Slashdot reports about an RIAA training video in which the RIAA claims that pursuing piracy "leads to bigger and badder wares, like handguns, drugs, terrorist orgs, and hardcore repeat offender criminals." While I am 100% certain that some pirates are criminals for other reasons, I am equally certain that the connection is a result of the number of pirates and the statistical improbability of not finding any other crimes among a group of people so large.
This past weekend I tried to watch the latest episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles from Fox's website. This is a 100% legal method of viewing the content that is endorsed by the studio. It didn't work. The connection was so slow that the stream stalled about every 10 seconds, until the software handling the stream decided to downgrade my quality to the point where it was unbearably pixelated even on the smallest window they would allow. Since Fox did not offer any way to buffer the content (I tried leaving the window open overnight thinking it might buffer, but it didn't), I was forced to 'pirate' this content that was available to me for free. I am not a "bigger and badder" criminal. I am a simple consumer TRYING to follow their rules, but unable to do so.
A friend from college pointed me to this presentation by Larry Lessig. In his presentation Larry mentions how the current government / MAFIAA has essentially created a state where the majority of the citizens are criminals. The more I try to stay current with events, the more I feel as though we're getting uncomfortably close to Orwell's predictions in 1984.
--Dan
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~Marcel Proust
The Protean Paradise logo is based on a picture that is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 License (cc-by-sa-2.0).
3 comments:
One of the comments highlights my point precisely:
"Of course, terrorists also eat, go to the bathroom, and occasionally bathe too. That's because it's what people do. Correlation does not equal causality, unless you're very well paid to believe so."
I don't want to make a whole new post, because frankly I don't think anyone wants to read any more of my ranting and raving about the MAFIAA and how their influence has grown too large for the public good. That said, the LA Times has a good article about the legal semantics of the MAFIAA's anti-piracy campaigns.
--Dan
Dan,
I actually had the SAME exact thing happen to me this past Friday when I was trying to watch Lost from ABC.com. It was so slow that I couldn't even START a connection. So I had to find "other means" by which to watch it. It's nice the networks are going in that direction, but if you're going to do it, set up the infrastructure the FIRST time around. :]
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