Bush Appoints Anti-Piracy Czar

Oh, he will, he'll bust the small people for a minor violation but will leave the big fish roam free. As usual.

Not that I agree with piracy, but do you really think that lost revenue figure is accurate? Some wouldnt use Photoshop or any other high priced app if they had to actually pay for it. Just my .02

Trading CD's among friends before this whole P2P hype came to be. I also remember installing private FTP servers on weird numbered ports and only letting 2 users on at the same time, and they would only be friends that I knew.

You won't be able to get software before or on the launch day that way, but within a month or 2 it will have spread the old fashioned way.

If they really are able to completely remove P2P from the picture, don't think for one moment that piracy would actually stop....

I actually RARELY use P2P or any pirated stuff anymore these days, but I don't believe piracy will ever be stopped. Especially since there is no way to govern the internet usage in other countries where P2P is more or less legal or at least not yet a hot topic.

And if all else fails, we'll just go back to copying CD's. I did not get over 2000 C-64 games back in the day by buying em all, and I did not get them by electronic communication either. It was all disk copies. Same in the DOS world by the way, I had hundreds of floppy discs.

No, as long as the media can be copied, piracy will not die.

how soon till we start seeing the us government up on ebay for all big business to buy lol new pay pal options goods, services, pass new laws

Yet more pandering to corporate interests.

What's a real problem is "taxpayer theft" by the government.

- Dan

Absolutely. This number is assuming all people who pirate music and software would buy it otherwise...which they wouldn't.

i hate when they state "it costs $xxx". the only thing it costs is a lazy programmer to develop a half assed protection mechanism.

other than that, you cannot put a cost on piracy. this article and many others that i have seen ASSUME if someone couldn't pirate something they would have to buy it and that's where the lost profit is.

WRONG. if i had to pay $200 for Windows XP for each computer and $500 for 2k3 ES, would I? hell no. i don't have $200 to spend on crappy software. Maybe if microsoft wasn't a bunch of greedy assholes and sold a "household" license $200 wouldn't be so bad. there are 7 computers here. I'm not spending $1400 on OS software let alone anything else.

$250 billion in "profits"? sounds like just trying to make this article sound like it's worth a damn.

Will it be effective as the war on drugs?

There are many, many issues with intellectual property that I have elaborated on before (mostly under my old anon. "Broadbanderexpanderc moniker). You can see a particularly spirited discussion that occurred beneath the article about the pirating of the Harry Potter book.

A few of the problems with intellectual property...

A) Art is not product (within the confines of a capital/mercantile system)
I've done this before here ...
Products have demand
Art sometimes has demand
If demand for a "product" ceases, the product will cease to be made.

Subset (a): If people stopped paying for art, I personally would continue to produce it.

If art ceases to be in demand, it will continue to be made
_____
Thus art is not product

Next we must ask "so if art isn't the product, what is it we're paying for when we buy a CD? Clearly, we're paying for something." Again, see my old posts for my feelings on this ...

B) In a capital system, according to Ricardo, Smith, Marx and even Walras, cost of production has a relation with price. Intellectual property has no "cost of production," just like doing a dance alone in your house has no "cost of production." Yes, the individual producing the art usually must pay for some sort of material. HOWEVER, those materials are NOT the intellectual property in question. How does one determine the price of an idea? Is it contingent upon value? Does the value has do with the demand side? Isn't value, according to Marx and Ricardo, determined by man-hours of production?

C) Copyright laws were intended to prevent individuals from making money without compensating someone for their idea. Take for instance, the inventor of monopoly. He brought his work to a company. They made an offer. He said no. They stole the idea and made it anyway. In the case of file-sharing (pro-term)/piracy (con-term), hypothetical money is not being made. However, no one is stealing money. How does one postulate on money yet to be created? It is quite possible, philosophically, that all individuals who download for free would not have purchased the product anyway, and thus are not A) violating the spirit of copyrighting and B) hurting the market in any way.

There are a host of others, but I'll spare everyone the hours of philosophical debate into the nature of sound and performance/construction of ownership since 1950.

I would go on to say that the war on piracy is more futile than the war on drugs. Funny that they care about $250 billion when the government doesn't do a thing about trying to collect unpaid taxes or the coorporate loop holes that are intentionally left open. Just another coorporate interest, but if big business is gonna foot the bill then I don't have any complaints and of course that won't happen. I think there are more pressing matters like border security and controlling immigration, but then again we all know those businesses would not hesitate to replace you for some illegal or legal alien that they could pay minimum or less. Oh well.

Can't live within the laws of society like everyone else, then there is a prison cell with your name on it. Get use to it. Bubba is gonna like the "fresh meat"...

Using society the way you just did is called a fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Maybe you should've taken an introductory level sociology class in "idiot troll" school.

I agree 100% with maartena everything he said is 100% true. Piracy will never die look how well the scene is organzied yes there was major busts but still. The scene lives, people in china are still pirating and why the hell does this guys of a sudden give a shit about piracy? Oh wow he got to buy a DVD of star wars for a dollar. Since when was it a kept seceret that you couldn't find anything pirated in china? Sorry don't mean to be offensive towards chinaman but everyone knows piracy and counterfit goods are rampent in Asia and china.

What I don't understand like on the AIDS policy in Africa that WE gotta be the big brother over all this. Before anyone who bashes me about aids epidemic I shouldn't have to pay for Africa to get condoms. Like this I shouldn't have to pay for a piracy czar I get 130 dollars of taxes taken out every paycheck, I work hard for that money why not put towards the roads, schools, or somthng here in America. It just seems like the goverment just wants to spend money because they can.

That's my 2 cents on this issue sorry to be so long and draged out but this just makes no sense to do this.

Oh yeah remember the recent scene busts didn't they say that they "Seized" 250 million dollars worth of illegal software how the hell can a small fraction of people they busted have a years worth of software?

sorry it was Billion they were talking about but still 250 million!!.

The one question that never seems to get asked much less answered in such proclamations of "lost revenue" is:

What is the impact of P2P vs. the impact of the huge numbers of bootleg CD/DVD/VHS turned out in countries like China where there are essentially no copyright laws?

Here's an old article on Software Piracy:

»www.unt.edu/UNT/departme ··· racy.htm

OK.. I'm wrong.. here's a screed from Jack Valenti that addresses the issue..but promptly blows it off to make THE INTERNET COPYRIGHT ENEMY #1

»www.copyrightassembly.or ··· 1202.htm

Too bad they arent putting any resources to something useful like jailing SPAMMERs.

HUH?

Absolutely!

Of course there really are international piracy rings that sell pirated software as the real thing. I just hope they concentrate on those operations rather than the nickle and dime P2P varieties.

Yup. That's not all though. They also assume that X percent of users should have brand Y's product. And since they haven't made the sales then it's been pirated.

250 billion is completely fabricated.

There is no nickle and dime about P2P, its all without tender exchange. The real thieves are the ones making money off pirated software, music and movies.

»money.cnn.com/2005/07/22 ··· ndex.htmThis is more about China making knockoffs of many many products, not JUST music and movies. Though that is a big piece of it. It seems the capitalists in China still have a big piece of communism in their philosophy. What's mine is mine, and what is yours is mine too.

And if this initiative can reduce the crooks in China by 50%, that could wipe out the US trade deficit with them.

But with the high number of new prisons coming into the system you will be spending most of your time building more prison cells and would have much time for Bubba.

The nickle and dime is the revenue that the software companies might have made in sales if their wares were priced to the level that would please the P2P pirates.

I agree that the real money (the only verifiable money) being made is by the ones selling counterfeits.

Don't you think China's trade surplus has more to do with their currency's article value (which they just inhinged actually) than with the drop in the pond of piracy? China is moving towards being a legitimate global competitor. Right now, it may be textiles and metal goods, but as the value of the yuan floats up, so too will China's imports, balancing the deficit. Besides, what does good does a US piracy czar do in China? About as much good as the drug czar does in Afghanistan (pre-U.S. occupation).

When China signed onto the WTO they signed a devils bargain. We now have the power to coerce them to enforce laws to stop piracy, etc. or they can have huge tariffs levied against their goods. Why do you think they revalued their currency. They didn't want to but were forced by the international money powers represented by the WTO.

Amen. If MS in particular wants to curb piracy of their products, then sell a license of XP Home that's good for 4-5 PCs. I can't count how many people have come to me asking for a way to be able to install the copy of XP they have on more than one PC they own. MS's bread and butter customers are OEMs and businesses, so it isn't going to kill them to let Joe Schmoe install XP on 4-5 PCs at his home under the same license. Hell, most people only have 1 PC at home! So what is really gained in their current licensing program?

Quite a good point! Nations are often short-sighted about such things. United States included. China's entry into the WTO seems to be an instance of a nation desperate to get in on international trade not realizing the strain such a relationship would cause as their economy grew more viable and profitable. As China grows economically and technologically, they'll probably deal with many of the international economic relations problems that the United States and Russia deal with.

And the truth is, if any government can control private piracy, its the Chinese government. Their law enforcement infrastructure is large enough and their ability to keep tabs on media is quite impressive as well (not necessarily a good thing of course). China are still dependent upon the international community for their surplus income so tariffs would have an affect, even if in the coming decade, China will switch from a cheap materials exporter to an importer, it certainly hasn't happened yet.