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Comments on news posted 2007-10-04 09:38:01: NBC recently demanded that the FCC force broadband providers to ban pirated traffic on their networks, using the argument that said trading hurts corn farmers by cannibalizing movie theater revenue. ..
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N O Y B
St. John 3.16
join:2005-12-15
Forest Grove, OR
| Take Issue with Touted Lost Revenue Numbers
Though I am dead set against piracy and do not endorse nor participate in the practice. I do take issue with the lost revenue numbers that are typical touted. They are ludicrous. For instance just because n copies of x material are pirated does not mean that same number of copies would have been purchased had they not been available via piracy. Many of the pirated copies are pirated because the pirate does not view the product worth spending money for.
Furthermore at the price of 'free' many more copies are likely to be distributed ('sold') than if they had to be paid for.
The lost revenue numbers typically put out are highly misleading at best.
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GlobalMind
Domino Dude, POWER Systems Guy
Premium
join:2001-10-29
Hollywood, FL | Creative math? or are they just all using Excel to calculate the losses.
Would explain the number.  | |
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dadkins
Can you do Blu?
Premium,MVM
join:2003-09-26
Hercules, CA
 ·Comcast
| Re: Creative math? said by GlobalMind  :or are they just all using Excel to calculate the losses. Would explain the number. OUCH! LOL! 
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Think outside the Fox... Opera | |
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ka blamo
@sbcglobal.net | Oh, for FFS All of you make baby Jesus cry. | |
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DSLucky
Premium
join:2002-04-23
Maud, OK
clubs:
| Illegal? Switch Piracy to Illegal Immigration, and I'd believe 58b in losses. If the govt worked HALF as hard dealing with the invasion of job stealing, benefit sucking aliens as they do against illegal downloaders of copyrighted materials, we soon would have NO illegal aliens in the USA. | |
| | TheMG
join:2007-09-04
Edmonton, AB
 ·TELUS
| $58b ?!?!? I'm sure to get these inflated figures they are probably doing this:
estimated number of pirated content X cost of legally buying the content
In reality, it's completely different. Many many many people who pirate shows, movies, and music would likely not spend the money on it in the first place. This is not to say that everyone wouldn't, of course there are some people who would spend the money if they couldn't pirate, but I'm quite certain that figure would be considerably lower than $58b.
To the guy at NBC who thought up this idea of filtering content in home network hardware -- what a complete dumbass. Do we really need additional useless crap to home networking equipment that already struggles to do what it's meant to? And you own the hardware, you can do whatever you want with, if that means wiping out the default firmware/program and substituting it with your own, there shouldn't be anyone to stop you. | |
| Sammer
join:2005-12-22
Canonsburg, PA | NBC wants to take freedom from the law abiding to stop... the acts of criminals. What NBC is suggesting is tyrannical and worse than the piracy they are trying to stop. | |
| | justin147
join:2006-02-28
Centerville, UT
| Re: NBC wants to take freedom from the law abiding to stop... NBC is a huge company. They are one of a nano section of business who can essentially print there own money because of there exclusive ability to broadcast and collect huge advertising revenues. I have to endur the agravating comercials when I watch their stupid programing. Unless they are planning on lobbing the FCC to wipe out Tevo, or DVR's then they are being unfair. I suppose its o.k. for the rich to access the programs comercial free. But not for the poor mother of five who just wants some content for her DVD player her Sister gave her for Christmas to do the same. | |
| nydwarf
join:2001-08-24
St Catharines, ON | N Beeee C This guy is just shooting of at the mouth and people should not pay too much attention to him. And how do you pirate something the network basically gives away for free anyways? | |
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No to ESPN
@comcast.net
| Maybe NBC is Losing Money because Nobody is Watching! I didn't know that NBC had anything worth stealing. Most of the shows I started watching on NBC got turned off due to being rather poor substitutes for entertainment. What do I consider to be good? Two and Half Men on CBS and some of the shows on PBS. | |
| | justin147
join:2006-02-28
Centerville, UT
| Re: Maybe NBC is Losing Money because Nobody is Watching! I couldn't agree more. The only television worth watching is Comercial Free anyway. Public Broadcast Stations are the only T.V. worth my time. Certainly not the half baked "make it up as the season goes along soap opera wanna be's" or "real idiots being filmed acting like morons" and calling reality TV. If that is reality.. then I'm glad I live in never never land. | |
| justin147
join:2006-02-28
Centerville, UT
1 edit | NBC Telling The FCC what to Do? Isn't that backwards? Shouldn't it be the other way around? | |
| | keason
Premium
join:2002-05-02
Ann Arbor, MI
 ·Sprint Mobile Broa..
| NBC can't charge advertisers for torrents That is the real problem, as NBC sees it.
They still get $$ for merchandise and spinoff licensing, plus the TV on DVD compilations....
If they had a clue, they would capture both markets - stream content in HD+ (complete with ads) and charge advertisers for it from their web sites, plus have their standard over the air rates and garner more money. It would be an incentive to have better content. They could even customize ads for multiple markets based on IP address location.
Why isn't NBC taking advantage of new delivery mechanisms? | |
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jsz0
@comcast.net
 from:
dadkins
| So in other words... Instead of his own industry losing money he'd rather have internet service providers lose money instead? The first ISP that tries this is going to see a backlash of biblical proportions. | |
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rygar
@comcast.net
| Tail wagging the dog If Zucker wants to boost flagging numbers, he needs to do several things:
* Come up with a way to answer competition from all the emerging networks. Sorry to break it to you, Mr. Zucker, but it's not 1963 anymore. You no longer have a captive audience for your flavorless, brainless pablum.
* Come up with an entirely new IP addressing scheme that prevents tunnelling. He'll need to rewrite the entire net to do this, but all is subordinate to NBC's failure.
* Arrest his former viewers. This will help. He can throw them in jail where they'll have only a black and white television tuned only to NBC. Then maybe they will watch. Lawsuits will really help win back your vanishing viewership. They'll make us feel good about you, Mr. Zucker. We'll want to watch your idiotic programming and the disinfotainment you call news.
And finally, most difficult:
* Come up with programming that we actually want to watch. I haven't had a functioning television since 1987. I would not be caught dead watching anything on broadcast television, with the exception of Olbermann. All else is lowest-common-denominator tripe, insulting, pernicious brainwashing deception.
Non-suckitude seems to be beyond the capacity of the music, movie and television industry. Their hubris is preventing them from considering the fact that most of what people pirate, they weren't going to buy anyway. If by some bizarre quirk of fate I had the whim to see "24," and I downloaded it and viewed it without commercials for TOXIC MATERIALS AND JUNK FOOD I DON'T NEED, that doesn't cut into Mr Zucker's profits in any way.
Why? Because if I didn't download it, there is no chance at all that I would watch it.
I would rather pick shitballs out of a dog's navel than watch broadcast TV.
All in all, the party is over. The industry is saturated and diffused and your viewership is never going to come back. Corporate bully tactics aren't going to work either because we're hip to all that.
Concentration camps maybe? Clockwork Orange clamps? | |
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mike_lee
@server4you.de
| Re: Tail wagging the dog It's only a loss if the person was going to buy the product then found it on a peer site and watched it free. That's not the norm -we still want a physical item we can collect, look at and admire. avi files stuck on a usb drive just isnt the same as a shelf lined with your video collection
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If i want a DVD like the TV series King Fu I still buy them like I always have. But if I see some cheesy HONG KONG Kung Fu movie on a torrent site I might dl and watch - but there was never any chance of me buying it
Financial loss to the industry $0.00 | |
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prestonlewis
Premium,MVM
join:2003-04-13
Sacramento, CA
 ·VoiceStick
| 58 billion $ I think most people who pirate video/audio would not have purchased the material in the first place. For example, Pagemaker by Adobe is a fine program but is way out of the price league of most home consumers who would NEVER buy it more than likely. Pirated version of such products are likely numerous but to people who couldn't afford it so the $58 billion suggestion is ridiculous. Take away pirating and Pagemaker would still sell in about the same quantities that it does today, or at least very close. | |
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waldoooo
join:2001-12-15
Blue Island, IL
| NBC is wasting their time NBC better worry about having some shows worth pirating first.
I would like to see one of these surveys that claim the lost revenue figure out how many people who obtained the content illegally would actually spend money on it if they couldn't find it for free. I bet its a very small percentage. | |
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brnmr2000
@rr.com
| Piracy could help NBC, if they use it I hate to be devil's advocate, but I haven't heard any positives for pirating. If I download a movie or show that I wasn't going to pay to see anyway, there is no loss to the businesses, but say I like it and tell 10 people that was a great movie or show and they go out and purchase it, or I like it and now want to see it on the big screen and take my family with me. On something I had no intentions of buying turned into several sales. Many people that I know that download things, do it so they can view it before they purchase, so I agree if NBC uses the time and technology for benefit to themselves, they could find ways of advertising, ie. more product placement in the show itself. Added features on the DVD's, get people interested in the product again. Why should I pay $10 a ticket for five movies I might want to see, when I can view all of them and decide which I might go see or buy on DVD when it comes out. If it is a good enough movie, I like to watch them over and over again, the problem is lately the product isn't that great. | |
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linicx
Caveat Emptor
Premium
join:2002-12-03
United State
·CenturyLink
| Chicken feed What pirated movies and music cost in terms of lost revenue is chicken feed compared to what the average working American loses in terms of real income every time he/she buys medicine at inflated prices.
No one should enjoy the fruits of their bad acts, perceived or otherwise. .
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Mac: No windows, No gates, Apple inside | |
| roddey
join:2007-12-05
Yuba City, CA
| American worker December 4, 2007
The Shortage Myth
The Lies at the End of the American Dream
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
Last June a revealing marketing video from the law firm, Cohen & Grigsby appeared on the Internet. The video demonstrated the law firm's techniques for getting around US law governing work visas in order to enable corporate clients to replace their American employees with foreigners who work for less. The law firm's marketing manager, Lawrence Lebowitz, is upfront with interested clients: "our goal is clearly not to find a qualified and interested US worker."
If an American somehow survives the weeding out process, "have the manager of that specific position step in and go through the whole process to find a legal basis to disqualify them for this position--in most cases there doesn't seem to be a problem."
No problem for the employer he means, only for the expensively educated American university graduate who is displaced by a foreigner imported on a work visa justified by a nonexistent shortage of trained and qualified Americans.
University of California computer science professor Norm Matloff, who watches this issue closely, said that Cohen & Grigsby's practices are the standard ones used by hordes of attorneys, who are cleaning up by putting Americans out of work.
The Cohen & Grigsby video was a short-term sensation as it undermined the business propaganda that no American employee was being displaced by foreigners on H-1b or L-1 work visas. Soon, however, business organizations and their shills were back in gear lying to Congress and the public about the amazing shortage of qualified Americans for literally every technical and professional occupation, especially IT and software engineering.
Everywhere we hear the same droning lie from business interests that there are not enough American engineers and scientists. For mysterious reasons Americans prefer to be waitresses and bartenders, hospital orderlies, and retail clerks.
As one of the few who writes about this short-sighted policy of American managers endeavoring to maximize their "performance bonuses," I receive much feedback from affected Americans. Many responses come from recent university graduates such as the one who "graduated nearly at the top of my class in 2002" with degrees in both electrical and computer engineering and who "hasn't been able to find a job."
A college roommate of a family member graduated from a good engineering school last year with a degree in software engineering. He had one job interview. Jobless, he is back at home living with his parents and burdened with student loans that bought an education that offshoring and work visas have made useless to Americans.
The hundreds of individual cases that have been brought to my attention are dismissed as "anecdotal" by my fellow economists. So little do they know. I also receive numerous responses from American engineers and IT workers who have managed to hold on to jobs or to find new ones after long intervals when they have been displaced by foreign hires. Their descriptions of their work environments are fascinating.
For example, Dayton, Ohio, was once home to numerous American engineers. Today, writes one surviving American, "I feel like an alien in my own country--as if Dayton had been colonized by India. NCR and other local employers have either offshored most of their IT work or rely heavily on Indian guest workers. The IT department of National City Bank across the street from LexisNexis is entirely Indian. The nearby apartment complexes house large numbers of Indian guest workers filling the engineering needs of many area businesses."
I have learned that Reed Elsevier, which owns LexisNexis, has hired a new Indian vice president for offshoring and that now the jobs of the Indian guest workers may be on the verge of being offshored to another country. The relentless drive for cheap labor now threatens the foreign guest workers who displaced America's own engineers.
One software engineer wrote to me protesting the ignorance of Thomas Friedman for creating a false picture of American engineers being outdated and for "denouncing American engineers and other workers as 'xenophobes' for opposing their displacement by foreign guest workers." The engineer also took exception to the "willful ignorance or cynicism of Bruce Bartlett and George Will" who he described as "bootlicks for pro-outsourcing lobbies."
On November 6, 2006, Michael S. Teitelbaum, vice president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, explained to a subcommittee of the House Committee on Science and Technology the difference between the conventional or false portrait that there is a shortage of US scientists and engineers and the reality on the ground, which is that offshoring, foreign guest workers, and educational subsidies have produced a surplus of US engineers and scientists that leaves many facing unstable and failed careers.
As two examples of the false portrait, Teitelbaum cited the 2005 report, Tapping America's Potential, led by the Business Roundtable and signed onto by 14 other business associations, and the 2006 National Academies report, Rising Above the Gathering Storm, "which was the basis for substantial parts of what eventually evolved into the American COMPETES Act."
Teitelbaum posed the question to the US Representatives: "Why do you continue to hear energetic re-assertions of the Conventional Portrait of 'shortages,' shortfalls, failures of K-12 science and math teaching, declining interest among US students, and the necessity of importing more foreign scientists and engineers?"
Teitelbaum's answer: "In my judgment, what you are hearing is simply the expressions of interests by interest groups and their lobbyists. This phenomenon is, of course, very familiar to everyone on the Hill. Interest groups that are well organized and funded have the capacity to make their claims heard by you, either directly or via echoes in the mass press. Meanwhile those who are not well-organized and funded can express their views, but only as individuals."
Among the interest groups that benefit from the false portrait are universities, which gain graduate student enrollments and inexpensive postdocs to conduct funded lab research. Employers gain larger profits from lower paid scientists and engineers, and immigration lawyers gain fees by leading employers around the work visa rules.
Using the biomedical research sector as an example, Teitelbaum explained to the congressmen how research funding creates an oversupply of scientists that requires ever larger funding to keep employed. Teitelbaum made it clear that it is nonsensical to simultaneously increase the supply of American scientists while forestalling their employment with a shortage myth that is used to import foreigners on work visas.
Teitelbaum recommends that American students considering majors in science and engineering first investigate the career prospects of recent graduates.
Integrity is so lacking in America that the shortage myth serves the interests of universities, funding agencies, employers, and immigration attorneys at the expense of American students who naively pursue professions in which their prospects are dim. Initially it was blue-collar factory workers who were abandoned by US corporations and politicians. Now it is white-collar employees and Americans trained in science and technology. Princeton University economist Alan Blinder estimates that there are 30 to 40 million American high end service jobs that ultimately face offshoring.
As I predict, and as BLS payroll jobs data indicate, in 20 years the US will have a third world work force engaged in domestic nontradable services.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com | |
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