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Tainted "Piracy" Statistics
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Oct 24, 2006 09:38 PM
from the lies-and-damn-lies dept.
from the lies-and-damn-lies dept.
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."
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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.
Parent
Re:Sounds like a great waste of time all around (Score:5, Funny)
Somehow I figured raccoons were a bigger nuisance.
Parent
Re:Sounds like a great waste of time all around (Score:5, Funny)
Funny, I thought they were one and the same thing.
Parent
Re:Sounds like a great waste of time all around (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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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
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re:Sounds like a great waste of time all around (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Sounds like a great waste of time all around (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
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.
Parent
Re:Sounds like a great waste of time all around (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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
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.
Parent
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.
Parent
Re:Sounds like a great waste of time all around (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
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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
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.
Parent
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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?)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:Sounds like a great waste of time all around (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
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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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There's no problem becasue.... (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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.
Parent
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.
Parent
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
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?
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.