"Why not spend this much effort going after other widespread crimes such as rape and human trafficking?"

I agree with your sentiments, but this is begging the question. I don't think anybody here can quote reliable figures on the effort spent on copyright law infringement vs. enforcement of laws relating to rape and human trafficking. I can certainly provide some anecdotal evidence: when somebody I knew was raped a number of years back, the swift attention provided by multiple police agencies resulted in the capture of the suspect (a BART train was stopped and the suspect was apprehended). The justice system was applied with equal force and the rapist got the punishment he deserved. The efforts were a huge order of magnitude beyond the attention they would have paid to, say, a report that my company was pirating PhotoShop. Your assertion that governments spend more effort on copyright violators than rapists and human traffickers is a bit shocking.

"Also, shouldn't the government be spending a lot more time worrying about environmental damage and climate change?"

Yes. But this is not related to the subject of file sharing. Beware of false dichotomies.

"I know CES doesn't want to lose money, but really these small businesses are just moving out of the way for the big guys to get more booths. Intel isn't going to bring people back to a hotel room, and the more companies you have in Las Vegas that week the bigger CES will be, whether they're in their room or on the floor."

This is not completely accurate. Plenty of mid- to large-size companies are pulling out of the LVCC, too. It's getting harder and harder for the CEA to sell floor space. The spaces vacated by companies going to booths is NOT all being taken up by other companies. If it were, there would not be a problem -- but that's just not the case.

"The Las Vegas Convention Center is not a hotel, so there is no "swindling viewers up to their private quarters" - in fact, the hotels that rent the largest number of suites to companies (Venetian, Bellagio, Wynn, etc) are no where near the convention center."

The Wynn is reasonably close to the LVCC; that's why many companies have suites there.

"Many of these companies have no presence at the convention, so how are they "swindling away" anyone? Many of the meetings/demos are private, have no interest/intention of showing their products in public yet, and have been set up between various parties well in advance, so it's not even taking away revenue from the CEA."

Ah, but many companies are fleeing the LVCC and moving to suites. Revenue is being taken away from the CEA. Logitech quit renting booth space a couple of years ago and moved to a cheaper meeting room in the LVCC. Creative Labs downsized their booth dramatically and held their meetings in a suite at the Wynn. XM/Sirius moved from the show floor to the Bellagio last year. These are just some examples in the industry I'm familiar with, but there are many, many more. This is why you probably noticed that the LVCC was a bit lonelier this year than it was last year, and if the trend continues, will get even more sparsely populated. There's still traffic at the LVCC, to be sure, but CEA sees the writing on the wall.

There's a secondary effect: as buyers get more used to visiting hotel suites, rather than going to the show floor, traffic to the LVCC is further reduced and creating even less incentive for vendors to place booths there. I didn't even need to buy a show pass this year.

"Management and CES could very well have been protecting the interests and quality of the show."

CES gets more money from you when you have a booth at the convention center. More and more companies -- BIG companies -- are abandoning booths and, instead, renting suites or ballrooms at the hotels. CES is watching their revenues evaporate, and is retaliating by punishing vendors.

Note that this is largely happening to vendors who are turning suites into full-blown display showcases; basically, a booth in a suite. Folks who use suites for meetings, with a few odd products on display (ie. those who might not have had a booth in the first place), have not been hassled.

I like your idea, but Congress won't enact it because the government gets the money anyway.

The zeitgeist is that in the post-industrial age, protecting the interests of the large-scale copyright holders is in the best interest of the US economy. Microsoft, Disney, and countless smaller companies like them bring a metric buttload of cash into the economy; revenues that will become even more important as more and more manufacturing moves to China. Our government is funded by the taxes paid by US-based copyright holders.

If the US starts taxing copyrights themselves, that's simply less profit to tax at the end of the year.

I'm perhaps presenting an overly simplistic view of corporate tax, but it's clear that when it comes to how copyright holders are treated, the average Slashdotter and the US governments are at the ends of the spectrum. Your typical slashdotter would like to see companies who make excessive revenues on copyrighted works to be punished; perhaps even to be made extinct. Yet these same companies are our government's lifeblood.

"And since I'm not an expert in philosophy and logic, I'd be curious to know what part of my statement is a straw man."

Sure, I'll be glad to help.

"The initial statement (assuming the person posting it is correct) was that the manual labor workers weren't getting paid enough money because of people illegally obtaining copies of the movies that they worked on."

Correct -- but you may be misinterpreting it by adding "from royalties" after the "paid enough money" statement.

"My response was that it doesn't matter how many people pay to see a movie and how many obtain it illegally, because the workers have already been paid the only salary that they would ever get from that movie."

And that's the straw man there -- the movie industry wasn't claiming that the salaries of the union folks who worked on a particular film were scaled by the sales of that film. If they were, then it would be an easy argument to shoot down, because it is simply false.

So, you ask, what is the actual argument they were making, as opposed to your straw man version? You've actually put it better than I could:

"Of course you could try to argue that reduced sales would lead to less work for them, but the report of record income seems to counter that pretty well."

Not only have you correctly stated the point of the ads, but you've also come up with a defensible argument against it -- without having to resort to a straw man. And that was exactly my point -- it's easy enough to use evidence to cast doubt on the film industry's position, without misrepresenting their arguments.

I hope this helps.

"Past a certain point, YOU PERSONALLY are not going to benefit from any more sales of the product even if YOU PERSONALLY contributed to it's production."

You're correct -- but that's not the argument that was presented.

There may be some confusion over my use of the term "straw man." I refer to the logical fallacy; defined as misrepresenting an opponent's position.

When those ads started airing, the retort from lots of piracy enthusiasts here on Slashdot was something to the effect of "last time I checked, all these set painters and other guys in the ads don't get points off the back end, so piracy doesn't effect them! They've already gotten paid!"

It's a straw man because the ads were not stating that the craft/trade people were paid based on the sales of a film, and thus the point, as misrepresented by Slashdotters, was invalid. That's exactly how to construct a straw man: misrepresent your opponent's argument and then tear down that misrepresented argument, and not the actual argument.

"Either way, it's probably not going to matter. A bad film is going to bomb and a good film is going to make profits for the studio that they studio will never admit to. Piracy won't change that. All Piracy does is inflate the sense of entitlement felt by the high level management at the studio. They mistake demand for the product at the ZERO price point as real value."

It goes both ways. Most pirates claim that they would not have purchased the product anyway, or they claim that their piracy might actually improve sales of the product. A few pirates do openly admit that they pirate to save money, but -- again -- they seem to be in the minority.

"They mistake demand for the product at the ZERO price point as real value."

It has a certain value that's larger than zero, and less than the retail value of the total number of pirated copies. Everybody has their opinion on what this value is, and since nobody can truly know, everybody's opinion is valid.

"If I remember correctly, the amusing part of that is that the only ones that get paid royalties are the big-name groups, like the writer, director (I think), and actors. I don't think any of the construction workers, camera operators, or costume designers get anything other than a straight salary."

This confused a LOT of file sharing enthusiasts back when those ads were running. You're right, of course, that the trade and craft folks are paid on a salary, but the straw man here is assuming that the ads were trying to imply otherwise.

The logic employed by the MPAA is that piracy reduces sales, which in turn leads to cost cutting in the industry, which in turn leads to fewer films being made (ie. studios taking fewer chances on risky, smaller productions) or cutting costs by employing fewer people or moving productions to other countries.

That theory in itself invites enough debate without having to throw in the "the salaried employees have already been paid" straw man.

"I've never heard of this before. Who came up with that bullshit interpretation?"

A few people did at the time. A few are listed here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jar_Jar_Binks#Allegations_of_racial_caricature

This issue was revisited with the latest Transformer film; a couple of the robots were seen to be racist caricatures and allusions were made to the Jar Jar controversy. Googling "jar-jar racist" will give you more background if you're interested. You obviously strongly disgree -- as do many people -- but this does not discount the fact that there was a raging controversy at the time.

"What's next? Because Yoda doesn't speak with correct grammar he's somehow racist too?"

I'll take this question at face value. There was no similar discussion of Yoda's accent that I recall. This is because Jar-Jar's accent was seen by many to be patterned after racist caricatures; Yoda's had no such similarities.

The reason is, of course, that Slashdotters, as a general rule, understand what goes into programming an application. We have empathy and respect for programmers for the simple reason that for some of us, it's our profession.

Not so much with musicians. We (again -- as a general rule) characterize them as untalented and spoiled. Some people are more equal than others, and in the eyes of many Slashdotters, musicians are the least equal of all.

We don't pirate applications because we respect the work that programmers perform. However, we elevate music piracy to a social cause worthy of Rosa Parks. Hurting musicians? No -- we're putting them in their place. They should get a day job! They should make a living selling t-shirts! They should just stop being so greedy! We deserve to use modern technology to copy their work, but how dare they try to use modern technology to make a living?

And if that's not enough of a rationalization of music piracy, we're eager to suggest others. Just watch.

Thank you for pointing this out. While the Sonos stuff is nice, it's expensive, and the interface is slow. The Squeezebox products are much more cost-effective, and have an open architecture (one can download the server software).

The Squeezebox Controller is actually a mini Linux system, making it a good hacking platform -- imagine the stuff you can do with a portable Linux system that has wifi, an accelerometer, audio output, and audio codec support.

For a while, Sonos was a bit easier to use, but Logitech recently dropped a major software update that's pretty much a clean-sheet interface design.

Like the Sonos gear, the Squeezebox family is available in a number of options -- headless, stereo boombox, and high-quality mono (think Tivoli). But, of course, it's much more affordable and, due to its open architecture, more flexible than the Sonos -- and can certainly do a whole lot more than the Apple solution.

I have a Squeezebox Receiver connected to my living room audio system, and two Squeezebox Booms in rooms where I haven't run speakers. Everything is controlled with the aforementioned Controller. Between my music collection (sitting on a NAS), Pandora, Rhapsody, and various Internet radio stations, I never want for entertainment.

"The copyright lawyers are laughing at this guy's defense, but these are the same lawyers who think that file sharing is immoral and that record companies should have the right to sue people into poverty because of a few kilobytes of uploads."

Huh? One of the fellows quoted was Ben Sheffner. He's very level-headed and insightful, and his blog is a good read for anybody tired of the Slashdot/Torrentfreak/Digg copyright misinformation echo chamber. Scott Mackenzie has tried a number of consumer advocacy cases. Your statement makes about as much sense as stating that NYCL or CptKangarooski think file sharing is immoral just because they also happen to be lawyers with expertise in copyright law.

"None of us engineers, programmers, or other laborers get a multi-decade monopoly over our creations.... we get paid an hourly rate, then we get laidoff, and that's it. No more money. I'm not entitled to a lifetime of free cash for a schematic I created at age 25, so why should an artist be entitled to a lifelong cash payment either? Fair treatment dictates they should get an hourly wage same as us engineers/laborers, and that's it. The 28 year monopoly is just a generous extra, and not required."

It is your choice -- and your choice alone -- if you want to work for an employer in a work-for-hire capacity (in which your employer owns your inventions) or strike it out on your own and work in an indepent capacity, licensing your software or engineering designs. Some are happy with the first method, as they get relatively steady employment and all the perks that go with it. Others prefer the second method. It can be a lot more risky, but if you're lucky and skilled enough, your code or your engineering designs can be making money for you even when you're not working.

"I'm not entitled to a lifetime of free cash for a schematic I created at age 25, so why should an artist be entitled to a lifelong cash payment either?"

Because you chose to create that schematic as an employee and gave up any opportunity to license it. That was your choice. You chose that route because it meant a more comfortable lifestyle for you at the time -- you got a guaranteed paycheck. You chose what you thought was best.

The artist, on the other hand, chose to hold on to his copyright. Perhaps he didn't have a family to feed at the time, and was able to try to eke out a living writing songs. And, since this artist receives a "lifelong cash payment," it means that he got very, VERY lucky. He effectively won the copyright lottery. What percentage of songs written in the 90s, 80s, or 70s are still making money for their creators today?

"But EMI don't own the particular soundwaves which comprise the Beatles' songs. Instead they own the very idea of these songs."

It's actually pretty well-known and well-documented that EMI owns the recordings, but that for many of the Beatles songs, it's actually Sony/ATV publishing who owns the publishing rights, which covers performance, licensing, covers, and most of the other ways you can make money off of a song other than selling a copy of the recording.

"No matter who sings it, or performs it, or records it, or sells it, or even hums it this music belongs to EMI because they own the very idea of it."

This is, of course, not correct based on the generally understood and documented state of ownership of the Beatles catalog.