Piracy More Serious Than Bank Robbery? 501
An anonymous reader writes sends us to Ars Technica for a dissertation on how detached and manipulative the discussion about copyright is becoming. "NBC/Universal general counsel Rick Cotton suggests that society wastes entirely too much money policing crimes like burglary, fraud, and bank-robbing, when it should be doing something about piracy instead. '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.'" Ars points out how completely specious that "hundreds of billions" is.
Re:just another rich guy living in his own world (Score:5, Interesting)
This should lend a little light over what lobbyists and various government officials and legislators might be thinking and where the root of the problem may actually lie.
Oh no! What would Jesus do! (Score:5, Interesting)
These people fail to see how stupid it is to scare the public with billion dollar figures. I frankly don't give a crap if company x lose a y dollars per year. My point is that if a company is struck by heavy use of piracy, then their business module is entirely misplaced. It could be too expensive, too difficult to purchase, only a tiny useful function out of many less useful ones, and many other factors that contribute to such outcome.
Take a music CD for example. It's expensive, impractical to purchase, often DRM:ed and includes maybe two, three or four songs that you like. This is why iTunes and other comparable services are slowly taking over that "lost" segment that chose piracy over unthoughtful music labels.
I don't believe that we are criminals by nature and I doubt that most of us prefer to "steal" rather than purchasing, but the companies have to find solutions very soon and adapt before piracy becomes a habit and not just an escape.
Last but not least, I am yet to see an anti-piracy statement that admits to the positive effects of pirating. After all, that's how many artists, movies and software developers gain a lot of attention. Do you think Photoshop would be widespread in Europe if there was no alternative to that idiotic $1,500 price tag? At least people pirate Photoshop instead of turning to the cheaper alternatives. And when have you heard Adobe admit to this?
Re:Imaginary excuses. (Score:4, Interesting)
Err... if someone produces entertainment that no-one buys or pirates, can the time and effort put into that be gotten back? I don't see your point. Just because time and effort are put into the creation of entertainment is real, doesn't mean that the "losses" caused by someone pirating that entertainment are real. It's entirely possible that every person who pirates the entertainment would never have paid for it, even if it were not available for pirating. Then again, it's entirely possibly that every person who pirated the entertainment would have paid for it were it not available for pirating.
Until someone determines a half-way reliable method of calculating how many people did not pay for the product directly as a result of it being available for pirating, then the "losses" remain as some unknown value between (0 x $PRICE) and ($NUMBEROFPIRATECOPIES x $PRICE).
NO FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE (Score:1, Interesting)
That means all software is inherently worthless and companies make a profit because you were stupid enough to buy it.
*pops head up for a moment* (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Imaginary crime (Score:5, Interesting)
As a proud member of the development corp, I do really feel insulted to hear the sum of my creative energies, and the sweat and blood of my work referred to as an imaginary product. That said, I understand what you're trying to say. The real problem the MPAA and RIAA have is trying to apply traditional economic theory (based on scarce-resource distribution and pricing) to an unlimited resource (something that once created, can be replicated ad-infinitum.
Why they want to do this is obvious, it's a licence to print money. Unfortunately for them, under these traditional economic theories it is the scarcity of a resource that makes it valuable (gold, platinum, wood) and an unlimited resource has very little, or no, monetary value.
Thus DRM, which is fundamentally an attempt to impose scarcity on an unlimited resource, thus creating artificial value. It doesn't work, because the methods are inefficient and if content has intrinsic worth itself, DRM reduces it by making it difficult to use.
I'm not sure how we're going to get around this particular problem and it is concerning for all of us involved in creating the content. There needs to be money in creation in order for us to get paid to do it, but the traditional methods of commercial software/music/films may not be the most efficient.
Perhaps we need to explore commoditization of software, or perhaps a return to the patron model enjoyed by artists of the last several centuries. Hard to say.
Re:"Intellectual property crime" (Score:3, Interesting)
I am willing to wager that even if there were no safeguards against it, 99% of patents would be reviewed by people who had no knowledge of or connection to the persons or organizations applying for the patent. In reality, though, patent reviewers would excuse themselves from any such conflict of interest.
* The shakedown of numerous small businesses and large customers for "patent violations" based on legal instruments created by a mafia-style clique of lawyers.
Yeah, the founding fathers were surely the mafia lawyers from hell.
* The wide use of patent "licensing deals" to create cartels that would be illegal and criminal under normal competition law.
Cartels are illegal. Please bring forth your evidence and I am sure you can find a glory-hog prosecutor who would like to take your case.
* The use of patent "licenses" to tax the use of technology by the public, even though very often the public subsidised the original research.
Patents are not a "tax" in any way, as paying for them is purely optional. The "public subsidized the research" line is a red-herring and displays a fundamental mis-understanding of how corporate and academic research intermingle. While the public was subsidizing the corporations research, the corporation was subsidizing the public's research. Yes, we work together to solve common or related problems! In no way would this imply that one of us now owns the rights to the fruits of the other's labor.
* The use of "intellectual property laws" (designed and paid for by content industries) to prevent content falling into the public domain.
Uhhh, yes, this is what patents and IP are....but you are wrong about your parenthetical...this system was designed long before almost any modern company existed. This is a basic fact, and I have no idea why you are lying about it.
* The use of said laws to create artificial barriers to free trade, so prices can be raised in specific geographic areas.
Again, you are noting how patents actually work.
* The use of the global patent system to keep the costs of medicines artificially high (even at the cost of millions of deaths)
And the cost of not having a patent system would be hundreds of millions of deaths, as medicines would be invented far more slowly without any financial incentive to do so.
* The use of the global patent system to prevent free competition in many markets.
Yep. That's exactly what it is supposed to do. It is a small, time-limited market failure created by the government that works to offset a larger, permanent market failure (the free-rider problem with respect to innovating).
* The use of the global patent system to stop alternative energy technologies being developed.
IP has no special relevance to alternative energy.
* The use of patents to create conflict and litigation than enriches lawyers and specialists.
First, people being enriched is a good thing, even people whom you dislike via steriotype (including me, because I am a specialist!). Of course, the patent system has an administrative cost, but it is well worth the price.
Re:Pirates disgust me (Score:3, Interesting)
They've re-phrased piracy from a civil, rights infringement problem which would require them to prosecute themselves and bear the costs, to a criminal issue with costs carried by the taxpayer. It's one of the dangers of government, when it has infinite cash to spend, there's little stopping government getting bigger and bigger, acquiring citizen's freedoms as it panders to more and more of the special interest groups.
Who are the pirates after all? (Score:5, Interesting)
Eventually, music became something influential on a corporate level. Zoom forward to 1957, 50 years ago from today. Artists began trying to market themselves to "record companies" in stead of their audience. The record companies would fund up and coming artists, who were usually established acts already. The elusive "record contract" would be still geared to pay the artist a good sum of money, but the cut for the record companies was getting bigger. This is where it began to snowball.
Lets move to more recent times. Now we have record companies finding talentless bimbos and tryhard boybands to front this multi-billion dollar industry. Not only that, the record companies are taking most of the proceeds and the artist is forced to tour/mime in order to make the kind of cash that would have been available to them 50 years ago. Good artists who may not be the 'in' thing at the moment (as in, not pop/emo/rap) struggle to get a recording contract. Even when they eventually do, it's on the record companies terms. Desperate to get noticed, most new artists will sign anything just to become famous.
So now record companies are making ridiculous amounts of money off the consumer and kicking the artist to the kerb when they are no longer the 'in' thing. This is bad for music, and bad for the consumer.
So when I torrent the latest album from the artist I like, does that make me a criminal? Even if I go to their concerts, buy merchandise and do all I can to get them money knowing that the record companies don't get as much of a cut from touring? I think, if anything, I'm doing the right thing. It's a very Robin Hood mentality, but stealing from the record companies and giving to the musicians is the way I believe in.
I think if everyone else did what I do, music would be in a better place.
Re:It's a problem of analysis (Score:5, Interesting)
- You will feel that you can get music for free, and spend more money on other things, or
- You will be exposed to more music, and spend more money on music.
For some people it's the former, for others it's the latter. I've seen studies that show that both are the majority. To me, this says all statements of the form 'piracy cost us $x' should be taken with a pinch of salt.The recording industry has lost several sales to me in the last month, even though I don't pirate music. I listen to Radio Paradise (which won't exist much longer, if the recording industry lobbyists have their way). A few times recently I've heard songs I like, and gone to iTunes with the intention of buying the album. Since it wasn't available without DRM, I've decided not to. If it had been, then that's a £7.99 impulse purchase they could have had. Did I pirate the music afterwards? No. I just chose not to spend any money on music this month. Instead, I went to see a play performed outside locally, bought a load of books, and rented a load of DVDs.
Total nonsence (Score:2, Interesting)
I can't imagine how the FBI could spend resources for a $25 DVD.
The most ridiculous part is the proposed punishment. Let's assume Blow Joe gets cought copying for himself the world's best, most valuble movie ever made to mankind. He is ssent to trial and sent to jail for 2 years. The cost of getting him cought, the cost of the trial and then keeping him in jail would be quite astronomical, compared to the actual demage. Multiply this with the alleged number of theft and thiefs: you would bankrupt the country, or tax payers would have to pay at least as much as the budget for education.
It's nonsense.
Stop playing semantics games (Score:0, Interesting)
2.) If the music or movie or whatever has no value, then don't download it. If you download it, then there is a reason you downloaded it, to either watch it or just collect it, either way, you get some value from it. If it entertains you for 5 minutes, then that has a value.
3.) the argument that "I would not have bought it anyway" is bullshit. If I walk into a grocery store and steal a can of caviar, I can not complain that its so expensive that I would not have bout it anyway, so its not a crime.
4.) perhaps instead of everyone else adjusting their ways of thinking to yours, maybe you should consider the other alternative, that YOU need to accept a new definition of value, or ownership, or property. Since you are not creating the goods, you have no right to dictate those definitions.
The world is changing, and they are not the only ones who refuse to adapt. You are holding onto an antiquated idea that loss is strictly a loss of usability of a tangible good. As we move away from a goods based economy into one that is more service based, then the idea of time=money really does become true. The idea that taking and using something, regardless of the physical media is still getting some utility from something you did not pay for. You folks are holding onto your 6th grade or even 12th grade definitions for things like "loss" and "theft" or "piracy" . Those definitions are not the way the law and economists define them. Time to grow up and face the fact that times have changed.
Re:Pirates disgust me (Score:3, Interesting)
I downloaded for free an album that I didn't had. Gave it to a friend. One week later, said friend told me a coworker of hers bought the album after hearing it in her car.
I downloaded a game for free, a mainstream game from an editor which doesn't have an active anti-piracy stance, and next week my step brother bought it.
See, you have one anecdote, I have two.
Re:Imaginary crime (Score:4, Interesting)
As a consumer of some custom made applications, I'd have to say this is the direction the market is going. Rather than paying a low price for off the shelf software that doesn't do what we want, we pay developers tens (or hundreds) of times what a boxed software would cost in order to make exactly what we need. In exchange for the exorbitant cost, we get direct input on features and design, and the developers know exactly who is using their software and what it's doing.
Am I saying this is the best for all circumstances? No, for commodities like web browsers and image viewers, this sort of mass-appeal software should be inexpensive or free -- I think Apple has done a great job developing a full suite of *quality* inexpensive (and free) generic tools for their platforms. But for more powerful apps that require years of development and research, the patron model is still the most ideal situtation for both the users and the developers.
No, Mr. Cotton is absolutely right (Score:4, Interesting)
We can do it very effectively.
- First, ban all trading on eBay and Craigslist etc. That will immediately have an impact on pirated goods.
- Secondly, employ large numbers of suitably skilled IT people to find and deal with all servers which allow file sharing. Shut them down regardless of the consequences. If your website is on one of those servers, well, guilt by association was good enough for Sen. McCarthy.
- Third, punish student file sharers appropriately. Put a large police force (let's call it the KGB for short) in all universities, public places, high schools etc. Send convicted criminals to - well, somewhere unpleasant. I'm sure the Russians would lease the Kuril islands, or even parts of Siberia.
- Fourth, only allow CDs and DVDs to be sold by shops with a permanent KGB presence.
- Fifth, ban all computers capable of storing user-transferred content to everybody except corporations with a turnover in excess of $1 billion per year.
- In fact, to be on the safe side, mandate a return to magnetic drum technology and dishwasher size storage. That will get rid of all those iPods and similar piracy devices.
This will work because, before long, the annual turnover of the presently constituted recording industry will fall so dramatically that losses from piracy will be completely insignificant.Re:Pirates disgust me (Score:3, Interesting)
I get where you're coming from on that, but cracks also sell more than a couple of items as well. There are far too many programs out there that are crippled until you purchase them, and of course, you can't really find out if they do what you want until you purchase them.
As an example, I was looking for a program to catalog my DVD collection a few months ago and stumbled across Movie Collector [collectorz.com]. The main thing that I wanted from this program was the ability to easily export to HTML... this program does that, but you have to pay to use that feature. Had it not exported in a way that I desired (not all fields are supported, bad formatting, etc. - I saw a lot of horrible design / functionality decisions in other programs before finding this), that would have been $40 wasted. So, I cracked it, found that it did what I wanted, and then...
Thank you for your Collectorz.com purchase. This e-mail is to confirm that we have received your payment information and that your order is being processed. Once the order is complete, we will send you the license key(s) for your software products and installation instructions to get the full version up and running.
Had I not found a crack in order to decide whether or not the export feature did exactly what I wanted, they never would have got my money.
Re:Pirates disgust me (Score:3, Interesting)
Basically, people are used to consuming media for free.
People only have so much income, and these numbers for "piracy" add up to such an amount that the people who they say didn't consume it, and went pirate instead literally could not afford to buy what they say was lost. Hell, most people in the USA are in so much debt, I can't beleive they can spend such large amounts as they do on non-essential media, movies, cable etc.
Re:Pirates disgust me (Score:3, Interesting)
In most societies healthy people don't use the healthcare system as much as unhealthy people do. Yet we know if we try to make everyone pay as they go, that the result is inefficient and unwieldy. That's why Americans pay far more as a percentage of GDP on healthcare than Canadians do, yet receive worse care overall.
As for the question of how much they should be paid. That is essentially the same question as how much we should spend on health care or education. That is ultimately to be decided by the voters. Questions about corruption are similarly misguided. The answer is the same one that holds everywhere: effective oversight. It generally works. Again, the only people who will really complain are those who complain about state funding on principle. I'm a pragmatist, so I don't.
Your complaints don't really have much merit in that they are too general and would also apply to other examples of publicly funded institutions. But we already have such institutions that work well enough. Personally, I think it is much harder to work out how much to spend on healthcare than it would be to track what music is popular. Television networks already know how to track ratings with a high degree of accuracy (in the case of a product that is provided free to users). There's no reason why that can't happen with music.
Re:Pirates disgust me (Score:3, Interesting)
AllofMp3.com had/has the best online music site bar none. You could get just about any format you want, any bit rate you want, etc... And it was priced to encourge you to buy more music. No bullshit DRM. No outrageous pricing. It was priced per MB. So the better quality the recording, the more you will pay. A reasonable model...not perfect...but reasonable.
Why do people pirate Photoshop? Beacuse it costs an arm and a leg. Personally, i use Gimp, which suits my needs. Hell, even Paint.net does most anything a non-professional could want.
The main driver of piracy is the ridiculously high prices charged by the MAFFIA and software producers.
Re:Pirates disgust me (Score:4, Interesting)
Instead you advocate the ability of others to offer competing services. This is absolutelly valid, and is what I was getting at.
That I have no problem with, its justifying piracy as a means to protest a monopoly which causes me problems.
After all holywood was formed by stealing patented technology and moving to california to escape opressive laws..
Oh wait, shit, um...
mathonomics (Score:4, Interesting)
"intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions [of dollars] a year."
A couple of observations:
1. If people were actually forced to buy the 'intellectual property' that they currently copy illegally, I suspect that the vast majority would not or could not. Therefore, there would be no economic or social benefit to preventing illegal media and software distribution. In fact, you could argue that it would do social harm by limiting access to music and films. On the other hand, not preventing armed robberies would have very real and nasty social and economic consequences.
2. If, indeed, intellectual property theft is that high, one could probably make an argument that it is actually helping the world economy. If people/companies actually had to pay out a few hundred billion dollars more to buy legal copies, it would result in a few hundred million dollars less for silly things like capital investment and salaries.
3. I suspect that the bulk of that "hundreds of billions" would be going to a few very large companies that are already making extremely high profits. Making a monopoly stronger through punitive legislation is probably not in the public best interest.
Re:Pirates disgust me (Score:5, Interesting)
OK, I'll try to go a little slower this time around.
No, because you left the verb "to pay" out of that sentence's first clause, and demand for entertainment products is highly elastic. People have the ability to be entertained by shitty products (I certainly do), but it doesn't mean they view them as worthy of money, or that their absence would leave a gap in a person's entertainment that they'd be willing to pay to fill with those products.
This is the same flawed logic put forth by the "Nader cost Gore the 2000 election" types. It is predicated on the mistaken assumption that, in the absence of some options, most people will select other options that they find undesirable just for the sake of selecting something. While this is true for products with a rather inelastic demand - food, for example - it is certainly not true for entertainment. This logical error also stems from equivocating demand for the product with demand for the content. Demand for luxury goods is not just a function of content, but of price, and the fact that someone pursues a free product does not logically imply that they would pursue the same product with a higher price. The market for free downloaded movies is not the same set of people who comprise the market for movie tickets and DVD's - there is crossover when looking at movies as a whole, but movies aren't purchased as a whole, but individually. For any one movie, these are different groups of consumers.
The fact that movie studios are making record profits from blockbuster movies indicates that they still have a large market of consumers willing to pay for their product - not just the audiovisual content of the product, but the associated theater experience or nice packaging. People aren't buying less DVD's, they're just seeing more movies that would have normally slipped under their radar when price is a consideration. In my experience, downloading movies enables consumers to make informed choices before laying down cash for a legitimate DVD. It doesn't lead to them buying less DVD's; it just greatly increases the likelihood that they will be pleased with their purchases.
As silly as conflating piracy (selling a substitute for a product, or stealing that product for resale) with the creation of an uncapitalized market for a product that did not previously exist, based on the confusion of "product" and "content?" Not really.Re:Pirates disgust me (Score:3, Interesting)
I like some movies. I have plenty of DVDs(hovering around the 40 mark). But, to be honest, I also have plenty of xvid files as well.
I saw each and every one of the Pirates movies in theatres. Why? Because I like giant screens, immersive surround sound and enjoying a night out with friends. Enough, at least, to pay 10$ for. Many people obviously felt the same way by looking at the line up.
The point I'm making is that the experience has to be worth paying for. The medium is neither important nor can it be prevented from being copied and distributed.
If people are not paying you enough(and judging from the movie industry's 9% profit increase this year that argument in itself is dubious), then adjust your offering. Make them -want- to pay for it. Don't force them to through draconian measures or one sided selfish laws.
Re:Pirates disgust me (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The solution is to eliminate software companies (Score:3, Interesting)
I believe your argument is flawed in several ways.
Historically, the rise of the software industry coincided with personal computers becoming commodity items. One might just as well argue that IBM or Apple is responsible for the foundation of what we might call the "software industry" today, for creating the PC and Mac. Indeed, arguing that it was Microsoft alone is surely incorrect, since at the time there were several other similarly powerful companies developing end user software; Microsoft's rise to supremacy in areas like desktop operating systems and office suite software did not occur until many years later.
In today's personal computing industry, the hardware is generic, and it is the software that provides specific applications. There are many application domains. Within each, there is much scope for customisation. Thus we have a variety of software products available today, and "universal software" such as an operating system that almost everyone will use is the exception. This immediately undermines your view of hardware and software as a combined unit: the wants and needs of one person who buys a PC may be completely different to those of another person who would buy identical hardware.
Finally, there is a simple economic fallacy in your argument. You are considering only the marginal cost of creating software products in your economic model, and from the fact that this is near zero for software products, you have inferred that the value of the industry is near zero. However, you have ignored the initial development cost. Even if software were only priced to cover the development cost, and development incurred no overhead in sales, marketing, legal, administration and so on, the money involved for a major software project must pay for the full-time labour of hundreds of highly skilled people over a period of years.
One of the major benefits of the copyright economic model, often ignored in these discussions, is that it provides a mechanism for a market to pay a realistic price for a product that they would all like to have but no one person could afford individually, by splitting the cost. If the product in question has a high development cost but low marginal production cost, then in a competitive industry, one would expect the cost per unit to converge on the value of the software divided by the size of the available market. Charge less than that, and it is not financially viable to build the software product, and everyone loses out because it doesn't get written. Charge more, and a competitor with a product of similar quality can undercut you. This naturally accommodates the uncertainty where the size of market cannot be predicted accurately ahead of time.
In your alternative reality, where software is not a useful industry in its own right, how do you deal with the generality of hardware and the economics of software development to make sure that code actually gets written to make the hardware useful?
Re:Pirates disgust me (Score:3, Interesting)
Copyright law exists to create an incentive for people to make a living by creating art.
No it doesn't. It exists to encourage more art creation by allowing a limited monopoly on distribution. The current terms of the monopoly are arguably too long, as much shorter terms would be as effective, and extending the rights retroactively makes no sense except as a cash grab.
Go! Do it! Just don't use someone else's product in your own.
Herein lies the problem. Art is highly derivative, and companies like disney source a lot of their material from the public domain. Not allowing their works to ever fall into the public domain is at best hypocritical.
Re:Pirates disgust me (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The solution is to eliminate software companies (Score:3, Interesting)
Composers "They provide instructions to the musician on how to do things. It is simply a necessary component of the use of the hardware."
So composers are artists but software engineers aren't, interesting. Granted many things that software engineers do is very mundane, but i have always seen software engineers akin to architects. They both can create art and can create pure functionality depending on what they are assigned.
Re:Pirates disgust me (Score:3, Interesting)
This is one of the reasons Wizards of the Coast developed the Open Gaming License. What the system reference documents actually do is precisely identify uncopyrightable material. The license is simply a covenant not to try and sue, a case which they would have a huge difficulty in winning.
Re:Pirates disgust me (Score:3, Interesting)
Caterham could claim infringement for manufacturing bodywork that copy's their designs, especially for design features such as the Super 7 grille and nose-cone, or the iconic wheel arches.
Anyway, the other guy is right that building a kit car which copy's the design of another car isn't the same thing as watching a movie, but then again, copying a car exactly with some sort of 'magical garage' isn't like copying a movie either, as when you pay far a car, the biggest cost is for the people to make the car(the physical part), not to design it(the intellectual part), whereas with a movie, the biggest cost is making the movie(the intellectual part) not stamping a disk(the physical part).
If I had a magical garage, I certainly wouldn't use it to make a copy of my neighbours lame car, I would make a far cooler car of my own design.
Of course all of this still leads to the same point. Piracy is not the same as stealing, no mater how many ridiculous analogies (especially car analogies) you go through.
Re:Pirates disgust me (Score:2, Interesting)
The deal with the game publisher- totally different than a movie. Online games are repeat customers. I can't say that I have ever gotten a movie pirated or legal on dvd and came home to watch it every day. Online games are crack for nerds- you cut the supply and they sell their grandma to keep doing it.
2. Your assumption is wrong as well- estimation of sales is not a valid number to calculate from, if it were I would be the richest man on earth I could go around investing in every buy low company that estimates their numbers will be high and WHAM!I am a billionaire. The fact of the matter is that the entertainment industry is out of touch. They have really been out of touch since the 70's. There have been nothing but copycats in every genre of music and movies since the days of the late 70s rock star and the lucas inspired summer blockbuster. Some great artists have come out of both of these camps, but more often 1 great artist comes out and then executives recruit 100 other copycats expecting that each will make as much as the first (same with sequal films). So I see that spiderman or batman or superman makes $ and then elektra and daredevil and a host of crappy comic book movies come out. Did the theaters expect daredevil to make as much as spiderman? probably. Should the public be held accountable for that? no, that is an executive decision that was wrong because it failed in the execution. The same goes for music- executives invest in album after album of pop stars and expect it to pay off, sometimes the stream runs dry. An estimated 2 billion dollars of loss has to be calculated not from download numbers but from intended sales. So the number is wrong.
I am a musician (so I speak at all of this first hand)who puts stuff out independently and if I suddenly said "hey my next album is GREAT I expect to sell a million records" but I sell 1000 is that piracy's fault?- no it is my fault for expecting too much and not reading the market, possibly not promoting well enough, maybe I think the album is better than other people did, maybe people think I am a dick 'cause I am blaming sales loss on dowloading and I go down the tubes further, maybe for god's sake I didn't take into account that inflation is going up and wages aren't.
The estimated losses are a smokescreen that are used to target "piracy".
Re:Pirates disgust me (Score:3, Interesting)
Ellison really only cares if you make money using his product and have the ability to pay what he's asking.
Payment terms are really flexable even then.
I suppose this just highlights the absurdity of the whole "blood we think we can squeeze from turnips" rhetoric of the RIAA.
Re:Pirates disgust me (Score:3, Interesting)
As another poster pointed out, what's missing here is perspective or, as someone more tactless like myself might say, some semblance of reality. People who equte "potential" revenue to "real revenue" are worrying. People who think "copying" is the same as "stealing" must suffer from some kind of sociological disorder. I think any person who thinks that said copying/"stealing" is somehow more of a threat to society than, e.g., having a knife stuck against your throat whilst your money is stolen should be put under medical supervision for delusional fantasy. I don't have any sympathy for these unrelentingly greedy, power-mad fuckwits. They're offering society a noose, and people have been conditioned to think they have to pay for the privilege of being strangled.