Obama DoJ: Bankruptcy still a fair price for filesharing

The Obama administration doesn’t seem to mind reaffirming the validity of “rebellion” as a reason for why people chose to pirate media:

This shouldn't be seen as much of a surprise at all, given that the Obama administration previously supported the $1.5 million verdict against Jammie Thomas-Rasset for sharing a mere 24 songs. However, now that an appeals court has reverted back to the original $220,000 ruling (procedural reasons...), and Thomas-Rasset has filed to ask the Supreme Court to hear the case, the Obama administration is back again, saying that there is nothing wrong with $220,000 for 24 songs. The argument is basically what you'd expect. In short: Congress set the statutory rates, the record labels asked for statutory damages, and thus nothing in that range should be considered too high.

Any system that favors mandatory minimum punishments (be they prison sentences or monetary fines), particularly minimums so egregiously disproportionate to any alleged harm caused, is a system invested in public spectacles rather than anything resembling true justice. There is simply no valid sensible or ethical (if not, sadly, legal) justification for throwing someone into insolvency over the “offense” of downloading or sharing a few tunes (or videos, or games, or anything else). The very most they can – or should – be accused of is displaying a lack of support for the artist(s) or right-holder(s), which ought to be punishable by furrowed eyebrows rather than criminal sentencing.

There is undeniably merit to the concept of copyright in itself (not to use the silly term “intellectual property”), as affording content creators legal protections against plagiarism and other unscrupulous behavior is evidently the right thing to do. But no rational mind can argue that the current system is anything other than categorically broken when it’s seen as a sign of leniency for a court to hammer an average citizen with crippling sanctions over an act that simply cannot be reasonably said to cause any harm to anyone (especially given the patent absurdity of “lost sales”^*).

* There is no such thing as a “lost sale”, which implies that a transaction was actually conducted before somehow being undone. What “lost sales” really means is that fewer potential customers are committing to handing out their money in exchange for content, which is simply a failure in marketing (and possibly PR – hint, hint, EA.) The blame for that rests squarely on publishers.

EDIT: 02/14/13 1:20 PM ET – Made a few minor phrasing edits.

Daily Blend: Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Quick updates: I finally found how to replace the old “Older/Newer Posts” links with actual post titles, something I’ve been trying to do here for quite a while. I’ve also replaced the clunky old search bar with a Google custom search bar, so older posts should now be much easier to find. Oh, and Disqus reactions are finally working again. That is all.

The Atheist Census ^[pictured] is finally back from its DDoS-induced coma, so get yourself counted if you haven’t already.

Speaking of godless representation, a new comprehensive Pew Research Center study reveals that 16.3% of the world is religiously unaffiliated (though not necessarily atheistic, of course).

Not that you need it (I would seriously hope), but the Bad Astronomer has a write-up explaining in detail how and why the world will not end this Friday.

And finally, it looks like the new SimCity will be the first in the series I won’t be spending my money on. It’s a damn shame; I love Maxis, but to hell with EA’s prohibitive DRM fixation.

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

RIAA ruins another life over a few unpaid songs

Speaking of assholes being assholes, here’s the latest in the RIAA’s neverending quest to make overly draconian examples out of anyone caught enjoying some free music:

Yesterday marked the end of Joel Tenenbaum's court battle with the RIAA over 31 songs he illegally distributed on Kazaa. A federal judge denied his latest appeal, and now he's on the hook for $675,000. That's nearly $22,000 per song, plus some wholesale character assassination that has now been sealed with judge's rubber stamp.

And the moldy cherry on top is Judge Rya Zobel’s pontification following Tenenbaum’s defeat:

In short, there was ample evidence of willfulness and the need for deterrence based on Tenenbaum's blatant contempt of warnings and apparent disregard for the consequences of his actions. In spite of the overwhelming evidence from which the jury could conclude that Tenenbaum's activities were willful, the award of $22,500 per infringement not only was at the low end of the range – only 15% of the statutory maximum – for willful infringement, but was below the statutory maximum for non-willful infringement.

In other words: “Tenenbaum was a total inconsiderate brat for downloading those few songs without paying for them, and he should totally be thanking me on bended knee for not ruining his life as much as I could have. ’Cause I’m so lenient.” Because bankrupting a teenager with $675 thousand is just so much more reasonable than bankrupting him with $4.65 million instead.

Mario Aguilar at Gizmodo summarizes the case (much more civilly than I would) thus:

Regardless of what the maximum allowable penalty for a crime is, anything more than a slap on the wrist for Tenenbaum's actions would have been hugely disproportionate to the crime. As it stands, the RIAA has certainly made an example by ruining one kid's life financially and dragging his name through the mud. Although it's maybe not the one they intended.

With these RIAA fanatics, it thankfully never is.

(via @todayspolitics)

Tags: Joel Tenenbaum • RIAA • Recording Industry Association of America • Kazaa • Rya Zobel

Why “piracy” makes artists richer than “going without”

One of the most common and mindless arguments used against illegal filesharing is that the moral and honorable thing to do when faced with a lack of availability or affordability of content (be it movies or TV shows, videogames, software, etc.) is simply to “go without”. Because to opponents, it’s apparently better to just deprive yourself of what you want/need than to acquire it through illegitimate means, despite the fact that both scenarios end up with the content creator/owner receiving exactly zero income. Maybe they just use their self-satisfaction at preventing the financially or geographically unfavored from enjoying their products for free to keep warm at night.

But the reality is that not only is “piracy” no worse than going without altogether, it’s markedly and demonstrably better for both customers and content providers alike. Here’s Tim Cushing at Techdirt to explain the obvious:

What exactly does "doing without" do for the content creator? How does "not purchasing" (or not having the option to purchase) the disputed content do anything for the creators? Because the bottom line in both scenarios is that $0 has made its way from the potential customers to the people desiring the income.

If everyone just "does without," how does this improve the situation for either the content creator or the customers? Once you've taken the piracy out of it, all you've got left is a set of lousy options that do nothing for everyone involved. If rights holders are happier merely saddling up their high horse and riding to the nearest moral peak, so be it. Riding that horse won't make you any richer, though. All it does is further separate you from your potential income.

A bit of the old infringement, on the other hand, gets your work into the eyes, ears, brains, etc. of potential customers. Sure, not all of them would buy if they had the chance, but at least in this scenario, you're building a bit of a fanbase that may decide to reward you whenever the distributor finally pulls their head out of their legacy and starts meeting customers, at minimum, halfway.

Or, to sum it up visually:

Europe abandons ACTA

Now this is what I call a good morning: waking up to the news that the notorious Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), an international treaty that essentially took the SOPA/PIPA approach to combating piracy and then cranked it up to 11 and introduced it to every other country, has been effectively killed by the European Parliament, thus crippling its chances of being ratified anywhere else, either:

The Parliament voted by 478 to 39 to reject the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a move that means it cannot come into force anywhere within the EU. In doing so, it followed the advice given to it by five parliamentary committees and heeded the massive public protests that were sparked by the treaty earlier this year.

ACTA could still become reality elsewhere in the world, but only if six of the eight non-EU countries that have signed it go on to ratify it — an unlikely outcome given the EU's rejection of the agreement. These countries include Australia, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore and the US, none of which has ratified ACTA yet.

The treaty was originally predicted to pass with numerous countries signing it, but actually ratifying it became a sour process once word leaked out – particularly thanks to WikiLeaks, as always – about the measure’s overly draconian provisions:

These measures would have criminalised people for filming movies in cinemas with mobile phone cameras, allowed border guards to search iPods for pirated music, and forced ISPs to disconnect their customers for file-sharing.

[…]

ACTA demanded the criminalisation of 'commercial-scale' copyright infringement, but its definition of commercial scale was broad enough to turn bloggers putting copyrighted images on their blogs into criminals.

The treaty also criminalised the circumvention of digital rights management (DRM) and introduced a US-style approach to the calculation of damages. This latter measure would have allowed the equation of unlawful downloads with lost sales — a questionable method, as many people download something only to go on and buy it.

That ridiculous notion that “illicit downloads = lost sales” (much less that “copying is theft”) has been debunked so thoroughly, so many times, and by so many people (including numerous experts and concerned artists, themselves) that I’m honestly almost surprised politicians still haven’t cottoned on by now. Then again, one thing lawmakers are known to demonstrate is a remarkable, almost admirable, tenacity in the face of overwhelming opposition by reality itself.

At any rate, I’m just relieved Canada won’t be adopting the U.S.’s ridiculous model anytime soon. Hopefully.

(via @todayspolitics)

Tags: ACTA • Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement • European Parliament • European Union • EU • filesharing • bootlegging

Gene Burmington | The Gay Agenda, or How Homosexuals Want to Destroy America

The following is a guest post by Gene Burmington.

---

I've seen numerous opinions and tenuous experiments basically describing everything from the destruction of American values and weakening of our overall power down to how the intentions of homosexuals are mainly focused on destroying the tenets of Christianity through the alterations of marriage.

The former listed explanations by well-meaning persons ass-backwards fools of religious convictions are concepts worth bearing some discussion, if there are any issues caused by the demands of the homosexual demographic. That is, if there are, which there are not. Pundits railing against these attempts at justice really need to ask themselves certain serious questions before they assert the existence of some kind of nasty hidden agenda by a minority group that badly needs government protections and whom would otherwise be trampled on by people who have neither love nor respect to give for such maligned persons.

The following questions are (reverse the terms if you are a woman):

How would I feel if my wife and I were denied our right to marry despite loving each other very much?

How would I feel if my wife and I couldn't produce offspring due to infertility, and weren't allowed to adopt because of government regulation?

How would I feel if I were bullied in school because I only had one ear or some other birth defect that was out of my control?

How would I feel if I couldn't feel safe out in public because Schizophrenia or some other illness made me appear strange and threatening to persons who might cause me harm from how they perceive me (in Africa, they call these witch hunts)?

How would I feel if I couldn't go to church or engage in any social activity just because I have a tumor or some other medical anomaly, and I felt that the right thing to do was be honest and up front about my condition?

How would I feel if I were not treated the same way as everyone else because of something outside of my own control?

Before you blame homosexuals or blatantly disclose your negative opinion on how you believe they are poisoning America's wells with their hidden covenants, ask yourself those questions and be honest. If one of those fundamental desires up there were an infringement on your liberty, wouldn't you stand up for your equality as well?

Because if your answer is no, then you're either dumb or dishonest, because these are the fundamental rights that most any given American takes for granted. If someone gave the matter all the serious and unbiased thought that it requires, they would realize that we are paving a new road in a similar manner to the way that we removed the blemish of segregation from our lives and made all races equal under the law. Now is the age where we make everyone else so.

Tags: gays • lesbians • homophobia • homophobes • anti-gay

Davy Vara (and his lawyer) still don’t understand Fair Use

Davy Vara [source]

Here we go again. Barely a day after I wrote about an egregiously dumb copyright claim sent to me by Davy Vara, a contributor at police monitoring site Cop Block and who’s apparently quite peeved that I dared to quote from his article for my own post, the man appears and responds thus:

Email from my attorney regarding people copying and pasting my work and passing it off as their own.

Davy, if your work is copywritten, and it is, then you and only you as the original author of said work, has the right to go forward with a notice to cease and desist any and all work which you see someone use and, as is the case here, the person(s) who have copied your work have failed to give you proper credit and/or acknowledgement to you as the original author.

Let me know how you wish to proceed and make sure that whereever you see your work being used in a way where your name has been intentionally excluded, then write down the name of whoever posted it and the website where you saw it and we will proceed accordingly with litigation against those individuals... not only the person who posted it but the website they posted it on.

Mick

Followed by this:

Again, you copied and pasted my exact article, yet intentionally left out my name so as to pass article off as yours. You can say what you want. And your refusal to either give me credit for the article that I wrote and you copied and pasted, or take the article down. Your intentions have been documented and forwarded to my attorney. In the future, so you can avoid litigation, write your own pieces, or have the respect to acknowledge that it is someone else's article and not yours.

Should I be questioning my ability to explain myself at this point? No, really, I mean it. (Or almost.) I made it beyond clear how and why A) I have done nothing wrong, B) I fully attributed his post to him via a hyperlink, as is required under the U.S. Fair Use/Canadian Fair Dealing doctrines (I even made sure to check them both, not knowing which might be applicable given my being a Canuck), and C) he has absolutely no credible legal basis for any of his claims against me (which even included that I had committed “libel actions” against him, despite not mentioning him at all in my original post). I provided several links, even taking the time to deliberately choose the pages that best explained the issue in the most straightforward way possible.

Daily Blend: Thursday, July 28, 2012

Mecha. RL. Srsly.

Sweet: Blogger (in Draft) now allows custom post permalinks (URLs), which the perspicacious observer may note I’ve already put to use for recent posts.

Shocker: U.S.’s search warrants in its witch hunt against MegaUpload ruled illegal by a New Zealand court.

Didn’t see that coming: Notorious “ex-gay” Christianist group Exodus International denounces gay deconversion therapy.
(via Right Wing Watch)

Chuck Norris apparently has a thing for plagiarism (and ghost-writing).
(via Dispatches from the Culture Wars)

Is Japan building a real-life giant Gundam-style mecha ^[pictured] for civil defense? (Why, yes.)

I Side With: Which U.S. presidential candidate best matches your policies? (I’m apparently tied at 87% with Obama and Green Party’s Jill Stein.)
(via Joe. My. God.)

Oldie but goodie: “While chronic leukemia was reportedly worried about how its association with the Republican Party would affect its public image […]”
(via Joe. My. God.)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Tags: Blogger • High Court of New Zealand • Helen Winkelmann • MegaUpload • FBI • Kim Dotcom • Exodus International • Alan Chambers • ex-gay • gay deconversion therapy • gay reparative therapy • Chuck Norris • Wonkette • plagiarism • ghost-writing • Todd DuBord • Gundam • robots • mechas • Japan • Barack Obama • Jill Stein • I Side With • The Onion • leukemia • Republicans • Republican Party • healthcare reform • ObamaCare • Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act • PPACA

In which I am vaguely threatened with a bogus copyright claim

Davy Vara [source]

I’m a nobody. I’m talking in the grand scheme of things – or even as specifically as in the Canadian atheistic blogosphere. There’s no shame to it; it just is. This here blog gets just over a hundred individual visitors (or 200 pageviews) per day on average, which may sound minimally impressive until one realizes that even moderately popular bloggers like Hemant Mehta or Ed Brayton rack up as much traffic in less than an hour (and let’s not even mention the juggernaut that is PZ Myers). Frankly, I consider myself fortuitous that enough people even notice this place to validate its inclusion in Google’s database.

So, all things considered, you can imagine my surprise when I received this email earlier today:

Personally identifying information uncensored because he doesn’t deserve the courtesy or effort.

Daily Blend: Thursday, June 14, 2012

From the file of awesome surprises: Comcast ^[pictured] takes a stand for its clients’ privacy, refuses to cooperate in BitTorrent “shakedown” lawsuit.
(via The Agitator)

Two Alabama public TV managers fired after protesting Republican official’s demands to air revisionist Christian-nationalist program from pseudo-historian David Barton.

“He is not the pastor of the United States, he is the President of the United States.”

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Tags: Comcast • ISPs • Internet Service Providers • BitTorrent • filesharing • David Barton • Alabama Educational Television Commission • Alabama Public Television • Allan Pizzato • Pauline Howland • Rodney Herring • Frederick Haynes III • Friendship-West Baptist Church • Barack Obama • gay marriage • same-sex marriage • marriage equality

Daily Blend: Monday, June 11, 2012

Zachery Swezey

Washington faith-healing parents who let their son ^[pictured] die from a ruptured appendix rather than call a doctor agree to a plea deal to avoid jail time.
(via Joe. My. God.)

Another U.S. Republican Congressman wants to cram his ideological penis^[SFW] where it doesn’t belong.

On the bogus threat of Shariah Law.
(via The Agitator)

Pentagon suspends program equipping domestic law enforcement with military hardware because police grow more militarized keep losing it.

Pregnant Chicago woman tased, arrested and bullied after allegedly ripping up cop’s parking ticket.
(via The Agitator)

Analysis: Google data indicates that racism cost President Obama around 3-5% of the popular vote in ’08.
(via @jennifurret)

The Oatmeal shows how FunnyJunk hosts hundreds of stolen Oatmeal comics. FunnyJunk replies by trying to bully Oatmeal out of $20,000. Oatmeal eviscerates them.

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Tags: JaLea Swezey • Greg Swezey • Zachery Swezey • faith healing • Church of the First Born • U.S. House of Representatives • school boards • Timothy Walberg • HR 662 • prayer • Christians • Steve Chapman • Shariah Law • Islam • laws • Pentagon • U.S. Military • 1033 Program • Taser • Chicago Police Department • police brutality • Tiffany Rent • Google • racism • racists • Barack Obama • The Oatmeal • FunnyJunk • Charles Carreon

Rob Reid destroys entertainment industry’s piracy claims

In case you missed it, here’s a great five-minute lecture by Rob Reid on the laughable claims about supposed damages that media piracy inflicts upon the movie and music industries:

My transcript: (click the [+/-] to open/close →)

[−]

ROB REID: The recent debate over copyright laws like SOPA in the United States and the ACT Agreement in Europe has been very emotional. And I think some dispassionate, quantitative reasoning could really bring a great deal to the debate. I’d therefore like to propose that we employ – we enlist – the cutting-edge field of copyright math whenever we approach this subject.

For instance: Just recently, the Motion Picture Association revealed that our economy loses $58 billion a year to copyright theft. Now, rather than just argue about this number, a copyright mathematician will analyze it, and he’ll soon discover that this money could stretch from this auditorium all the way across Ocean Boulevard to the Weston. And then to Mars. If we use pennies.

Now, this is obviously a powerful – some might say dangerously powerful – insight. It’s also a morally important one, because this isn’t just the hypothetical retail value of some pirated movies that we’re talking about, but this is actual economic losses. This is the equivalent to the entire American corn crop failing, along with al of our fruit crop, as well as wheat, tobacco, rice, sorghum. Whatever sorghum is. Losing sorghum.

But identifying the actual losses to the economy is almost impossible to do unless we use copyright math. Now, music revenues are down by about $8 billion a year since Napster first came on the scene. So that’s a chunk of what we’re looking for. But total movie revenues across theaters, home video and pay-per-view are up. And TV, satellite and cable revenues are way up. Other content markets like book publishing and radio are also up. So this small missing chunk here is puzzling.

Since the big content markets have grown in line with historic norms, it’s not additional growth that piracy has prevented. But copyright math tells us it must therefore be forgone growth in a market that has no historic norms, one that didn’t exist in the 1990s. What we’re looking at, here, is the insidious cost of ringtone piracy. $50 billion every year, which is enough, at 30 seconds a ringtone, that could stretch from here to Neanderthal times.

It’s true. I have Excel.

The movie folks also tell us that our economy loses over 370,000 jobs to content theft, which is quite a lot, when you consider that back in ’98, the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicated that the motion picture and video industries were employing 270,000 people. Other data has the music industry at about 45,000 people. And so, the job losses that came with the Internet and all that content theft, had therefore left us with negative employment in our content industries. This is just one of the many mind-blowing statistics that copyright mathematicians have to deal with every day. And some people think that String Theory is tough.

Now, this ($150,000.00) is a key number from the copyright mathematician’s toolkit. It’s the precise amount of harm that comes to media companies whenever a single copyrighted song or movie gets pirated. Hollywood and Congress derived this number mathematically back when they last sat down to improve copyright damages and made this law (Copyright Damages Improvement Act). Some people think that this number’s a little bit large. But copyright mathematicians who are media lobby experts are merely surprised that it doesn’t get compounded for inflation every year.

Now, when this law first passed, the world’s hottest MP3 player could hold just ten songs. It was a big Christmas hit. Because what little hoodlum wouldn’t want a million-and-a-half bucks’ worth of stolen goods in his pocket?

These days, an iPod Classic can hold 40,000 songs, which is to say eight billion dollars’ worth of stolen media. Or about 75,000 jobs.

Now, you might find copyright math strange, but that’s because it’s a field that’s best left to experts.

So, that’s it for now. I hope you’ll join me next time, when I’ll be making an equally scientific and fact-based inquiry into the cost of alien music piracy to the American economy. Thank you very much.

How intriguing. I had no idea that my hard drive alone was (conservatively) valued in excess of $200 million. Should I sell, or should I invest? Maybe I need a decent brokerage firm, first. Does anyone have any references? Ah, it’s so hard being this filthy rich.

Unless, of course, the MPAA and RIAA are completely full of guano or something. Who knows?

Relatedly, this explains everything.

Sidenote: It’s right after I’d spent half-an-hour tediously typing out the entire above transcript that I realized the whole thing was already available on the TED site. S’cuse me while I go break something expensive now.

(via Bad Astronomy)

Tags: Rob Reid • RIAA • Recording Industry Association of America • MPAA • Motion Picture Association of America • copyright math

Daily Blend: Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Peter Gleick

My thoughts on Leaked-Heartland-Anti-Global-Warming-Documents-Gate, in (sorta-)brief: The only (major) objection I would have with what Peter Gleick ^[pictured] did is if he stole someone else’s identity rather than forge a fake one (and I withhold judgment on that matter until I see confirmation either way). Otherwise, I can only support his actions (even though he apologized for his self-called “serious lapse of [his] judgment and ethics”). No laws were broken, no-one was harmed in their persons or rights, and in the end, truth trumps all. Not that it stops Heartland from crying foul, nor the usual denialist suspects from crowing – even after cheerleading for the “Climategate” perpetrators (who actually did break the law, unlike Gleick) only a couple years previously. But then, denialism of any flavor does usually come bundled with weapons-grade hypocrisy.

All in all: No harm or foul (again, as long as Gleick didn’t steal any real person’s identity), the truth won out, and the anti-science liars are whining because someone used (a watered-down version of) the same tactics they so eagerly applaud when used against actual scientists. It’s only sad that Gleick now faces a ruined career for having ostensibly done the right thing.

And with that out of the way, I now present your links:

Dead-child law in 3 … 2 …
(via The Agitator)

Death by denial: A look at the (literally) dying field of HIV/AIDS denialists.
(via The Daily Grail)

Pathetic smear piece in The Telegraph: Richard Dawkins should apologize for having a distant ancestor who owned slaves hundreds of years ago!

• On that subject, Vox Day never misses a shot at making a more pathetic ass of himself than I thought possible.

Oh, Canada: Ontario universities sign ridiculous copyright agreement stipulating that emailing links is equal to photocopying, incurring heavy fees.

Homeowner to armed burglar who just shot him in the head: “F—- you, you son of a bitch, now it's my turn.”
(via @radleybalko)

The march sprint to Idiocracy continues.
(via The Daily Grail)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Tags: Michael Truluck • Kris Keys • energy drinks • dead-person laws • HIV/AIDS denialism • Richard Dawkins • The Telegraph • Adam Lusher • Henry Dawkins • Vox Day • Theodore Beale • Canada • universities • Access Copyright • Western University • University of Toronto • burglary • home invasion • Jay Leone • Samuel Cutrufelli • Ultimate Taser Ball • extreme sports • stun guns • Taser

Study: Online piracy has little effect on box office revenue

Those paying attention to the kerfuffle over illegal filesharing will have heard all about the various U.S. Government studies claiming to show how harmful “piracy” is to the entertainment industry – along with how they’re complete bullshit, according to the government’s own watchdog group. In fact, far from hammering a stake through Hollywood’s heart, a recent (independent) study makes the claim that filesharing actually doesn’t have much of an effect on box office receipts – and what’s more, that the levels to which movies are pirated online may be the industry’s own fault:

Hollywood films are generally released first in the United States and then later abroad, with some variation in lags across films and countries. With the growth in movie piracy since the appearance of BitTorrent in 2003, films have become available through illegal piracy immediately after release in the US, while they are not available for legal viewing abroad until their foreign premieres in each country. We make use of this variation in international release lags to ask whether longer lags – which facilitate more local pre-release piracy – depress theatrical box office receipts, particularly after the widespread adoption of BitTorrent. We find that longer release windows are associated with decreased box office returns, even after controlling for film and country fixed effects. This relationship is much stronger in contexts where piracy is more prevalent: after BitTorrent’s adoption and in heavily-pirated genres. Our findings indicate that, as a lower bound, international box office returns in our sample were at least 7% lower than they would have been in the absence of pre-release piracy. By contrast, we do not see evidence of elevated sales displacement in US box office revenue following the adoption of BitTorrent, and we suggest that delayed legal availability of the content abroad may drive the losses to piracy.

In other words, it’s just as critics of the modern anti-piracy fervor have been saying for years: that online filesharing is mostly about availability, not legality. Oddly enough, the better the product is and the easier it is to obtain, the more people will happily fork over the bucks to get it. It truly can’t possibly get any simpler than that.

Which makes one wonder why the industry still hasn’t picked up on it.

(via @ebertchicago)

Tags: SSRN • piracy • online piracy • filesharing • Hollywood • BitTorrent

Daily Blend: Saturday, January 21, 2012

Gov. Steve Beshear (D-KY)

• Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear ^[pictured] (D) releases yearly budget with huge cuts to K-12 education – and huge tax breaks for Ken Ham’s Creationist amusement park.

• Sad: Bill Maher defends SOPA without having read it. “[J]ust because you’re sitting at your computer in your pajama bottoms doesn’t mean you’re not stealing.”
  (via @radleybalko)

• “Newt Gingrich is to polyamory as rape is to “making love”.”
  (via Blag Hag)

• Sad but true. Though, I wonder what possible legal basis they could conjure up for banning it.

• Vox Day: British atheists should avoid conflict with intolerant Muslims by supporting Christian domination. Or something.

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Tags: Kentucky • Steve Beshear • Ark Encounter • Ken Ham • education • Bill Maher • Stop Online Piracy Act • SOPA • filesharing • Newt Gingrich • polyamory • open marriages • adultery • Can I Park Here? • apps • parking • New York City • NYC • Michael Fasano • Muslims • Islam • atheists • Vox Day • Jesus and Mo • Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society • University College London • Christianity

DoJ takes down Megaupload over piracy claims

Well, this is troubling. Just as the Internet was collectively pissing its pants at the thought of SOPA/PIPA, the Department of Justice jumped the gun and pulled the plug on Megaupload over claims of copyright infringement:

One of the world’s most popular file-sharing sites was shuttered Thursday, and its founder and several company officials were accused of facilitating millions of illegal downloads of films, music and other content.

An indictment accused Megaupload.com of costing copyright holders at least $500 million in lost revenue. The indictment was unsealed one day after websites including Wikipedia and Craigslist shut down in protest of two congressional proposals intended to make it easier for authorities to go after websites with pirated material, especially those with headquarters and servers overseas.

Megaupload is based in Hong Kong, but some of the alleged pirated content was hosted on leased servers in Ashburn, Va., which gave federal authorities jurisdiction, the indictment said.

The lawsuit includes accusations such as “conspiracy to commit money laundering” and “racketeering”, which makes it sound like they’re just throwing anything they can at the courts to see what will stick. Now, it’s obviously true that Megaupload is (or was) used by more than a few for sharing copyrighted material, but one would hope that even the government’s anti-piracy attack dogs would display some measure of perspective and consideration when going after a networking service used by millions for all sorts of perfectly legit operations. But it seems that blindly tearing the entire thing to the ground and penalizing countless innocent users is the closest thing to a judicious approach they know of, so I suppose we’re out of luck at the moment until the courts decide.

At any rate, it certainly is revealing that the DoJ decided to go after Megaupload just as the general public was alerted to the dangers of pending Internet censorship disguised as counter-piracy measures. The government claims to require more power over the Internet and “rogue sites” in order to curb illegal filesharing, yet here they are, breaking absolutely no sweat in shuttering one of the biggest websites on the Web and hauling its owners to court on those very grounds of copyright violation. As Mike Masnick at Techdirt notes, “Not only does it undermine the argument for PIPA/SOPA, but it raises significant questions about whether or not the feds already have too much censorship power.”

(via @BreakingNews)

Tags: Megaupload • US Department of Justice • Justice Department • DoJ • filesharing

Daily Blend: Saturday, January 14, 2012

Andrew Wakefield

• (Temporary) VICTORY: SOPA hearing delayed in reaction to international outcry. (Meanwhile, Sen. Reid (D-NV) still wants to move forward with PIPA.)

• Meanwhile, Obama administration tech policy officials issue rambling statement in apparent opposition to SOPA/PIPA/OPEN.
  (via @todayspolitics)

• On the importance of recording police interrogations, as shown by the coerced false murder confession from a 12-year-old boy.
  (via The Agitator)

• Great WashPost write-up: 10 reasons the U.S. is no longer the land of the free.
  (via @todayspolitics)

• Antivax king Andrew Wakefield ^[pictured] makes yet another list of science frauds.

• Which Republican candidate is right for you? (I’m apparently a 65.3% Jon Huntsman supporter.)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Tags: Stop Online Piracy Act • SOPA • PROTECT IP Act • PIPA • Eric Cantor • Obama administration • Victoria Espinel • Aneesh Chopra • Howard Schmidt • Online Protection and Digital Enforcement Act • OPEN • Thomas Cogdell • false confessions • police interrogations • USA • United States • civil liberties • indefinite detention • due process • Andrew Wakefield • MMR vaccine • autism • antivaccination • antivax • GOP • Republicans

Daily Blend: Monday, December 26, 2011

Siobhan Reynolds, RIP

So, y’all working on figuring out what your soon-to-be-short-lived New Year’s resolutions will be?

• Even former officers don’t go to jail: Indianapolis ex-cop gets probation for arson attacks.
  (via The Agitator)

• Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) signs law banning domestic partnership benefits for state employees.
  (via Joe. My. God.)

• Anti-piracy logic: Guy harmlessly uploads early version of blockbuster movie (and arguably helps its box office ranking), gets thrown behind bars for a whole year. Totally reasonable.

• Damn. Siobhan Reynolds ^[pictured], pain relief warrior and governmental censorship victim, killed in plane crash.

• I wish you a Portal Christmas tree.
  (via The Agitator)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Tags: Jesse Russell • IMPD • Rick Snyder • domestic partnership • domestic partnership benefits • HB 4770 • X-Men Origins: Wolverine • Gilberto Sanchez • Margaret Morrow • Siobhan Reynolds • chronic pain • Pain Relief Network • Tonya Treadway • Portal • Christmas • Christmas tree

Daily Blend: Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Spook the pitbull

• Doggycide: Gulfport, MS police shoot & kill a pitbull ^[pictured] during a botched raid – right in front of a 3-year-old – and claim the dog supposedly attacked them despite being chained in the yard.
  (via The Agitator)

• Shocker: Major anti-copyright-infringement advocates caught with millions of dollars in pirated content. ’Cause what good fascist isn’t also a hypocritical asshole?

• Meanwhile, MythBusters’s Adam Savage speaks out against SOPA.

• David Barton: Disney, homosexuality and erosion of “Judeo-Christian biblical worldview” to blame for making people think that animals feel and think.

• List of some of Kim Jong-il’s titles. My favorite is “Highest Incarnation of the Revolutionary Comradely Love”, which has got to be code for something.
  (via The Agitator)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Tags: Gulfport, MS • Spook • pitbulls • dogs • YouHaveDownloaded.com • NBC Universal • Sony Pictures • Fox Entertainment • Recording Industry Association of America • RIAA • Homeland Security • torrents • Adam Savage • Stop Online Piracy Act • SOPA • David Barton • Rick Green • Christianity • Kim Jong-il • North Korea

Daily Blend: Thursday, December 01, 2011

A.G. Eric Holder

• Florida education officials illegally force legal citizens to pay jacked-up out-of-state tuition fees if their parents are undocumented.
  (via @danrothschild)

• A.G. Eric Holder ^[pictured] urges Americans to rat out their copyright-violating neighbors to the feds.
  (via @radleybalko)

• Govs. Lincoln Chafee (I-R.I.) and Chris Gregoire (D-Washington) call for legalization of medicinal marijuana.
  (via @todayspolitics)

• In case you needed a reminder about what a despicable ghoul Newt Gingrich is.
  (via @radleybalko)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Tags: Florida • tuition • college • higher education • equal protection • Rick Scott • Eric Holder • Obama administration • copyright infringement • filesharing • illegal downloading • marijuana • medicinal marijuana • medical pot • Lincoln Chafee • Chris Gregoire • Newt Gingrich