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.

Chalk up One for the Good Guys

If you haven't heard, the RIAA decided that it didn't want to risk fighting a case in court, and the case of Atlantic v. Andersen (PDF) has been dropped. Both sides agreed to dismiss the case with prejudice. This is a great victory for everyone that has been falsely targeted in the RIAA's carpet bombing approach of filing lawsuits. Ars makes a good point.

What's unusual is that the RIAA has stipulated to a dismissal with prejudice,
completely exonerating Andersen. Next to a negative verdict, an exonerated
defendant is the last thing the RIAA wants. When faced with an undesirable outcome, the RIAA's tactic has been to move to dismiss without prejudice, a "no harm, no foul" strategy that puts an end to a lawsuit without declaring a winner and a loser. Dismissing a case with prejudice opens the RIAA up to an attorneys' fee
award, which happened in the case of another woman caught in the
music industry's driftnet, Debbie Foster.

This is especially great news when you consider that. It is close to the RIAA admiding that they were wrong. True, not exactly the same thing, but it still exonerates the defendant, which is wonderful. I hope that Andersen is able to fully recover all of the fees taht she's had to pay during this two year legal battle. I also hope that she can serve as inspiration to others to stand up against the RIAA when they knew that they've done nothing wrong.

I Hate These People

Perhaps the fact that this came from a site called MLM Forums I shouldn't be too surprised by what it says. They outline, in I assume seriousness, a plan on how to promote your business on Facebook. What the heck? First off, this seems like a rather simple approach, and I don't know why someone would need to be told how to do this. More importantly, though, is that Facebook is not meant to be used as a promotion tool. It is a networking site, and if you want to try to network and meet new people and tell them what you do, that's one thing, but if you just want to use it as an advertising platform I am going to not like you. Given that they have recently added a marketplace, I assume that it's more likely people will post things there as opposed to making them a shared item. As far as I'm concerned, the shared item things should be used for sharing interesting/funny/apocalyptic things, not ads.

Radio Reeling at Royalties

It isn't very often when I think that the RIAA does something semi-sensible (I'm not actually sure this has ever happened), but their desire to charge terrestrial radio royalties makes sense. It makes sense in that it would lend credence to their charging royalties to other forms of radio. Whether or not any of these should have to pay royalties is another issue. Personally I think they all should, though not a very large amount. Radio's argument is that they provide a valuable service to musicians by promoting their music. This is true, they do promote musicians, but only those that they chose to. Rather, only those that they are told to promote by the people that line their pockets. The entire format that currently exists is incredibly corrupt, and the people getting screwed are the artists. Enter satellite and internet radio. Both of these pay royalty fees that do actually go to the musician (albeit not directly). In addition, they provide a wider range of artists the ability to be heard. Especially those that are simply independents.

Sure I'll Buy Your CD, I'll Need to See Some ID First

So if you want to sell your used CDs to a store in Florida, you're going to have to turn over finger prints and ID. Florida just joined Utah in having laws that are in place to supposedly stop the sales of counterfeit CDs. Whether or not this is actually a large problem hasn't actually been shown. In addition to having to make their customers feel like criminals, store will also have to hold the CDs they purchase for 30 days before being allowed to resell them. On top of all of this, stores will also be required to secure a $10,000 bond for the right to do all this. How these laws get passed is beyond me. This is just another example of the music industry's greed and desire for power.

Is It Friday Yet?

I never did get around to posting anything the entire weekend. Possibly because I was still in mourning. Seriously, though, on Friday I was so busy at work that I didn’t even get a chance to see anything interesting about which to write. Once I got home, which was about 7, I had to get my place cleaned up because I had my family coming over for dinner. Saturday and Sunday I just was in this weird funk where I did not want to do anything that required my brain. I didn’t even want to play some Sim City, which is usually what I do on the weekends. Needless to say, I was in no mood to read or write anything.

I went and saw Spider Man 3 last night with some friends. It was pretty entertaining, but I do have some complaints. Semi-sorta spoilers ahead. First, I agree with a review I read that said they tried to cram too many villains in there. I feel like it would have been better with just Sandman or Venom, but not both. We could have actually had some nicer character development that way, like they were able to do with Doc Oc. Instead, we get very shallow villains that don’t play nearly as large a roll as I would have liked. It also means that Spidey is able to battle them too infrequently. Only one fight with Venom? What is that? I heard that they only included Venom because the fans were demanding it, which I don’t necessarily have a problem with, but I wish that they would have just taken Sandman out in that case. I don’t know a whole lot about the Spiderman universe since I never read the comics, but I thought that Venom was supposed to be this incredibly powerful super-villain (fanboys, feel free to correct me). If that is the case, shouldn’t he have been a far greater threat and menace? And shouldn’t it have been much more difficult to defeat him? I feel like Spiderman got the crap beat out of him, then kicks Venom’s ass without seeming to be too bothered. If they were going to give Venom such a small part, I would have liked it if they hadn’t made his departure so definite (we see his skeleton basically vaporize). At least had they done that they could leave it open for him to return. Speaking of Venom’s demise, how is it that the same explosive that completely decimates Venom and Brock’s body only manages to leave Harry with a burned up face? They could have at least made the thing explode farther away from Harry instead of right next to his head.

Another big problem I had with the movie was that they made Pete look like quite the moron during his “I’m confident cause I’ve got an alien symbiote living with me” routine. I mean, dancing down the street giving girls the most incredibly stupid gesture ever? Where do they come up with this stuff? In the second movie, when he’s walking down the street to “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” it is a good scene. This time, it is just absurd. Then that number he does in the Jazz club just takes the cake for being retarded. Also, what is with his emo look when he is in this state? Does the suit make him more angsty?

Despite these criticisms, the movie is still pretty good and definitely worth seeing. It’s easier to point out a movie’s faults than it is its strengths. Some of the highlights, though, include the amazingly well done swinging through the city scenes as well as some great special effects with sand.

I know that I keep talking about the RIAA and their ilk, but they just really make me mad. Ars has an article about RICO accusations against them. They conclude that the RIAA would probably not be in violation of anything under RICO. Under the current laws, I suppose they are probably right. However, that doesn’t make what the RIAA does any better. Personally, I feel like what they do should be considered illegal, or at the very least monopolistic. They attempt to have complete control over the entire music industry, and try to use strong-arm bullying in order to get it. Look no further than the internet radio issue to see how this works. That is not even looking at how they treat consumers. They treat their customers as thieves, whether they actually are or not. They have this mentality that everyone is just out to screw them over, so they had better do the screwing first. Now, I understand the whole deal about copyright holders being allowed to seek compensation when someone infringes on them, but I don’t agree with the way the RIAA does this, or how much they seek. They have sought damages from $750 per song, to $150k per CD. I don’t see how they can possibly say that those numbers are fair. Honestly, people can buy single tracks for under a buck. Even if they sought damages as little as three dollars per song, that is still orders of magnitude higher than they would see had someone bought the song off iTunes. On top of this, they act as if they are suffering some massive loss of revenue by people illegally downloading music. I’ll give them that they are losing some revenue, sure, but not anywhere near what they claim. There are many people that download thousands upon thousands of songs, but would never buy more than a handful of CDs if downloading was not available. People amass huge collections of music because it is easy and free. If they had to pay for everything they got, they would be much more discerning, and would probably only buy those CDs which they absolutely could not go without. I know a few people that even have bought music after downloading it from the net because they wanted to support the band (ok, so it was only 2 people, but still). To say that they are losing billions in revenue is ridiculous.

Okay, I think that’s going to be all for now. I’m sure there is plenty more I could write, but I have already made this a pretty long post. Making up for the absence of one in the last three days. Hopefully I’ll be back later today with some good stuff for you.

Tony Soprano in Charge of RIAA?

In my continuing rant about the absurdity that is this whole mess with royalties and internet radio, I bring you yet another horrendous act. The company that the RIAA created to collect royalties on behalf of artists, SoundExchange, has the blanket coverage of collecting royalties for all artists, regardless of whether they are members of the RIAA or not. In fact, even if artists don't want SoundExchange to collect money on their behalf, they still do. The biggest kicker here is that if the artist wants to collect these royalties that have been collected for them they have to pay a fee to join SoundExchange. So what you have here is an organization collecting your money, and then charging you to get it from them. Yeah, that sounds about right. This post over at Daily Kos has more.