More tales from Bizarro World

[strongaxe]

(See original Ars Technica article)

The intellectual property magnates once again show their true colors.

From the article:

"NBC/Universal general counsel Rick Cotton suggests that society wastes entirely too much money policing crimes like burglary, fraud, and bank-robbing, when it should be doing something about piracy instead. 'Our law

Comments

Re: Intellectual Property Argument

[strongaxe]

Several years ago, a high-up in the Turner organization made a comment to the effect that there was an implicit contract between the viewers and the broadcasters that the viewers were required to watch the commercials in exchange for free TV. So, if you fast-forwarded through thte commercials or stepped out and made yourself a sandwich, you were a criminal. (And no, I'm not kidding. He actually said this.)

The whole statistical fallacy is that if (say) a million people download a movie that retails for $20, that is $20M lost in potential sales. But those sales are at a PRICE POINT OF ZERO. Because at $20 those people were (for the most part) NOT willing to shell out the money to buy the movies.

[kcfireplug]

Being an owner of intellectual property myself, I am sorry to hear such an absurd argument.

The loss of "potential" revenue is no comparison to loss of "actual" revenue, or as you pointed out, human lives.

It all ends up as free publicity anyway, but you don't see banks advertising that they were robbed.

I wish more people would buy my music, but then again, I'm happy that people might like it enough to copy it and listen to it. I have no lawyers, management or publishers to feed, so there in lies my strength of autonomy in the marketplace, grass roots if you will.

But because I'm not feeding off of the system, I miss out because I don't get the kind of promotion those other artists do.

As we can see, it's about the money, not about the people, and yet, it's the people who made them the money.

[strongaxe]

(also see my response to the previous comment about the argument absurdity

[kcfireplug]

In the case of royalties, yeah, I know all about that one, which is why I opted to try and do it all myself. The legal issues are still enough to make my head swim, and while I'm a member of BMI, I'm almost afraid to make it big because then the lawyers would probably find some way of taking it away from me, meaning I would have to spend my money on legal council. People are ready to sue over the slightes infraction, and artists are pulled into courts that end up being a huge waste of time for them