Addendum: And claiming to have the right to invoke DMCA takedowns, means you need to claim copyrights. Which absolutely is copyfraud if you do that with public domain material.
Piracy is actually a crime: "Any illegal acts of violence or detention, or any act of depredation, committed for private ends by the crew or the passengers of a private ship or a private aircraft, and directed on the high seas, against another ship or aircraft, or against persons or property on board such ship or aircraft (or) against a ship, aircraft, persons or property in a place outside the jurisdiction of any state"
However, copyright infringement is not; it's civil law, not criminal law (except in some countries where real criminals wrote the law).
Piracy doesn't kill your revenue - not watching your movies kills your revenue.
No. "not paying for your movies kills your revenue". It doesn't matter whether I don't buy the blueray or don't go to a theatre, or don't pay for a download. It's all the same. Whether I'm still watching the movie, or a different movie, or read a book, doesn't matter at all.
Or to put it differently: You only get revenue from me, if you get me to pay for your movie. This means: - Offer something I like - At a point in time I like - To a price I'm willing to pay - Without mistreating me (like: searching me for cameras, or putting DRM onto your products etc.)
It's simple. http://www.gog.com/ can do it for computer games, you could do it for movies just as easy.
Now to calculate damages correctly, we can apply several models.
Suppose somebody has put a song illegally onto the internet, and some other people might have downloaded it.
a) We calculate damages from the actual amount of people who downloaded it, and multiply it with the sales price. Yes, the people who had downloaded it might also put it onto the internet illegally, but then these people violate copyright, and not that somebody that put it initially there. So these need to be sued separately. This has a further problem that it's very hard to quantify if using peer2peer technology, but we could divide the outgoing peer2peer traffic of the file by the size of it, and get a number. Probably something like 20, multiplied by $1.
b) We deem the first person to put it up illegally to be responsible for all the infringement that might arise further down. Since we don't sue everyone else, we don't have any numbers who might have re-published it, and whether they've even republished it. With peer2peer, we can at least assume they've republished it illegally. So we could take the above figure and assume that everyone republished it 20 times. So this would end up at something around $400 for the above example. Now, since bandwidth is finite, sharing multiple songs and other materials would probably lead to smaller amounts of the work being sent out illegally, so a whole album might be sent out only 5 times at all, so this still wouldn't amount to a lot, maybe 5x5x$12 = $300 for the above example.
Obviously, it's rather difficult to even get exact traffic stats, and they also could be inflated artificially by the rights holder himself, this is probably not the right way to do it.
We could instead base the whole damages upon something else:
c) The amount of people that could have bought the song, if it hadn't been made available illegally. As it happens, the number is 0. Because those people spent their money somewhere else in the economy: The bought coffee, computer games, went to the movies, etc. So that's not really a good number, and we can't discern people who didn't buy the song but a cup of coffee instead, from the people who didn't buy it because they bought a weeks food instead.
d) The amount of people who would have bought it, if it hadn't been made available illegally. This is more interesting, but also hard to figure out. Obviously all fans would have bought it. You might get a ballpark figure of how many there are from homepages, social media and concerts. But it will probably be lower than the amount of songs already sold. You might use past sales, but then, you already have illegal copies in there, so these will be less than the possible amount. Probably the only way to find out is a survey and do statistics. Just ask a random set of people, worldwide, and ask them if they already bought, or would buy the song for $1. Which would be a huge effort.
But there still might be another way: Statistics on economy and spending.
e) Since the money not spent on paying for the song, the money was spent on something else. That "something else" is totally uninteresting if it's food or housing or other necessities. It's only interesting if money was spent on entertainment, and the amount happens to be known for a lot of countries. From this we can actually figure out the percentages for the different kinds of entertainment (in the US it's around $1000 a year for audio, but including equipment), so we need the number spent for audio recordings alone. If we divide that number by the average total amount of audio recordings acquired within a year (from sources published legally and illegaly both, as well as free/open content/commons/public domain; probably needs a survey), this will give us a price somebody will actually pay for a song. (And now I've gotten lost on the damages part, but that price is in itself interesting, because it's the price you want to sell your songs at). Ah yes, we need to know what percentage of the population, on average, has a certain song. This will be rather low. Multiply that with the population times the price somebody will pay, you've got your damages.
Needed for (e) are surveys on the amount of songs acquired in a year, on average; and on the chance a song has to be among them, on average. But this actually sounds doable, at least in certain countries.
In the days without copyright in the US, US printers actually *bid* on books from UK printers, in order to get them before they were released, so as to be the first to print them in the US.
When everyone that lands on some kind of "blacklist" isn't able to protect its own machine, then we might assume that their machines are soon part of some botnet, making everyone else less secure. Stupid gits.
Of course, that is assuming that AV products really work.
Imagine that there is this outfit putting tracers into the water supply. So they can find people wasting water or something.
Now they're arguing, since water filters not only filter out poisonous and disease-causing substances but also their tracers, the water filter companies "may be liable" ?
On the post: Boston Public Broadcaster WGBH Files Bogus DMCA Notice On Public Domain Video Uploaded By Carl Malamud
Re: Re: Piracy double standard
On the post: Boston Public Broadcaster WGBH Files Bogus DMCA Notice On Public Domain Video Uploaded By Carl Malamud
Re: Piracy double standard
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyfraud
On the post: Jeb Bush Claims That Creating Encryption Harms America
Re: Re:
On the post: Jeb Bush Claims That Creating Encryption Harms America
Re: Candidate lineup
On the post: Are People Passing Around Images Of Lenny Kravitz's Wardrobe Malfunction Violating Revenge Porn Laws?
Re: Re: cameras
Besides, this is not porn, because there is no pornographic context.
On the post: Hollywood Keeps Breaking Box Office Records... While Still Insisting That The Internet Is Killing Movies
Re: Warning before movies
"Any illegal acts of violence or detention, or any act of depredation, committed for private ends by the crew or the passengers of a private ship or a private aircraft, and directed on the high seas, against another ship or aircraft, or against persons or property on board such ship or aircraft (or) against a ship, aircraft, persons or property in a place outside the jurisdiction of any state"
However, copyright infringement is not; it's civil law, not criminal law (except in some countries where real criminals wrote the law).
On the post: Hollywood Keeps Breaking Box Office Records... While Still Insisting That The Internet Is Killing Movies
Re: To the MPAA:
No. "not paying for your movies kills your revenue". It doesn't matter whether I don't buy the blueray or don't go to a theatre, or don't pay for a download. It's all the same. Whether I'm still watching the movie, or a different movie, or read a book, doesn't matter at all.
Or to put it differently: You only get revenue from me, if you get me to pay for your movie. This means:
- Offer something I like
- At a point in time I like
- To a price I'm willing to pay
- Without mistreating me (like: searching me for cameras, or putting DRM onto your products etc.)
It's simple. http://www.gog.com/ can do it for computer games, you could do it for movies just as easy.
On the post: Hollywood Keeps Breaking Box Office Records... While Still Insisting That The Internet Is Killing Movies
Damage calculations
Suppose somebody has put a song illegally onto the internet, and some other people might have downloaded it.
a) We calculate damages from the actual amount of people who downloaded it, and multiply it with the sales price. Yes, the people who had downloaded it might also put it onto the internet illegally, but then these people violate copyright, and not that somebody that put it initially there. So these need to be sued separately. This has a further problem that it's very hard to quantify if using peer2peer technology, but we could divide the outgoing peer2peer traffic of the file by the size of it, and get a number. Probably something like 20, multiplied by $1.
b) We deem the first person to put it up illegally to be responsible for all the infringement that might arise further down. Since we don't sue everyone else, we don't have any numbers who might have re-published it, and whether they've even republished it. With peer2peer, we can at least assume they've republished it illegally. So we could take the above figure and assume that everyone republished it 20 times. So this would end up at something around $400 for the above example. Now, since bandwidth is finite, sharing multiple songs and other materials would probably lead to smaller amounts of the work being sent out illegally, so a whole album might be sent out only 5 times at all, so this still wouldn't amount to a lot, maybe 5x5x$12 = $300 for the above example.
Obviously, it's rather difficult to even get exact traffic stats, and they also could be inflated artificially by the rights holder himself, this is probably not the right way to do it.
We could instead base the whole damages upon something else:
c) The amount of people that could have bought the song, if it hadn't been made available illegally. As it happens, the number is 0. Because those people spent their money somewhere else in the economy: The bought coffee, computer games, went to the movies, etc. So that's not really a good number, and we can't discern people who didn't buy the song but a cup of coffee instead, from the people who didn't buy it because they bought a weeks food instead.
d) The amount of people who would have bought it, if it hadn't been made available illegally. This is more interesting, but also hard to figure out. Obviously all fans would have bought it. You might get a ballpark figure of how many there are from homepages, social media and concerts. But it will probably be lower than the amount of songs already sold. You might use past sales, but then, you already have illegal copies in there, so these will be less than the possible amount. Probably the only way to find out is a survey and do statistics. Just ask a random set of people, worldwide, and ask them if they already bought, or would buy the song for $1. Which would be a huge effort.
But there still might be another way: Statistics on economy and spending.
e) Since the money not spent on paying for the song, the money was spent on something else. That "something else" is totally uninteresting if it's food or housing or other necessities. It's only interesting if money was spent on entertainment, and the amount happens to be known for a lot of countries. From this we can actually figure out the percentages for the different kinds of entertainment (in the US it's around $1000 a year for audio, but including equipment), so we need the number spent for audio recordings alone. If we divide that number by the average total amount of audio recordings acquired within a year (from sources published legally and illegaly both, as well as free/open content/commons/public domain; probably needs a survey), this will give us a price somebody will actually pay for a song. (And now I've gotten lost on the damages part, but that price is in itself interesting, because it's the price you want to sell your songs at).
Ah yes, we need to know what percentage of the population, on average, has a certain song. This will be rather low. Multiply that with the population times the price somebody will pay, you've got your damages.
Needed for (e) are surveys on the amount of songs acquired in a year, on average; and on the chance a song has to be among them, on average. But this actually sounds doable, at least in certain countries.
On the post: Feds Still Shrugging People Onto Terrorist Watchlists Based On Hunches
Re:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140506/14033627137/how-many-terrorists-are-there-not-as-many -as-you-might-think.shtml
On the post: Techdirt Podcast Episode 38: Yes, There Are Business Models That Don't Need Intellectual Property
In days of old
On the post: Yes, The Appeals Court Got Basically Everything Wrong In Deciding API's Are Covered By Copyright
copyright on language
On the post: Retro Games Industry Booming Despite Pirate-Options Being Super Available
Re:
Why would you want that when you've got https://www.winehq.org/
Hm, I just realise, this does not work on Windows, you need a Unix (Linux, MacOS, BSD) to use it..
On the post: Australian Reporter Makes A Year's Worth Of His Metadata Available For Public To Rummage Through
Another one
https://apps.opendatacity.de/vds/
On the post: Before We Pass CISA As A Response To OPM Hack, Shouldn't We Look At What The Feds' Cybersecurity Practices Were?
Wrong Answer
If the OPMs system gets broken into because a security hole was not patched, what should we do?
And the answer CISPA gives is:
We should let the NSA hoard more security holes, so that they cannot be patched and allow the NSA to snoop on everyone.
This is just incredibly stupid.
On the post: Vimeo Should Take Some Of The Blame For Simply Accepting Massive Bogus DMCA Takedown Over The Word 'Pixels'
Re: Re: Re: Insanity rules
On the post: Vimeo Should Take Some Of The Blame For Simply Accepting Massive Bogus DMCA Takedown Over The Word 'Pixels'
Re: Re:
On the post: Vimeo Should Take Some Of The Blame For Simply Accepting Massive Bogus DMCA Takedown Over The Word 'Pixels'
Re:
Actually, I want them to do not just that, but to immediatly SUE the issuer of the wrong notice for fraud and prejudice.
On the post: Peru's New Data Retention Law Gives Police Warrantless Access To Real-Time And Historical Mobile Phone Geolocation Data
Junta
Peruvians will be soo glad when the next Coup d'état comes that they have all this data.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_Peru
On the post: Sophos: If You'd Like A Copy Of Our Free AV Software, You'll Need To Prove You're Not A Terrorist
Making the world less secure
Of course, that is assuming that AV products really work.
On the post: Insanity Rules: NSA Apologists Actually Think Apple Protecting You & Your Data Could Be 'Material Support' For ISIS
Poisoning the water supply
Now they're arguing, since water filters not only filter out poisonous and disease-causing substances but also their tracers, the water filter companies "may be liable" ?
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