Their virtual money is worth more than the analog money in your wallet

See, when someone hits you over the head and steals your iPod, that's not as terrible a crime as the one you committed when you illegally downloaded last night's episode of How I Met Your Mother...

clipped from susiemadrak.com 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 enforcement resources are seriously misaligned,” Cotton said. “If you add up all the various kinds of property crimes in this country, everything from theft, to fraud, to burglary, bank-robbing, all of it, it costs the country $16 billion a year. But intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions [of dollars] a year.” Cotton’s comments come in Paul Stweeting’s report on Hollywood’s latest shenanigans on Capitol Hill.

I'm actually sympathetic to the music, television, and movie industry's feelings about piracy, although as Susie Madrak points out a lot of people who express these feelings are the same people who pretty much think the artists who make the music, TV shows, and movies ought to be about as well-compensated for their work as Scrooge felt about what he was paying Cratchitt before the ghosts showed up. But this idea that the theft of intellectual property is a more serious crime than robbing people at gunpoint is a good expression of the attitude ruining American businesses every day---nevermind the millions you made last year, the millions you think you could have made are the point, and if you didn't make those you as good as lost them...or they were as good as robbed from you at gunpoint.

Oh, and money, even theoretical money, is more important than people and the cops work for the rich not for all of us.

Comments

[Kevin Wolf]

You don't even want to get me started on this subject. The trade groups pushing this BS about lost billions ought to be deeply ashamed.

[Mike Schilling]

Crimes against me are far more heinous than crimes against you, and crimes against him are downright trivial.

[Ken Houghton]

I'm with Kevin Wolf.

[harry near indy]

and may god bless crapitalism!

[Kathleen Maher]

Anyone know coined the word, piracy, for this?
Wikipedia uses it across the board for hip hop artists and not at all for visual artists, who have appropriated Master works 'ironically'--isn't the word "ironic" done yet?--only to reap everything MOMA can give them, because they've painted a yellow splotch where the original used sepia.
But then how serious can piracy be, billions lost or not, if it puts everyone in mind of Johnny Depp all but lost off screen in that last movie?

[velvet goldmine]

It would be funnier if you referenced an NBC comedy in your intro. Not that Doogie's show doesn't apply. I'm just tweaking other people's writing rather than trying to do anything with my own.

[Vir Modestus]

Ed Schultz on the Jones Radio Network has been using a phrase a lot lately: "Race to the bottom line" that I think captures this idea perfectly. The almighty capitalist dollar is far more important than the people who create or even the people who partake. It is a shortsighted view: indeed, so shortsighted that it looks backward at what it 'should' have made but didn't, and was therefore stolen from them. It results in suing high school students instead of utilizing new media and new delivery systems for a new approach.

I have a number of friends who are artists. Some utilize the Creative Commons license, some simply post their songs or stories on the web, glad to have an audience. It seems that business today thinks it *deserves* an "audience" no matter how crappy the product or how badly it treats that same audience.

[Dave Bell]

I do see a distinction between the amorphous mass of downloader pirates, and the organised criminal piracy that sells dodgy DVDs and CDs.

Heck, why am I falling for the "piracy" label? But the downloaders aren't the ones likely to resolve their business disputes with guns. Which is possibly why the downloaders are targets: they don't snoot back.