U.S. Joins Hollywood in War on Piracy 358
Section_Ei8ht writes to mention a Washington Post article about a new joint initiative between the U.S. government and the entertainment industry. The government will now be aiding efforts abroad to stop copyright infringement. They cite the recent Pirate Bay fiasco, as well as the problems Russia is having with the WTO as a result of their thriving IP black market. From the article: "The intellectual property industry and law enforcement officials estimate U.S. companies lose as much as $250 billion per year to Internet pirates, who swap digital copies of 'The DaVinci Code,' Chamillionaire's new album and the latest Grand Theft Auto video game for free."
Re:Stupidity in action (Score:5, Interesting)
In other words, This is smart for two reasons. One is that it is the US meddling in other nations' purely internal affairs. The other is that it is yet another war on an abstract idea. (joining the war on terror and the war on poverty and the war on some drugs, which that other guy forgot.)
Good news, you can't win against an idea, only against a group of people (terrorists, pirates, the poor?). And yes there are too many pirates to even think about "winning" against them. They probably make up more than 50% of the population, meaning that there's about a 50/50 chance that when we need to put someone in prison, or just sue them into the stone age, we'll be able to do so.
All we need now is a war on pr0n, and we'll have around 70% of the population as criminals. Then we turn power over to the Democrats, they can declare the Christian fundies that make up our voting base as McVeigh militia whackjobs, and we'll have absolute power over everybody.
Power corrupts. Absolute power is pretty cool.
I love contributor links... (Score:5, Interesting)
Hopefully I was correct about all this, but the claims I have made above were made in many long-standing high-score comments in the last discussion about this subject, and not refuted, so hopefully peer review will have made me sound like I know what I'm talking about.
And in other news... (Score:2, Interesting)
Every time you read this sort of story... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Something I'd like to see: (Score:2, Interesting)
Here is one:
http://w1.nada.kth.se/media/Research/MusicLessons
It has some interesting stuff.
A corollary quote... (Score:5, Interesting)
That God
Did not want us to be
All the same
This was
Bad News
For the Governments of The World
As it seemed contrary
To the doctrine of
Portion Controlled Servings
Mankind must be made more uniformly
If
The Future
Was going to work
Various ways were sought
To bind us all together
But, alas
Same-ness was unenforcable
It was about this time
That someone
Came up with the idea of
Total Criminalization
Based on the principle that
If we were All crooks
We could at least be uniform
To some degree
In the eyes of
The Law
Shrewdly our legislators calculated
That most people were
Too lazy to perform a
Real Crime
So new laws were manufactored
Making it possible for anyone
To violate them any time of the day or night,
And
Once we had all broken some kind of law
We'd all be in the same big happy club
Right up there with the President
The most excalted industrialists,
And the clerical big shots
Of all your favorite religions
Total Criminalization
Was the greatest idea of its time
And was vastly popular
Except with those people
Who didn't want to be crooks or outlaws,
So, of course, they had to be
Tricked Into It
Which is one of the reasons why
Music
Was eventually made
Illegal.
--Frank Zappa (from the booklet of Joe's Garage, Acts II & III - 1979)
Re:Something I'd like to see: (Score:1, Interesting)
FTA:
Re:Pirates are parasites (Score:2, Interesting)
One thing I'm suprised no one has brought up, all my friends have said the same thing, if they charged a more reasonable price for music and didn't limit what we can do with it, we'd be more than happy to buy it. When you go to the store though and buy only 4 cds and it runs you 80 bucks and that was at Walmart, thats pretty damn steep. Now according to the RIAA ripping the discs and placing them on a file server makes you a pirate. Because I have all my cds there on my server so I can play them easily through winamp, I can also create an MP3 CD to play my music in my car. The reason I use MP3 cds, dont have to change discs as often, as well as the fact if I'm in a major accident, all my music survives on my server. I speak from experience on that line, I lost 50 CDs in a violent wreck because I hadn't burnt them onto CD-Rs yet. It would have cost me over 1000 bucks, but my friend had many of the same disks as me, so I copied the ones he had, I still have the damaged disks, but I use the copy I got from him... PIRACY according to them.
Now lets say you buy it off of I-Tunes. 99 cents a song. I haven't browsed much, but lets see here approximately 15 songs per album, 4 albumbs, 60 bucks. You saved 20 bucks, however its not in MP3 format, and to use it on anything other than an I-Pod and in I-Tunes takes serious work. Piracy is not just because we want something for free, at least not among my circle, its because they over charge, we already own it, and we believe that once we purchase it we have the right to listen to it however we want, we bought it.
Don't quote Ayn Rand thinking that makes you sound smart while at the same time trying to insult people. She happens to be one of my favorite authors. There is a reason this debate is so hot, because they are trying to blanket legit issues as piracy. I would suggest pulling your head out of that dark crack on your back side. Coward!
Re:Stupidity in action (Score:1, Interesting)
The world will never be a safe place to live as long as we let others decide what's in our best interest.
That rant being over, Piracy is bad. But forcing other countries to do what we want is not the answer. Our problem only exists in this country. Outside of America, it's not our problem, it's Their problem. Let them deal with it however they want to.
copyright in Mexico (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Stupidity in action (Score:5, Interesting)
Think about alcohol Prohibition. Before and after Prohibition, a majority of adult Americans drank alcohol at least occasionally. (Perhaps even during it, though we'll never know.) Yet the idea was popular enough to get passed via constitutional amendment, requiring the approval of two thirds of both houses of Congress AND all the state legislatures. Not that it wasn't stupid, it was *so* stupid that 13 years later it became the only amendment ever repealed.
Never underestimate the ability of the American electorate to be precisely that stupid.
The true Costs of Piracy! (Score:4, Interesting)
They appear to be taking a page out BSA's [bsa.org] book to reach such conclusions.
Using the entertainment industry's analogy, every P2P download represents a lost sale,
& it sounds & looks good to the average Politician!
Now if we use an example the flaw will become apparent.
Example: If Photoshop's [adobe.com] latest version get's downloaded via P2P 100,000 times does
that mean they lost those sale's?
Answer: At $649 US a pop I very mush doubt it!
Being generous I'd guess only 1% to 2% of those 100,000 people would truly pay
$649 US for Photoshop if that was the only way they could get it.
I think it would be safe to say the true cost of Piracy isn't $250 billion, but closer to the
$2.5 to 5 billion mark anually.
In all likelyhood the U.S. government will spend more than that amount each year hence
forth in fighting Piracy, thanks to the lobby groups mystical figures.
Awww yeah, this will work. (Score:3, Interesting)
Notice what they're doing now. They're flaunting it - before they had cannballs fired from the ship at a Hollywood sign, today they're using an abstract phoenix in the shape of the pirate ship as their logo, and in the blog (see link above) they have offers from many in various servers to set up redundant hosts. The MPAA and RIAA cannot and will not win. They HAVE to come to grips with today's technology or face extinction. Whether or not they want to admit it, P2P and sales CAN coexist. Some folks use it as try-before-you-buy (I've done this, quite recently in fact), and the folks who won't buy, are likely not the target consumer anyway.
Personally, I often wait for movies to hit cable or DVD before I watch them (usually cable first and if I like it I buy the DVD), unless it's a movie I want to see in the highest possible resolution, then I'll go to the theater and hope they bothered to focus the projector. I am mainly part of the secondary market - the market that the MPAA fought tooth and nail against when they tried to block home video from becoming reality. I buy lots of DVDs (although admittedly not since the MPAA illegally caused thepiratebay.org to come down for all of three days), probably too many, but I rarely go to the theater because so few new movies are worth the hassle.
As an aside where politics is concerned, rather than just the MPAA's stupidity: Is it IP that will be the final straw and get people to say "enough is enough" and actually get out and VOTE, or run for office, or do whatever else it takes to institute change? Will the reality that Joe Sixpack's Hi-Def television will not display Hi-Def from legitimate content with HD-DVD or Blu-Ray but will display pirated content at full resolution make him realize that it is the politicians he put in power which enabled this sort of bullshit to happen? Don't mess with Joe Sixpack's television, because he gets pissy when the telly goes on the fritz, and I would not want to be the one responsible! It'll be the boston tea party of the new millennium, only it'll be HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs!
Actually, if it is IP which causes major changes for the better, it would be a pretty sad statement of today's society.
The Pirate Party of the United States (Score:3, Interesting)
But now The Pirate Party of the United States is emerging what could happen now?
http://www.pirate-party.us/ [pirate-party.us]
pretended war (Score:3, Interesting)
Since the war on drugs has made drugs cheap, pure and ubiquitous ...
One correction: pretended war on drugs ... thanks to what the saying "what does not kill you makes you stronger" kicks-in.
I think that real war of people agains politics will kill politics quite effectively in very short time. Same as real war on drugs would have killed drugs and real war on terror would kill terrorists.
Because we can't consider war on drugs being serious when for example even some US soldiers deployed to fight drugs are smugling drugs themselves. Or when some politicians get bribed by narco-mafia (because why would they bribe them if drugs were legal or nobody wanted those drugs?).
Of course real fight against drugs or terror is most probably not fought with guns and bombs but then, politicians braging about fightng this or that without guns would look ... well ... boring, less entertaining, ... :|
It looks like to me a lot of people just want fun (majority also with drugs) with a little bit of suffering (terror) mixed in. So the politicians (as any good vendor) just deliver to the peole what they want while trying to profit from that as much as bearable (bearable to those fun+terror loving customers).
What a nice world we're living in. :)