Two Birmingham Men Are Arrested By UK's New Intellectual Property Crime Unit 201
cervesaebraciator writes "The Guardian reports that the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit has arrested two men from Birmingham and have seized 'suspected counterfeit DVD box sets worth around £40,000, including titles such as Game of Thrones, CSI and Vampire Diaries.' The claim is that the men were buying foreign counterfeit copies and selling them online as genuine. London police commissioner Adriad Leppard offers commentary indicative of the thinking behind these efforts, saying, 'Intellectual property crime is already costing our economy hundreds of millions of pounds a year and placing thousands of jobs under threat, and left unchecked and free to feed on new technology could destroy some of our most creative and productive industries.' The article offers £51 billion as an estimate for the cost of illegal downloading to the music, film, and software industry, a figure they say will triple by 2015."
Meanwhile, Netflix is paying attention to piracy via torrent sites as well. The difference is that they're using that data to decide what shows they should buy.
i don't get it (Score:2, Interesting)
i don't get it. can somebody provide insights into why this is a big deal and is on slashdot? criminals break law, get arrested. what is the sizzle here?
Re:i don't get it (Score:0, Interesting)
The "sizzle" is that these laws are awful, as are all copyright and patent laws. People who expect monopolies over ideas and data maintained by government violence are the most entitled brats I've ever seen.
Re:Not really slashdot... (Score:4, Interesting)
No, neither the US nor the UK has any provisions saying that "if a show isn't sold in this country, copyright doesn't apply to it". Even if it did, that wouldn't apply in this case, as you can buy DVD box-sets of all of those shows in the UK.
Of course, there are instances where copyright holders take a relaxed view of whether or not to pursue people from territories they don't operate in downloading their stuff. Anime's probably the biggest example here; the odds of being sued for torrenting fansubs of an anime show that isn't licensed in the West are next to zero (though the people who upload them in Japan can and do get prosecuted over there). Even if the show is licensed, you're still much less likely to get hit than you might be with Western shows. The main reason why? Overseas sales are so marginal to the business model for making these shows that it's not worth the cost of cross-border prosecutions. Plus watching the popularity of torrents is, as referenced with Netflix in the summary, sometimes an indicator of which shows are worth licensing for a Western distributor.
But that isn't to say that they couldn't go after people in the West downloading their shows, or even that it hasn't happened. We've seen a harder line on people torrenting Ghost in the Shell material (certainly to the extent of chasing fansub groups, if not individual downloaders) - possibly because GitS is a bit more "made for export" than the norm.
Re:i don't get it (Score:5, Interesting)
They were mis-describing it when they sold it, if you read TFA. That's bad because it means that the purchasers weren't making an informed decision. By and large, counterfeit box-sets will have lower quality packaging etc than the originals. If they're just burns of TV-rips, then they may also have on-screen network watermarks and other artifacts missing from the official home release.
Plus the people buying it might actually have wanted their money to go to the creators of the show. Even if you're the neckbeard type who believes that all intellectual property is theft, you don't want to say that selling by deception is right?
Compare to GDP (Score:4, Interesting)
The Justification is the Interesting Element (Score:5, Interesting)
I, too, agree that the men were involved in fraud but I think we're missing the point by talking about the guilt or innocence of these two individuals. If the article only said that two jerks were selling bad copies of The Vampire Diaries, then it'd hardly be worth mentioning.
The revealing thing about the article is the way that a new police unit, funded with £2.56 million over two years, is justified. Of course the first people they arrested were engaged in fraud, for who can complain about arresting such people? But the hyperbolic claims made about piracy here would, in fact, make the girl who downloads a One Direction album partly responsible for the destruction of one of the world's largest economies. And this unit is, as parent recognizes, charged with prosecuting "illegal downloads" as well. £51bn per month, to triple by 2015? Just think about that claim for a moment. That's larger than the British economy! If you take these people at there word then you could blame illegal downloading on the world-wide recession. You needn't bother with accusing innocent financiers and speculators who, after all, are just trying to make a better life for their families and provide a public service.
Such hyperbole is reported as fact, except on alternative, online news sources. And it is little wonder. Is MSNBC or FoxNews apt to disagree with the figures given by major media conglomerates? It would be rather shocking if Comcast and Rupert Murdoch allowed anything but the inflation of such figures.
Such hyperbole is also a matter of course when those in power seek to shape public opinion and have new policies accepted. To give a parallel, look at the rhetoric of hawks in the U.S. They constantly inflate the size and significance of every possible threat in order to drum up support for their cause. Hussein was a Hitler-like madman bent on world domination. Never mind that in reality he lacked the capacity and further invasion was not in his interests. Iran will start WWIII by blowing up Israel since they're religious zealots who think to welcome the 12th imam thereby. Never mind that intelligence show Iran is not building a weapon and the religious authorities in Iran have declared the deployment of nuclear weapons haram. Not one year ago, I heard John McCain declare the world a more dangerous place than he had ever seen it. This from a man who lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis. But without the fear, the hyperbole, the little bin Ladins around every corner, the wars will not go on and without the constant wars the apparent need for an ever growing state security apparatus might falter. Then we might devolve to a pre-9/11 world where our lack of war threatens the peace.
Whenever someone in power indulges in hyperbole, threat inflation, and encourages an exaggerated fear know that they're trying to manipulate the public into accepted a policy which, examined with a clear head and a calm heart, any decent person would reject.
Re:i don't get it (Score:5, Interesting)
Nikon is particularly dickbagish when it comes to international warranties. They are just begging you to void it.
You could buy a 100% genuine Nikon product from an authorized reseller in another country, and they will not honor the warranty. You could buy the same item in your *own* country, but if it wasn't from an "authorized reseller", they will refuse to honor the warranty, even if it is 100% genuine Nikon product. They won't even service it if you PAY THEM. It's like no one can be arsed to take the tiny extra step of sightly routing around the standard procedure to provide customer service.
They're the polar opposite of IBM/Lenovo, who will bend over backwards to ensure that a ThinkPad purchased anywhere in the world will be supported and serviced anywhere in the world. I'll praise them for this everyday, even if I still don't recommend their purchase anymore because of the dumbass keyboards.
Re:i don't get it (Score:4, Interesting)
The real problem here is establishing intent. The alleged perpetrators here might be as much a victim as anyone else. When counterfeits are really good, should a reseller be forced to risk hard jail time just to resell something? Add in the whole nonsense of "region coding" and other attempts to expand copyrights by non-legal means, and you have a situation where the notion of a counterfeit doesn't mean anything anymore.