Fast CD-R Drives Make For Twice the Piracy 524
Bowie J. Poag notes this Register story about an RIAA copyright infringement bust in New York. The RIAA claims the operation had the equivalent of 421 CD-burners, which, translated from RIAA-speak, means "156 CD-burners but some of them were fast". How they expect anyone to take their statistics seriously is beyond me.
RIAA in a spin over CD copying bust (Score:3, Informative)
"Perhaps the truth is less interesting than the facts?" asked Amy Weiss, the RIAA's Senior Vice President of Communications recently in this email to The Register.
It's a question which has baffled many of our readers, and us too. Perhaps it's a kind of Zen koan, which needs to be repeated many times before making sense. If so, we can't report any success.
But the RIAA seems to be having a few problems with the facts itself.
Yesterday it issued a press release announcing a piracy bust in New York which unearthed 421 CD-R burners.
Only there weren't 421 burners, but "the equivalent of 421 burners."
In fact, there were just 156. How did the RIAA account for this discrepancy?
"There were only 156 actual burners, but some run at very high speeds: some as high as 40x. This is well above the average speed," was the official line yesterday.
Apparently another example of the Association's difficulty grappling with new technology. After the RIAA's website was hacked, with large sections rendered inaccessible, spokespersons explained the difficulties were due to a sudden upsurge in popularity.
Well, that's one way of putting it.
The other curious aspect of yesterday's release is the use of Secret Service agents in the bust. The Secret Service, we naively presumed, was employed to protect high-ranking elected officials.
And RIAA's Press Release... (Score:1, Informative)
Largest CD-R Manufacturing Operation In U.S. History, Major Blow To Piracy In Area
WASHINGTON (Dec. 11th) -- In what is the largest seizure ever of equipment used to pirate music onto blank CDs in the United States, the U.S. Secret Service, assisted by a team of investigators from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), on Monday morning raided a major music piracy operation in New York City, leading to the capture of 35,000 finished CD-Rs, 10,000 DVDs, the equivalent of 421 CD-R burners and the arrest of three individuals. This operation alone had the potential to cost the industry an estimated $90 million annually.
The raid, executed by a team of several Secret Service agents and RIAA investigators, was the culmination of a two-month joint investigation of a well-organized music piracy operation in Queens, located on 47-28 37th Street. This particular operation was the largest supplier of pirated music to individual vendors, retail locations, and distribution centers on Canal Street in Manhattan, churning out illegal product around the clock with an estimated capacity of at least six million pirated discs each year. Among the three individuals arrested was the leader of the operation. They now face charges of trafficking in counterfeit labels, criminal copyright infringement, and trademark counterfeiting.
"This is a major blow to the music pirates who were robbing record companies, artists, legitimate retailers and countless others in the industry of millions of hard-earned dollars," said Frank Creighton, Executive Vice President and Director of the RIAA's Anti-Piracy Unit. "This operation should pay further dividends because we have successfully struck at one of the major choke points for music piracy in the New York City area. I especially want to thank the work of the U.S. Secret Service who were invaluable partners in this effort."
Officials also seized eight Rimage Imprinters, one high-end color copier valued at $75,000, and other equipment and raw materials used in the manufacturing process. Approximately 25 percent of the product seized was Latin music.
The register needs to check its facts (Score:3, Informative)
The other curious aspect of yesterday's release is the use of Secret Service agents in the bust. The Secret Service, we naively presumed, was employed to protect high-ranking elected officials[*]. Perhaps this is a further indication of who's really in charge.®
Uhh... no.. actually, the Secret Service was created to track down counterfeiters [bbc.co.uk].
Re:And RIAA's Press Release... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The register needs to check its facts (Score:5, Informative)
*Bootnote: In fact the task of talking into one's sleeve at a press conference only came 28 years after the Service was
Re:RIAA in a spin over CD copying bust (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Actually this is a good thing right ? (Score:3, Informative)
I'm all for freedom of speech and lebensraum to use what I legally buy, but "35,000 finished CD-Rs, 10,000 DVDs" can hardly be concidered fair use. No matter how fast the drives used to make them were.
I don't appreciate the creative math of course, but 35k pirate cds is not something to stand up for (assuming no twiddling was done in that figure)
Re:RIAA in a spin over CD copying bust (Score:2, Informative)
Why not quote a "burn-rate" instead? (Score:5, Informative)
First, congrats to the RIAA for shutting down a real piracy operation. However, if they wanted to get the idea across without messing with the facts, why didn't they say something like "...able to churn out X CDs a day..."? They obviously went through the trouble of doing some sort of calculation to come with that 156 burners = 421 average burners, why not put it in real world terms? Shouldn't be too hard to come up with really big numbers like:
(x_burners)(average_CD_burnt_per_minute)*24*60
Lets say average_CD_burnt_per_minute (aka burn rate) of a 20x burner burning a 70-minute CD is:
20/70min = 0.286 CD/min
You have a fascility churning out:
156*0.286*24*60 = 64,247 CDs/day
Now isn't that a much more impressive number? (assuming I've got me numbers correct; my brain only half-works on Sundays, which is how I average more than a whole brain during the week
Re:Does this mean... (Score:3, Informative)
Tell that to the guy that had to go to court and give up a six figure settlement [cnn.com] because Cage's estate sued for copyright infringement... for making his own version of that 'song'
Re:Another "Equivalence" (Score:2, Informative)
No puedes dividir por 0 (a-b=0)
Counterfeit vs Piracy (Score:2, Informative)
No, it was a counterfeiting operation. Counterfeiting is the reproduction of copy protected designs for illicit sale.
RIAA doesn't like to use the word counterfeiting, because the only type of thing worth counterfeiting is hard to obtain (official papers, Picassos, Bugattis) or something with a high cost:resale ratio (Rolex, Chanel, CD, DVD, banknotes).
Normally the high resale in the latter category is justified by the protected design because the cachet and market demand for the product is assisted by the artifically high price. Perfume manufacturers used this argument to prevent grey imports of their products into UK by supermarkets for sale at a lower than usual price.
Now, of course, there's no cachet to a CD/DVD sale. The product owner wants to sell as many as possible, and a high sales volume does not diminish the product's appeal to the next purchaser. In fact the self-advertisement due to popularity is a key sales tool, like for books. So RIAA avoids the word 'counterfeit' to avoid answering the question of why the products they represent of priced so high.
Think: what would actually happen without IP? (Score:2, Informative)
How do you know?
What would happen if IP laws did not exist is probably more like this...
Firstly, academic research would all but stop, because the only product it produces is information, and the value of that information is drastically reduced. Consequently the funding would rapidly dry up. The picture would probably be much the same in both universities and industry, for the same reasons.
As a direct result of lack of research, medical science would grind to a halt. One of the single biggest turnover markets in the world is medical research, but the reason is that doing that research costs a lot of money. If the people investing that money have no guarantee that they'll see a return on investment, they'll get out of the market. They may be greedy -- although for all the high prices they charge, they do spend a fortune developing the good stuff in the first place, and write off several more fortunes on all the ideas that don't work out first -- but they're not stupid.
Along similar lines, say goodbye to any hopes for faster, more efficient transport infrastructure any time in the near future. Car manufacturers are currently throwing staggering amounts of money into R&D for things like fuel cell cars. Potentially, they solve the environmental problems of automobiles once and for all, which I hope you'll agree is a goal worth aiming for, but without the knowledge that they'll be the only ones who can produce cars based on the tech they develop, at least for a while, they have no reason to invest in it only to see their competitors rip off the end results within months.
This same picture repeats itself all over the world. IP is not just about music, or software, though obviously both of those things are information-based and have the same driving economics behind them. Personally, for all we knock modern software, I'm quite glad we've seen the improvements we have over the last fifty years. And where did those improvements come from? R&D, of course.
Now, if the cost of maintaining the incentives to research and develop is having intellectual property, and convincing a load of idealistic script kiddies that they can't have everything for free just because they want it, then as far as I'm concerned, so be it. You don't go driving through the streets like a maniac just because your car can do 90, because there are serious consequences, and people understand that. The irresponsible few who do it anyway are, rightly, treated as criminals and dealt with accordingly. It's about time the current teen/20something generation understood that there will be consequences to their wholesale ripping of music and software as well, and accepted the corresponding moral responsibility to work inside the rules.