p2pnet - rss feed: The RIAA’s Beaverton bust: II
p2pnet.net news view:- Yesterday, p2pnet ran a story centering on the corporate music industry use of local police in a raid on two flea markets in Oregon, and I’ve had several emails mirroring some of the comments in the Slashdot post on this. They say, in effect, Why shouldn’t the police be acting against counterfeiters?
As I posted in a Slashdot response, I didn’t say, and I’m not saying, that shouldn’t be happening. Rather, I was underscoring the completely distorted emphasis on what is, after all, a minor event in the scheme of things.
Thanks to an ongoing PR blitzkrieg in the mainstream media, duping music in any way, shape or form is coming to be regarded as a major crime and police forces are being suborned by the entertainment industries to act as copyright cops; and, in the process, they’re being stopped from dealing with far more important incidents.
Counterfeiters are lumped together with file sharers under the now-generic term ‘piracy,’ which makes it much easier for the Big 4 - EMI (Britain), Vivendi Universal (France), Sony BMG (Japan and Germany) and Warner Music (US) - to drag innocent men, women and children into court, accusing them of being thieves and criminals of the same ilk as the counterfeiters. But there’s no similarity whatsoever. And not one of these approximately 30,000 cases has yet been decided, and no one has yet been found guilty of the non-existent crime of file sharing, or anything else..
Sharing means exactly that. Sharing. No one has deprived of something he she used to own, no money has changed hands and it’s often argued that file sharing is, in fact, an invaluable form of viral marketing.
The Big 4 use their so-called trade organisations such as the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), BPI (British Phonographic Industry), IFPI (International Federation of Phonographic Industry) or, CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association of America), to name but a few, to suggest files share shared equal sales lost, and that sharing is exactly the same as someone walking into a retail outlet and shoplifting ——- or duplicating a disc and selling it in a flea market.
The story I refer to, published in The Oregonian, says police grabbed, “50,000 items worth about $758,000,” the implication being this was all music industry ‘product’.
But also mentioned, though only in passing, are, “knockoff designer purses, sunglasses and clothing, and counterfeit brand-name toys”.
The owners of these items would no doubt love to see the police giving the same kind of undivided attention to their products as the CDs and DVDs. But that isn’t happening.
The story says Beaverton police, “got a tip about counterfeit items being sold at a Beaverton market in December, and the investigation led them to the Hillsboro flea markets”.
No prizes for guessing where the tip came from, and about “20 recording and movie industry investigators” arrived from California to “help” police (who numbered in their dozens, according to the story) identify counterfeit items.
Beaverton’s population in 2006 was, says the Wikipedia, estimated at 84,270. So you’d hardly call it a major city. Nonetheless, the movie and music cartels assigned 20, TWENTY!, ‘investigators’ with “dozens of police officers” taking part in the raid?
The report says the CDs were going for $4.50 each, and the DVDs for between $4 and $12. But let’s deduct, say, $10,000 for the sunglasses, etc. That leaves $748,000 for 50,000 (or so) DVDs and CDs, which also means the $4.50 to $12.00 claim doesn’t compute.
Meanwhile, the issue isn’t whether or not counterfeiting is illegal, or if police should be arresting counterfeiters: it’s the disproportionate amount of time and manpower being allocated when it’s generally acknowledge that enforcement authorities everywhere are already finding it hard enough to cope with serious problems, including shortages of personnel and other resources.
It’s piracy, all right. But the pirates are the entertainment cartels.
Jon Newton - p2pnet
If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.
rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile - http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php | | And use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site
Tired of being treated like a criminal? They depend on you, not the other way around. Don’t buy their ‘product’. Do bug your local politicians. Use emails, snail-mail, phone calls, faxes, IM, stop them in the street, blog. And if you’re into organizing, organize petitions, organize demonstrations and then turn up on your local political rep’s doorstep, making sure you’ve contacted your local tv/radio station/newspaper in advance. Don’t just complain. Do something!
June 12th, 2007 at 9:53 am
You are never going to get anywhere with this. You are trying to match corporate interests against the moral right and you will never succeed.