so should you. The State is worthless here.
16. Pirated Movies -- See #5 (supply and demand).
17. Smuggled Cigarettes -- Thank the market for cheaper tax free smokes. I noticed they were $7 a pack in Chicago a few weeks ago. Tax free they're about 70 cents. The State created this problem.
18. Gas and Oil Smuggling. See #17 on the State destroying the market of goods through taxation/theft.
19. Pirated Music -- See #5 (supply and demand).
20. Illegal Fishing -- See #10 (privately funded habitats).
22. Pirated Mobile Phone Entertainment -- See #5 (supply and demand).
23. Pirated Video Games -- See #5 (supply and demand).
24. Counterfeit Cigarettes -- See #17 (market provisions) and #2 (shop at trustworthy retailers if you're concerned).
25. Small Arms Trafficking -- See the second amendment.
27. Counterfeit Shoes -- See #2 (shop at trustworthy retailers if you're concerned).
28. Pirated Books -- See #5 (supply and demand).
29. Counterfeit Sports Memorabilia -- See #5 (supply and demand) and #2 (shop
Re:Sounds like a great waste of time all around (Score:4, Insightful)
I think that says it all. Pirated music is just a slightly bigger problem than illegal fishing.
Re:Sounds like a great waste of time all around (Score:5, Funny)
Somehow I figured raccoons were a bigger nuisance.
Re:Sounds like a great waste of time all around (Score:5, Funny)
Funny, I thought they were one and the same thing.
Re:Sounds like a great waste of time all around (Score:5, Insightful)
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It certainly is, at least for the fish.
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While I agree with many of these, there are a couple I have problems with. With regard to small arms trafficking, your comment suggests that it isn't a problem because people have a right to bear arms. First, that doesn't mean that everyone should be able to carry arms. Do you really object to restrictions on felons and mentally ill people obtaining firearms, restricting the ability of rogue governments and criminal organizations to obtain them? Second, "small arms" includes a lot of things other than hunt
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now last time I checked our armed forces have every weapon known to man and many trained people to use them..
if there was a civilian revolt today against the US it would require someone from the armed forces to command their troops against the government for it to work.. there is no
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Which begs the question (as an outsider looking at what has happened in the US in the past few years) - so, what are you waiting for?
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(Note: I am not really a latent revolutionary.)
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You are so wrong.
What you mean if Iraquis can do it, US citizens can't? Big guns, nice tanks, and fighter planes that go whoosh are of absolutely no use against a civil revolt. For a start the millitary don't even know who the enemy is. But the guerrilla, he knows who his friends are, and with the modern communications avail
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Oh you bought into that lie did you? Politicians serve themselves first, the party second, and the people, oh well, we just didn't have the budget for it this year, but I promise that if you vote for me for another term, we'll...
The parties are bought and sold. Vote for whoever you want. Your one studied and well intentioned vote will be lost in a sea of
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Wow, that question sends a chill down my spine. Who defines who is sufficiently 'mentally ill' to warrant restrictions? Would this category include those Stalin deemed to be mentally ill due to their opposition to his politics? What about homosexual people 50 years ago?
If you open the door to arbitrary restictions on liberties, things becomes very cloudy when you need to decide where to close it. I agree that keep
Re:Sounds like a great waste of time all around (Score:5, Informative)
That said, the constitution is an evolving document, subject to the collective will of the people, for better or worse, yadda yadda yadda.
Re:Sounds like a great waste of time all around (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Sounds like a great waste of time all around (Score:4, Insightful)
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Are you serious? The produce of my labour is mine. The fact that the government can tax a portion of what I decide to produce is irrelevent. If I can manage to live without earning any taxable income, I am free to do so.
Re:Sounds like a great waste of time all around (Score:4, Informative)
As much as I hate to step on the toes on someone advocating civil liberties there is a thing I would like to argue with you about.
You seem to be saying that all drugs are harmless. Tell this to any father whose daughter has been introduced to drugs like Cocaine at a party, gotten addicted, travelled down the path to where she has to do unspeakable things for money to buy more, and then eventually died from an overdose or suicide. I think you'll have an argument on your hands. I've seen this happen. It's horrid. You can't group all drugs in the same backet. Drug pushers destroy lives for their own profit, and they have some pretty devastating, instantly addictable weapons in their arsenal that they use to draw young people, particulary girls, into their net.
I guess you could say that people should be allow to make the choice about whether to be enslaved by drugs, but often young people don't understand the nature of the enslavement until it's too late. Experience is often something you get after you needed it.
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That's natural selection. I know a few people who that happened to (not to the point of overdose or suicide yet, AFAIK). I also know people who were't too stupid to know that cocaine is addicting, and some people with enough will power to only try it once
Re:Sounds like a great waste of time all around (Score:5, Insightful)
1. You implicitly assume that addiction is related to genetics, and therefore by letting addicts die you are improving the gene-pool. Please provide some evidence of this.
2. You confuse stupidity with ignorance
3. You ignore a plethora of social factors involved in drug use
4. You ignore the negative effects that drug users have on society
5. You ignore the negative effects that the drug barons have on society (organised crime of other kinds).
The idea that 'people should be allowed to do what they want with their own body' is wrong. It's wrong because it's based on the premise that we don't owe anything to society. No matter how independant you might think you are, you still owe a huge debt to society, and its ancestry. Just going with the flow isn't good enough, and we have a responsibility to each other to ensure that people pull their weight.
That's one reason why I think 'libertarians' are wrong - they think all this is optional.
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2. I know the difference, but saying "gee, those DARE people were just squares - I won't get addicted! Besides, I might gain the approval of a few other people!" is stupidity as much as it is ignorance.
3. You ignore the ability of intelligent people to resist them. How many smart sheeple do YOU know?
4. You ignore that mos
Re:Sounds like a great waste of time all around (Score:4, Insightful)
Wait, surely this is an argument for legalising drugs? Criminals can profit from drug trafficking because its illicit nature allows them to have extremely high margins with none of the governmental oversight usually associated with the pharmaceutical business. If one could buy heroin or cocaine from the local chemist, organised crime gangs would be quickly priced out of the market by large pharma corporations. Doubtless there'd still be some money to be made from tax-dodging, but this would be a fraction of the market.
So the question is whether you believe that the disadvantages of legalising drug use outweighs the advantages of significantly reducing the profits of organised crime.
By that argument, suicide should be made illegal, since you're depriving society of your future contributions. Besides, paying back debts to society is exactly what taxes are for. If drug use increases our debt, then we should pay increased taxes; the high tax on cigarettes and alcohol is an obvious precedent.
Arguing that we shouldn't be able to do what we want with our own bodies, implies that our bodies are not entirely our property. I'm not sure I particularly like the idea of this.
Re:Sounds like a great waste of time all around (Score:4, Insightful)
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Maybe not genetics, but possibly child-rearing. Part of the problem is that drunks, drug addicts, and others can (and often do) have children. The extremely volitile environment is often very damaging to the children, and causes them to grow into damaged adults. The cycle continues.
This isn't always the case, but it tends to be quite
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Re:Sounds like a great waste of time all around (Score:5, Informative)
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You don't have to assume that all drugs are harmless in order to support their legalization. All that's required is that the harm done by prohibition is greater than the harm done by legalization. I've lived in neighborhoods that saw lots of drug traffic. If I had to choose between the current state of things and legalizing drugs (cocaine, speed, heroin, all of em) I'd choose legalization.
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Tell this to any father whose daughter has been introduced to drugs like Cocaine at a party, gotten addicted, travelled down the path to where she has to do unspeakable things for money to buy more, and then eventually died from an overdose or suicide.
Hehe, you're making his argument for him. Cocaine is only expensive and hazardous because it's illegal. Make it legal and regulate it like booze, and it's going to be as cheap as somewhat expensive booze and come in a predictable concentration. Also, keep i
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Thank the government for that. Wal-Mart would have happily sold it to her for $3.99 per ounce, if they were allowed to.
When you vote for prohibition, you're voting for innocent, young girls doing unspeakable things for inflated drug prices. Hmmmm.. ok, you talked me into it. I'll advocate prohibition.
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Re:Sounds like a great waste of time all around (Score:4, Insightful)
I forgot to add the topic-relevent bit.
Calling music piracy a major problem when society is full of stuff like quoted above is laughable.
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I do that periodically.
I say properly bait that hook, and you'll catch 'em every time!
Favorites:
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How about we legalize all weapons while we're at it (rocket launchers, AK-47s, etc)? Certainly if I wanted to harm someone I'd find a way to do it anyway, right? Your logic is flawed because cocaine/opion(did you mean opium?)
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You're simply parroting the capitalist/monopolist propoganda. you're where I was a couple years ago. Do some reading, think about the current economy (guys like redhat, ibm and mysql all *pay* people to write *free* software ... how does that figure into your dilemna?)
I've written some of it down in my journal here on /. ... it's a good place to start, but I'm sure it'll lead you to make up your own mind.
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Humor us. What pray tell would the huge problems become? While I won't argue that with a little thought I couldn't think of a few problems, but the whole "I don't need to explain this..." argument doesn't wash. It certainly has no place in an intelligent discussion, and while I will admit that this is /. imagine how m
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I can't imagine I could find information more than a dozen marijuana related fatalities, if that many. I don't know of any first hand.
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That being said.
1. Marijuana -- The State says what you can put into your body (doing no crime to no one else), probably funded by the big medical business
No problem- hard to sneak to people and if you do, there is no immediate addiction.
3. Cocaine -- See #1. No crime committed against anyone else. Now if you kill someone (when on drugs or off), I can agree that a crime is committed, but the intoxicant shouldn't matter. Sometimes that intoxicant is adrenaline.
Used to addic
Counterfeit pharmaceuticals are a problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't believe you truly understand the problems that counterfeit pharmaceuticals are causing - this goes far beyond some crook cheating a patient or someone sticking it to the 'rich pharmaceutical companies', but is a problem that creates disease pandemics and kills thousands.
To give you one example, counterfeit antimalarial drugs are a huge problem at the moment and are threatening the lives of hundreds of thousands in Southeast Asia and Africa. Often times the pharmacies themselves aren't aware that they're selling counterfeits - in fact the proliferation of counterfeits is so bad in some areas that a large pharmacy unknowingly sold 100,000 counterfeit antimalarials and in a separate incident the entire stock of one Burmese hospital was found to be counterfeit. Simply shopping at a distributor that's "insured and bonded against dispensing dangerous drugs, or knock-off ones" doesn't appear to be a realistic solution.
Simply testing whether the drug is a counterfeit is not necessarily a trustworthy precaution either. Due to the proliferation of counterfeit antimalarials, testing procedures were put into place. The counterfeiters got smart however, so they started to include low levels of the real drug in with their fakes. Now not only do we have drugs on the market that test as 'real' but don't provide enough of a dose to effectively treat patients, but these low levels of drug are rapidly creating drug-resistant malaria strains. Unless we're somehow able to stop this black market industry, soon we won't have any drugs left to treat malaria. How is this not murder of innocents for profit?
While you may think that stopping counterfeit pharmaceuticals is 'ridiculous' and that it's a 'non-violent', 'non-crime', I most certainly do not. It is ridiculous to think that the various States of the world are fighting these issues, most of them are non-crimes and in most cases not even violent crimes.
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1 - The Second Amendment is a national legal instrument that plays no part in life outside of your borders. Many countries, for their own 9often valid) reasons, have chosen to either regulate or ban firearms, and your Second Amendment has nothing to do with their approach on the law. For those countries, firearm trafficking is a big problem - even if it isn't for you.
2 - The abrogation of all cop
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3. Cocaine -- See #1. No crime committed against anyone else. Now if you kill someone (when on drugs or off), I can agree that a crime is committed, but the intoxicant shouldn't matter. Sometimes that intoxicant is adrenaline.
4. Opion/Heroin -- See #1 (doing crime to no one else).
This is outright ignorant. In your mind, if A causes crime, A should be illegal, but if A greatly increases the likelihood of crime and results in huge harm to society in medical costs, then it should not be outlawed. The pr
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That might be true in a country with no public health care, but if you live somewhere where the taxpayer has to foot the bill for the health effects of excess Marijuana consumption (mental health, lung disease etc), it becomes a government problem.
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While I agree with you on the state of the law with regard to Marijuana, I really have to question your implicit assumption that ALL drugs should be legal. It's interesting that on that long list of yours that you omitted drugs like PCP or LSD, because these drugs can make some people become violent, self-destructive, and dangerous to others.
For those drugs, it would become a huge public health issue if they were legal. Which raises another question: in this way, couldn't ALL IV drugs be considered a pu
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That's circular. If the second amendment was the right to own slaves, would that alone justify it? Of course not. But there are a lot of arguments there; I can see why you left it short.
You left out the part where big tobacco still gets to peddle its poison, and alcohol is free and clear of any fut
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Keep in
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Judgement gets destroyed (Score:2)
But I've come to realize something - people ARE stupid. Adding to that is the fact that now it's easily possible to build drugs that addict you with one single dose. And, there are countless such drugs! So there's a VERY TOUGH decision to make: do you allow 60% of your population to die, causing dramatic losses in economy, simply because they are too stupid to not take the killer drug, or do you attempt to control the damage to your p
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This isn't true. Digital products can't be compared to something physical (remember the old "copying a cd isn't the same as stealing" argument, it applies here as well).
Also, they aren't a bunch of random bits. It takes weeks, months, and sometimes even years to create a piece of music, applicat
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If you think that Meth production does no harm to anyone else, then you have a grossly oversimplified view of the logistics and mechanics of the trade. Meth labs are like miniature Chernobyls, even long after they've been abandoned. The levels of toxicity of even the ambient air in these locations are so high that just a few minutes of exposure can do significant irreparable harm to passers-by.
Heaven help you if you're an officer that gets ca
Re:Sounds like a great waste of time all around (Score:4, Interesting)
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Oregon is a giant meth producer. My county, Lane County, is supposedly the biggest producer of meth in the United States. The local newspaper runs a PSA every month or so letting us know about uncleaned "meth houses," rental houses used to produce meth. All kinds of icky and toxic substances are required to synthesize amphetamines, and the fumes and waste make meth houses into toxic, unsafe environments. It's expensive as hell to clean up, and (thankfully) we have a law that req
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While I'm not a certainly fan of the idea of anyone being able to go out and get meth, cocaine, acid, ecstacy, etc, a large part of the problems that stem from those drugs wouldn't be an issue if the drugs could be made and distributed through legitimate markets.
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I could name hundreds of legal industrial processes that would probably be very dangerous to other people, if they were performed in an apartment bathtub. What is so special about meth production? Why don't we outlaw refined oil, circuit boards, and tampons?
Outlawing something is what causes irresponsible people to do dangerous thin
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You can't climb mountains- don't you realize hurting yourself hurts others!
You can't enter contests- don't you realize hurting yourself hurts others!
You can't eat fatty foods- don't you realize hurting yourself hurts others!
You can't smoke- don't you realize hurting yourself hurts others!
You can't do cocaine- don't you realize hurting yourself hurts others!
You can't go on 2 hours sleep for a week- don't you realize hurting yourself hurts others!
You can't not brush your teeth- don't
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Fine, but I want the same rules applied to anybody who's prescribed morphine, vicodin, or fentanyl.
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Give me a break. Alcohol effects don't stick around? You didn't see me the day after Oktoberfest ended. Just thinking about it, almost makes me need to puke.
;-)
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There's no problem becasue.... (Score:2, Insightful)
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Lastly, you make a cheap shot at Christian scientists. You provide no evidence to support your claim. In fact there is a large segment of legitimate scientists who are also Christian.
OH wait... I see what you mean.. "Christian Scientists..:A religion based on the teachings of Jesus. It was
Yep: Somewhat Biased (Score:3, Insightful)
And organizing Illicit Markets by value is a bit tainted: money is not always correlated with prevalence. Just look at small groups of CEOs earning millions of dollars: overall, they're asmall minority.
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actually they are usually large white guys.
Stupid comparisons (Score:2)
The argument that recording industries etc make against piracy is that every sales of a pirated item is lost revenue for a legal sale.
The same does not hold true for drugs, humans and other illegal items. You cannot argue that if someone had not bought illegal drugs then they'd have bought the same value of legal drugs from somewhere else. A lot of the street price of grass is due to it being illegal. If it was legal, then you'd have freeer flow and the pric
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That's easy. They lost $30 billion on the way up, and another $30 billion on the way down again!
It Is Still Wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
The fact is pirates are enjoying the fruits of someone else's labor without compensating them for the price they are charging. There is no way that the piracy apologists can get around it, so they resort so stuff like this, and downplay any statistics they don't like.
Wrong is wrong, even if this doesn't rank on the top of the list of evils in the world. Stop trying to justify this illegal activity.
So what about.... (Score:2, Insightful)
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Well, I have already paid for the music I put on my CDs or iPod because the Recording industry forced a tax on these devices (it works out to be a couple of dollars per iPod and cents per cd); according to my legal system it is absolutely legal
Re:It Is Still Wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact is media producers are vastly overstating the damage they suffer, in an effort to steal limited police services from other, more deserving crime victims. There is no way that the Media apologists can get around it, so they resort so stuff like this, and downplay any statistics they don't like.
Wrong is wrong, even if this doesn't rank on the top of the list of evils in the world. Stop trying to justify this fraudulently illegal activity.
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Economic crimes are still crimes. The Enron exec goes to jail.
The white collar criminal does not get a bye because his victims, individual or corporate, are somehow less "deserving."
In the U.S., P2P is pol
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No, the bottom line is that piracy of copyrighted works is still illegal.
Given how long copyright terms exist, I find it difficult to feel sorry for copyright holders who take advantage of the ridiculously long copyright term limits.
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Nowhere does the summary try to justify piracy. It's simply saying that the threat is overrated, and consequently, by implication, so is the punishment. "Wrong is wrong" is a moronic sentiment usually uttered by people who ignore the myriad ways they violate little laws in their everyday lives. Surely you can see that there should be different consequences for mass murder than for underinflating your bicycle tires. Similarly, I'd argue that uploading a song i
Completely unsurprising (Score:5, Interesting)
What a lot of people don't seem to realize is that the media industry is small potatoes. Seriously, look up some hard numbers aggregating the worldwide revenues and profits from music, movies, TV and video games and then compare them to the numbers from other industries. I did this a while back and found that any two of the biggest IT handful of IT companies exceeded the *entire* media industry. And IT is itself small potatoes compared to manufacturing, distribution, energy, agriculture etc. Any one of the major players in those real industries, the ones that actually make stuff, absolutely dwarfs the entire worldwide entertainment and media industry. Consider the fact that most of the music industry's US revenue is channeled through Wal-mart, and then consider what a tiny part of Wal-mart's business music is.
Even if media piracy were absolutely massive, the net effect on the US and world economies would be almost negligible. Piracy can't be a major problem because media isn't major.
But even though media is small potatoes financially, what they have is a direct line to the masses. Because communication is what they do, they have influence, and therefore power, that is orders of magnitude greater than their real economic importance.
Re:Completely unsurprising (Score:5, Insightful)
Intellectual monopoly laws create an enviornment of unprecendented disposable profit.
Couple that with a political system that demands bribery as a requirement to win and we have laws that are disproportionately strong for the industries' true importance in the economy.
Re:Completely unsurprising (Score:5, Interesting)
Until you look at the number that's important: gross profit available to purchase politicians. While the sales in these other sectors is far larger than media, the dispensible income (and concentration thereof) is no where near.
Actually, profits in those other sectors *also* dwarf the profits in the entertainment industry. And, by and large, the political contributions are on a similar scale. The charity that manufacturing and agriculture extract from the federal government, for example, is mind-boggling. No, the only difference is that the media industry is more visible, both when they want to be and when they don't want to be.
Even in the political donations arena they're small potatoes financially, but wield inordinate influence.
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Run me some numbers and references ... I'm very interested...
specifically in pure $$ how much money is being spent, and I guess more specifically how it is concentrated. It seems to me that it's the concentration of money (sony
NO WAI! (Score:3, Insightful)
Newsflash, business has long since departed the capitalism game and joined the "corrupt enterprise" market. Companies just feel "entitled" to make hand over fist of cash because clearly they're hip, happening, and all that jazz. Sales low? Must be piracy, because it can be in no way due to the COMPLETE AND UTTER LACK OF QUALITY OUTPUT. Or simply overpriced shit. I mean I like boxsets like the next guy, but honestly, a boxset of cartoons ain't worth 70$. Especially when I can score them off the net for 0$.
Combine quality with fair market valued prices and you will see a return of sales numbers.
Tom
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Especially where you leave the US and look at the countries where the real piracy is happening. $70 is half a month's wages in most places. Most people here in the third world will settle for a lower quality pirated version for $5.
Odd feeling (Score:2, Insightful)
Totally off topic but the new spell checker in Firefox rules!
Media Cartels vs. Drug lords & Smugglers (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, they obviously don't consider the other illicit markets a big problem.
But seriously. Look. Marijuana is top, followed by counterfeit technology... next two positions are drugs. Then web vids, more drugs, then comes pirated software. There's 2 more drug markets and 4 smuggling markets before you hit Movies.
Counting oranges alongside apples? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem comes when figures for pirated & counterfeit products are from those industries, quotes of how much is lost... Now, somehow I doubt that the illicit marijuana industry value is based on how much that industry has lost. Considering that it is illegal in most countries.
So here we have two sets of figures - one which is basically "estimated loss on profit, based from industry" and the other is "estimated products sold".
Does anyone else see why this list isn't conclusive?
No bias here... (Score:2)
Mentions of the "music, movie, and software cartels", "dis- and misinformation propaganda campaigns", and attempts to "dragoon entire governments and police forces into acting as industry enforcers". No, I don't see any bias in this story. Clearly this was written with the full intent of being a serious objective look into the topic of piracy.
Seriously though, when has any of these organizations (no, I'm sorry, "cartels") ever claimed that piracy was the "Number One problem for the world"? Or even some
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Piracy is a problem. (Score:2)
Small arms... (Score:2)
It comes full circle (Score:2, Interesting)
For want of a soundbyte... (Score:2, Funny)
Law enforcement dollars (Score:5, Insightful)
Furthermore, even though we're eliminating over 75% of the crimes on your action-item list, we are a generous bunch, so we'll only eliminate 50% of your budget. Given your newfound surplus (once you adjust, of course), we'd like you to apply the best possible strategy -- along with all of your remaining resources -- to making noteworthy progress against 7 high-priority items that actually impact citizens' lives on a day-to-day basis, in the order that they're listed below.
You'll notice we're taking a middle ground on the drug enforcement thing, putting some on the list & leaving others off. Well, that's what you get when you realize that the sane people of the world include liberals, conservatives, and libertarians. Our views may differ a bit on recreational chemical policy, so in this case we agreed to leave you to enforce the ones currently wreaking measurable societal damage, and let idiots do as they will on the rest. That list may change over the course of time.
# 8 - Human Trafficking
# 14 - Human Smuggling
# 25 - Small Arms Trafficking
# 9 - Amphetamines/Meth (we're really just sick of looking at ugly teeth)
# 6 - Counterfeit Pharmaceutical (I want my V!grr8 to do its job, dammit)
# 11 - Ecstasy
# 4 - Opium/Heroin
When these 7 are no longer a problem, please see us about permission to prosecute any of the others. We imagine that there will still be other, more pressing issues once you've solved the biggies above.
Overly strong verbage (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
If you try and reverse engineer the encoding/copy prevention, the government/police will be all over you, hence the "dragoon entire governments and police forces into acting as industry enforcers" c
Re: (Score:2)
And let me whisper a quiet "Thank God" for that small grace.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)