Movie Piracy Killed My Brother and Raped My Mother

Apparently piracy is way more damaging than other, more pathetic crimes because it causes something like infinity billion dollars in damage. Ars reports that NBC/Universal's Rick Cotton claims that law enforcement wastes too much time on things like bank robberies when they should be focusing on piracy.

"Our law enforcement resources are seriously misaligned," Cotton said. "If you
add up all the various kinds of property crimes in this country, everything from
theft, to fraud, to burglary, bank-robbing, all of it, it costs the country $16
billion a year. But intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions [of
dollars] a year."

What Cotton seems to forget, as Ars points out, violence associated with things like burglary is pretty bad, whereas you don't really see anyone getting shot while downloading a movie. On top of this, the claim that intellectual property crime runs in the "hundreds of billions" is completely ludicrous. If that were true, it would mean that piracy costs the entertainment industry more than its total revenue for 2006. I wholly believe that there is some lost revenue by people downloading stuff instead of buying it, but the vast majority of pirated content would have never been purchased and can't really be counted as lost revenue. However, even if you did count it as lost revenue, I don't know if you would come up with hundreds of billions a year. This just goes to show that the industry is seriously out of touch with reality. Maybe we'll start breaking into their homes, but stop downloading movies. After all, based on their numbers they'd be doing better off if we did that.

Thank You for Choosing ATT, How May I Screw You Today?

First it was the NSA, and now AT&T is going to start working with the RIAA and MPAA by turning over customer information. They are going to try to help track down pirates, and make sure that they get punished. Now, if you're an AT&T customer, even if you're not a pirate, I'd strongly encourage you to get off their network ASAP. If this is any indication, they are on a slippery slope downwards to having no regard to their customers' privacy. By actively helping to track down customers that are pirating things, AT&T demonstrates just what kind of company it is. If this was some sort of move to track down child molesters or something I could see where they might have a defense, but as it is they are basically just telling their customers that they don't care what they want. Even that would be a bit questionable. Duncan Riley is correct.

There's something very, very wrong when a company starts conspiring against
its users.

What's next? Are they going to start sending letters to spouses if it looks like their partner is cheating? How much monitoring are customers going to allow before they jump ship?

Updated: No, really, I can spell.

Life's Not Fair

Marybeth Peters is the Register of Copyrights at the U.S. Copyright office. She’s held the post since 1994 so she has seen a lot in terms of the current copyright issues. She recently talked to Ars Technica about the issue of fair use. Consumer groups are always citing fair use and the Sony Betamax case as reasoning for wanting to be able to copy DVDs. Particularly, every three years when there is a review hearing for the DMCA to examine if any exemptions should be allowed. Every three years it’s the same story, too. The EFF asks for the exemption, and the panel says no. Their reasoning is that based on the “true meaning” of fair use, an exemption is not required for DVD copying. They say that since the content is available through other means (such as VHS tapes) that there is not a legitimate reason for ripping a DVD. Also, they say that the Sony case was limited to time-shifting content from free broadcasts. She says that ripping DVDs is place-shifting, and that it is done for a convenience factor. Neither of those is covered under fair use.All of this means that consumer rights groups are going to need a different strategy when trying to get the right to rip DVDs. I’d love to see them use the argument of being fair and nice to the consumer is in the best interests of the media companies. That is not likely to happen, though. Mostly because the media companies don’t see it that way. After all, there is a reason that you have to sit through those stupid anti-piracy ads at the beginning of DVDs you legally bought. The reality of the situation is that if they made it legal for you to rip DVDs piracy would not suddenly flourish. All it takes is one person to break the encryption, rip something, and then upload it. Now that one thing has just rendered all copy protection on discs useless. I can assure you that there is at least one person that rips just about every movie out there and uploads it. On top of this, ripping something isn’t exactly hard. I can find and download programs that allow me to do so in less than five minutes. All that the media companies are doing is making it an inconvenience. If I download a ripping program, rip my DVD, and stick that on my media server to watch throughout my house, how does that hurt them? Why is it that I technically have to break the law to do that? Why is it that having a copy on my hard drive so I don’t have to go find the disc so scary to them? They say that it is to combat piracy, but piracy is rampant already. If piracy is already so widespread, do they seriously think that it will be more so if they allow ripping?