“Last month, the Motion Picture Association of America started using two dogs, Lucky and Flo, to sniff out DVD’s in the cargo area of Heathrow Airport in London, a major transit point for pirated DVD’s. “First we had Lassie, then Rin Tin Tin and now Lucky and Flo,” said Dan Glickman, the president of the association.”

Some questions:

- An American company doing law enforcemtn work in a foreign country and the agents ARE DOGS?

- And what ever happened to the sovereingty of Britain? Gone along with Irak’s?

- How ridiculous can it get?

- Or is Glickman promoting a new movie version of It’s a mad, mad world?

Rafael Venegas
http://www.gvenegas.com

Mr. Glickman said: “It is ridiculous to believe that you can give product away for free and be more successful. I mean it defies the laws of nature. Would a clothing store give all their clothes for free? Would a car dealership give all its cars for free? Of course not.”

Here, Mr. Glickman is making the wholly inappropriate comparison of physical property (automobiles and clothing) to virtual or intellectual property (music, video, books, magazines, etc.) In the digital world, the latter can be replicated repeatedly at extremely little cost. Even to create the physical manifestation of such an item the cost is that of suitable blank media and a few seconds to minutes of someone’s time to perform the copying task. This can not be done with an automobile or clothing or an ocean liner or a bag of pretzels.

Also, Mr. Glickman’s statement is a classical example of a fallacy known in the branch of mathematics called “formal logic theory” as “affirming the consequence.” Affirming the consequence can be summarized as, “If the conclusion is true, then the premise must be also.” If A then B. This construct only has validty if A is true. The “truth table” for: IF A THEN B is:

A________B____________A ==> B (or A implies B)

True_____True_________True
True_____False_________False
False_____True_________True
False_____False_________True

(pardon any misalignment as that is dependant on the viewer display font in their browser. The php script unhelpfully compresses multiple spaces.)

As you can see, you can not test the validity of the assertion by merely verifying the value of B as true. Similarly you can not determine the validity of the statement by verifying the value of A as ‘False’. The latter is also a fallacy known as “Denying the Premise (or antecedant.)”

He affirms the consequence by stating: “Of course not. If they don’t make a profit in this world they’re out of business. That’s just the laws of human nature.” The assertion is that Hollywood will be driven out of business by people giving away its so-called ‘product’ for free. Similarly “If we don’t allow our product to be given away for free, we won’t go out of business.” is also fallacious. It’s a ludicrous assertion. There are many reasons that entities go out of business, not just from giving away their products.

All of the preceding mathematical machinations are taught in basic computer programming classes, or become intuitively obvious to someone who just starts out on their own ‘hacking away’ (that’s where the word originated, as someone who experiments on their own with computers, there was no connotation of maliciousness when the term started being used in the late 1970s.) on their own with programming. The 17-year old kids Mr. Barlow refers to definitely get this concept, whereas the middle-aged guys in suits are clueless.

No wonder the kids are laughing.

–TurboGeek

1- I’m a little confused, according to all the ad’s you’ve been taking out it’s all aout the blue collar worker losing jobs, not about making sure the actors, directors, and creators get their millions. Though to be honest I never believed you were all about the blue collar worker, just the $.

2 - You know there are thousands (probably underestimated) of actors, creators etc. available to do the work right now, the fact that you find it necessary to overpay a small percentage of them, well that’s just bad business. Or at least it would be considered so for any other business.

3 - Stop putting out overpriced crap & start treating your customers like customers not consumers!!! I think you might be surprised by the reaction you get, as well as the $ you make. But then again your all about making the most $ of the worst dribble you can make.

4 - You act like your supplying a specialty product, i.e. “the magic of the movies” and you price it like it’s a specialty product. But here’s the thing Dan, specialty products have customers, not consumers. Commodities have consumer and lower prices (not to mention product and suppliers). So which is it Dan do you want to treat the public like consumers of a commodity, cause then you have to lower your prices. Or do you truly have a specialty product? Cause then you need to stop pushing the crap and start making specialty products and stop treating your customers like consumers.

db

But there are other laws of nature, among which is “If a person can get something for free, he will”.

That aside, Glickman’s analogies are way off because none of the products he mentions can be reproduced for free.