Bayosphere

While I have friends who used to download MP3s on a regular basis, none of them have ever downloaded a movie. One in 4 internet users? That means one person in each household in my neighborhood must be a pirate! Absurd.

The loss in quality from the compression required to reach 1 Gb/movie is substantial. Besides fewer than 1 in 4 internet users have the bandwidth (or DVD burners) to make such a transfer worthwhile.

Even backing up your own DVDs for use in the minivan takes time and you almost always have to recompress (degrade quality) to make it fit.

How they can make such claims with a straight face is beyond me. Or perhaps they really are that ignorant.

Is it remotely possible that they’re mixing the statistics for pirated DVDs with downloaded films? Given the number of questionable DVD’s I’ve seen from sidewalk vendors and internet firms, it’s not inconceivable that 1 in 4 sold are counterfeit…but downloaded? Nah!

>>How they can make such claims with a straight face is beyond me. Or perhaps they really are that ignorant

The people behind this are not ignorant at all. They do not believe they are fighting for their survival anymore than you or I do. They just had their best month ever in June, in a entertainment/leisure industry during a fairly bad economy. Those record sales are not JUST because they have been arbitrarily cranking up ticket prices at several times the rate of inflation; somebody still had to buy a lot of tickets to set the record.

These guys have intelligent consultants working for them; they know that, like Napster, Internet downloading tends to expand the market by making people desire to consume more of their product.

The only explanation for their actions is that they do not see an immediate increase in profits as part of their strategy. Just like they complain about analog VCR piracy out of one side of their mouth, while they thank Blockbuster for the billions they rake in because of the success of this general-purpose device out of the other side, their ultimate goal is the same as it has ever been, since the music industry tried to suppress the use of the player piano and the introduction of radio.

With each new technology, they realiZe that it will eventually offer them the opportunity to get even richer and boost their profits ever more by expanding the siZe of the market; however, the overriding desire is not JUST the boosting of profits, but, rather, the EXPANSION OF THEIR SPHERE OF CONTROL AS REGARDS COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL / INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY.

Their ideal world is one where all expression is controlled by the copyright cartel — where the general-purpose computer is turned into a restricted, media-consumption, rental and billing machine.

I believe their thinking is along the lines of: “Once we have ultimate control of the consumption of all media, we will be able to charge as we choose for it, and then our profits will be as much as we desire them to be … as much as we can extract from the market without totally bankrupting Joe User en masse.”

Viewed in this light, their statements / actions make sense. It is not their desire to appear credible to an intelligent person, rather, to misrepresent their case for how they have been “damaged” to the techno-illiterate in Congress, while trying not to appear too ridiculous to the general public (who are also, by-and-large, clueless concerning tech issues). This gets them the traction they need, while avoiding a general outcry against the draconian technological measures they seek to have implemented.

This is why they try to re-cast the largely academic-sounding term “copyright infringement”, with the far-more-serious-and-emotional-sounding terms “stealing” and “piracy”. It helps to convince Joe User that they have been somehow violently wronged, thus keeping him watching “Temptation Island” and “White Chicks”, instead of calling his Congressperson to try to put a stop to their ludicrous demands, as he would if he understood the true nature of the issue, and how he will be impacted 5-10 years from now if Congress passes the ugly, one-sided, club-like excuses for balanced legislation that they seek.

I have legally downloaded movies from
http://www.archive.org/movies/movies.php

They *are* big, but the download happens in the background while you can do something else in the foreground. If you have cable or DSL, it’s no big deal. Would a long download would be successful often enough with dialup to attempt more than once or twice?

Still, 25% of *all* internet users seems pretty high. What’s the percentage of cable&dsl internet users?

Fred

The latest Pew Internet report says 32% of home internet users have “high speed” access of some sort. Even assuming a 1-for-1 home/user ratio, that’s a 78% piracy rate!

On the 1 in 4 users downloading a movie (or more accurately, 1 in 4 consumer household connections), the only way you could get a rate that high is to include porn clip downloads, where the download is a tiny fraction the size of a feature-length movie. (not that I would, er, have first-hand experience)

Like Fred, I too have downloaded a lot of movies – all perfectly legally. Example site: www.pocketmovies.net

So to me the disinformation here is the implication that every movie download is illegal.

Somebody please lemme know when Jack Valenti and everyone else with/at/formerly RIAA and/or MPAA stop suing/filing charges/whining about this activity which [as they well know] puts money in their pockets by increasing demand for their products.

When they STOP, I will resume purchasing their merchandise. Until then, I will simply voluntarily restrict myself to what I have on hand.

Oh yeah, in answer to the questions I infer to be flying around out there — NO, I have not/don’t/won’t download them.

This is a one man boycott.

I’m ready to sell some of m
y money for movies & music. Just begin acting like grown-ups.

Actually, doping cases work from the same basic assumption as drugs cases do under American law; everyone’s guilty until proven innocent. Though normally it’s enough to pee on command and let a lab test the results for residues of banned substances.

That the end results of these test are ignored this time is not really a change of the basic rules set out.

What Dan’s missing because he’s uninformed is the fact that Tim Montgomery, the most high profile and i’m sure inspiration behind this piece (since Montgomery complained of facing a ban without ever having tested positive), is that Montgomery admitted to a grand jury of taking steroids and human growth hormone, even though he never tested positive. Maybe Dan will say he was perjuring himself and could never have taken those drugs

What Dan’s missing because he’s uninformed is the fact that Tim Montgomery, the most high profile and i’m sure inspiration behind this piece (since Montgomery complained of facing a ban without ever having tested positive), is that Montgomery admitted to a grand jury of taking steroids and human growth hormone, even though he never tested positive. Maybe Dan will say he was perjuring himself and could never have taken those drugs

If Tim Montgomery has confessed to a violation, then banning him is proper. If others are suspected of violations but contest those violations, they should be presumed innocent; certainly the tests can be made more rigorous to prevent any future cheating.

I don’t think that proof beyond a reasonable doubt is a relaistic standard – these are all private organizations after all.

But, these sporting authorities are in effect employers (or the agents of employers), and so should be governed by the same rules and regulations. There should be a “reasonableness” standard, there should be due process (including appeals), and there should be proportional reaction to the offense.

Lots of hypocrisy on all sides of this issue . . .

A newspaper report quoting what he may have said to a grand jury isn’t enough evidence for me.

I doubt they’re going to be able to police this stuff in the future, when it’ll be possible to create designer drugs that are fundamentally undetectable. Anyway, the entire sports world is awash in hypocrisy.

Oh there’s plenty of hypocrisy about – I’ve never heard of a British athlete yet that was really guilty, or of a foriegn one that was innocent.

But what adult puts into their bodies is not their own business if they wan’t to compete in international competetitions.

All games have rules. Athletes and their trainers know them inside out. If an athlete tests positive the onus is rightly on him to prove why he should not be banned.

I agree with Wez

http://www.links4you.biz

When will the SEC investigate this farce as a potential stock manipulation scheme? It seems increasingly likely that no one at SCO ever seriously thought that their legal case had any merit, and that the only reason for pursuing it (and dragging it out so long) was to give insiders a chance to dump a good part of their shares while the stock price was inflated based on their hype.

If dumping their stock was their purpose they seem to have succeeded:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/it?s=scox

Attention investment relations professionals, this information is public and online.

See further related information at Groklaw.

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20040623153937941

“When will the SEC investigate this farce as a potential stock manipulation scheme?”

Probably never: it’s a tough case to make, and Boies’ involvement makes me inclined to believe that it wasn’t a true “pump-and-dump”.

I think it’s more likely that they believed that the lawsuit, while dicey, had enough of a chance of some success that IBM would buy them out (at a nice profit to them) to shut them up. That’s certainly debatable, as a moral issue, but it’s not _illegal_, and it’s not “investor fraud”.

I could be completely wrong about this, since it’s all guesswork. But my opinion is that, if there were a big enough smoking gun around for the SEC to nail SCO, Boies wouldn’t have taken the risk of going down with them. So, even if it really was a pump-and-dump scam, the chances of any enforcement action are extremely small.

I’ve been mentioning the dumpiing angle for some time now, and it really started right when they started putting out the FUD. Making the case legally may be a tough thing — I don’t know, but it’s pretty clear that’s that is what was going on.

“Legal experts tracking the case think each hurdle – let alone all three – is difficult to clear.”

They may not be accounting for the abject lack of tech smarts in the courts, though.

“Legal experts tracking the case think each hurdle – let alone all three – is difficult to clear.”

They may not be accounting for the abject lack of tech smarts in the courts, though.

Jim —

The pump-and-dump is hard to prove, though doing a month-by-month analysis of the volume of insider sales shows that it looks awfully coordinated. Maybe that’s not illegal. A better way to convict the SCOX insiders is to look at all the related companies and “charities”–Canopy Group, Vultus, Altiris, Angel Partners, and so on.

“WNEP TV: Smokers Die Early, Study Finds.”
Dan: “Thanks for clearing that up.”

The connections between Lung Cancer, Emphysema aka. COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disorder) and Heart Disease with smoking were demonstrated by retrospective studies in the 1950’s. I.e. look back at a random group of smokers and non-smokers and see what happened to them over time. Uncontrolled retrospective studies are only valid if you have an extremely large study cohort. They did. It may be the first time that such a study had this kind of impact. To this day people still challenge that report.

Epidemiologists and Public Health Officials (as do I), correctly, accept those findings as scientific fact.

However, don’t despair, there is a way to convince the doubters. The Gold Standard in Clinical Research is the double-blind controlled clinical study. We may have to conduct one of these studies. Here’s how it works:

We take a few thousand teenagers and randomly assign them to smoke or not to smoke. The participants cannot, of course, be aware if they are smoking or not. We then follow them for 50 years and check the clinical outcome.

Volunteers anyone?

That should read “cigarette smokers”. According to the Surgeon General’s report, cigar smokers showed only a very slight increase in death rates. Pipe smokers actually lived longer than non smokers.

This is a bit of a digression, but anyway . . .

As Dan’s comment pointed out, it is axiomatic to rational people that smoking kills people. They called cigarettes coffin nails back in the 40’s. My mother knew it was dangerous when she started smoking in the 1950’s; and she was proven right when she died at 60.

The idea that the Big, Bad Tobacco companies have been pulling the wool over our eyes (even if they were trying to do so) is nonsense. That is like blaming Johnny Cochran for the acquittal of OJ Simpson. The idiot teenagers who start smoking today are doing it with their eyes wide open.

Without arguing that this or the other beheadings are in any way excusable or justified, I don’t think that name-calling is useful. See my comments on Bush’s reaction to the Johnson beheading http://russabbott.blogspot.com/2004/06/bushs-reaction-to-johnson-beheading.html and http://russabbott.blogspot.com/2004/06/enemies-in-heat-of-battle-friends-for.html

More like they have nothing else to lose….

We point our guns in too many places around the world. We’ve made way too many enemies for silly reasons…..

http://www.sumeria.net/politics/usa.html

http://www.zmag.org/CrisesCurEvts/interventions.htm

But at the same time most Iraqi’s want to do business with the US, Asia, and Europe. A US business associate of mine and his French partners just came back from Baghdad and have local Iraqi businessmen begging him to invest. In fact in a golf course on the Tigris River of all things. Some sort of resort targeted to rich Europeans and Arabs. Like everything in life there are opportunities to build bridges and make a lot of money for both the US, Iraq and others.

OK, so who’s going to complain that these Iraqis aren’t abiding by the Geneva Convention? The coin has two sides in that regard. These radicals are a small, vocal, brutal minority. They may be trying to hold onto Friedman’s proverbial Olive Tree, but their ends do not justify their means. It’s time for the UN to roll out the big guns.

Actually, I think it was a religous point they were trying to make.

The article says: “He was an Arabic speaker and evangelical Christian who had worked in Iraq for a year as a translator for a South Korean firm supplying goods to the U.S. military.” I think that’s the clue: he was murdered for being a non-Muslim in an Arab country.

Dan, your concise, accurate statement speaks volumes. Not one extra or missing word. The poor Russ Abbotts of the world still don’t get it. There do exist bad people on this earth; sorry about the “demonization”. Of course they’re still human, but evil they are. They would gladly annihilate Russ and all us other infidels in a heartbeat. To sit back and ponder their justfications or rage misses the point. Terror means the intentional attack on civilian targets for political effect. My only suggestion to Russ is that when (evil) people threaten your life or those of your loved ones, please take them seriously.

The thing that terrorists have in common is anger and a willingness to commit acts forbidden by every modern religion and every civilized government. The evil committed by the Moslem terrorists of Al Queda is anathema to their religion, just as Catholic and Protestant killings in Northern Ireland and Jewish crimes in the Near East.

Thus, the abominable beheadings can’t be associated with the religion of the perpetrators any more than German Lutheranism or Catholicism was responsible as a religion for the Holocaust.

Unfortunately, the knee-jerk reaction to what Dan aptly termed barbarism is to associate it with the extremes of Moslem belief, not the mainstream. “Moslem”, like “Arab” is far too broad a concept to be hung with responsibility for the terrorism.

Yes, dan, I totally agree with you.

Iraq militants behead S. Korean hostage

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040623/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq&cid=540&ncid=716

Sure thing

So, not to belabor the Chomsky view of things. But, say a trader on Wall Street calls in a debt on a developing nation’s government, or maybe forgives a portion but increases the interest rate by .25%

The government of this country wants to meet its international obligations, and so pays back its loan. It obtains the extra .25% on the interest rate by not subsidizing the purchase of seeds for the next year’s crops, which will feed its population.

The next year, a bit of starvation occurs in the population. Iterate this over 5 years, as hungry people are not as productive, and can’t produce as much output to pay back the government’s obligation.

Eventually, the people at the bottom with the least amount of support die. Say 50,000 children who did not get adequate nutrition in their first years of life. These were civilians, as they had no say in what their government did in the international arena, but must live with the consequences of these agreements.

Is it any less barbaric to kill these children through economics at a far distant remove than to kill a few people operating in a war zone directly with a sword?

“Is it any less barbaric to kill these children through economics at a far distant remove than to kill a few people operating in a war zone directly with a sword?”

I’ll never understand this flavor of moral equivocation. Do you really see yourself as enlightened with this viewpoint? How many Wall St. traders blow up busloads of children, detonate roadside bombs without caring who the victims are, and murder people because of their nationality?

Sorry, you are not enlightened and you don’t get something that the rest of us are missing. The thing that you are missing is that these thugs, crimminals, and terrorists will murder you because you are not subscribing to their brand of Islam, not because you didn’t help feed their children. The value of human life in the middle east is appallingly low, only when people get a chance to exercise freedom will their outlook change. Unfortunately, there is an ent
ire spectrum of groups and people who don’t want anything resembling freedom in these countries, which is why they have embarked on this campaign of terror to drive out anyone who attempts to instill freedom.

Yes, it’s barbaric and savage. Not only should people not attempt to justify their actions, collectively we should recommit to hunting down and killing these terrorists one by one if that’s what it takes.

I don’t think I was justifying their actions, nor was I saying that killing innocents is not barbaric.

You ask, “How many Wall St. traders blow up busloads of children, detonate roadside bombs without caring who the victims are, and murder people because of their nationality?”

I am suggesting, that while they do not use dynamite or swords, they do kill without caring about the victims, and they murder people because of their nationality, being citizens of indebted nations. And they can’t see that it’s murder, because all they think they’re doing is adjusting numbers in a spreadsheet, because they want another Lexus, or the guy in the next office made better numbers and you have to show him up.

And I am suggesting that this is also barbaric. And I might even suggest that we tend to our own barbarism before noting the log in someone else’s eye.

Our valuation of human life in our inner cities, amongst the working poor and permanently unemployed is appallingly low. Our exercise of freedom has only made class striations worse over the last 30 years. Unfortunately, there is a small group of of very rich men who don’t want anything resembling freedom in this country, which is why they have embarked on this campaign of terror to drive out anyone who attempts to instill freedom.

I actually have no idea what to do with barbarism overseas. Our business interests are too entagled to just go away, and we are too dependent on foreign energy to just walk away. But I do think we need to clean out our own fratboy jerks before we have the moral standing to call others barbarians.

Today’s Juan Cole blog: has this thought on the issue:

I don’t think a lot of press attention should be given to the capture and killing of a single hostage, since the whole point of the captors is to generate such attention. I think the big stories on Tuesday were the killing of 2 more US troops near Balad and the airstrike on Fallujah. The beheading creates a lurid interest, but it doesn’t matter to a dead person how he was killed. And, no, beheading has nothing special to do with Islam, it is just grisly and a good tool for terrorists.

Russ, I agree with you that Bush’s broad-brush characterization is “not useful”. I’d go even further, and call it “immoral”, because it’s false (we’re “up against” many “kinds of people”, ranging from “evil” to “deluded” to “corrupt” to “patriotic”), and because it encourages people on “our side” to act immorally when dealing with people on “their side” by fostering a view of all of them as “in-/sub-human”.

But I also think it’s entirely appropriate to get out the Pilot Razor Point and write “evil” (or, in some cases, “insane”) on the _individuals_ who freely chose to commit those acts.

It’s not sufficient to label the acts as “immoral”: there are many things that people do, often as a result of basic human weakness, that are “immoral”. Like, say, driving drunk. But the drunk driver who kills a pedestrian through drug-induced incompetence is very different from a sober driver who deliberately runs over a random stranger. Both acts are “immoral”, but the latter is probably also “evil”, and the distinction between the two _is_ “useful”.

“But I do think we need to clean out our own fratboy jerks before we have the moral standing to call others barbarians.”

Your reasoning is ludicrously flawed. The moral distinction is easy to grasp — it’s not one of mechanics, as the other poster may have suggested, but rather one of intent. Wall Street traders may act with indifference, perhaps callousness, regarding the many-degrees-removed consequences of their daily business dealings, but they do not set out to intentionally maim, torture, rape or murder people each day.

You are equating negligence (at most) on the one hand with intentional and immediate brutality on the other. Any first-year student of philosophy or law could easily grasp this distinction and describe why virtually every society in existence since the dawn of civilization has chosen to punish intentional wrongdoing far more harshly than mere negligence or indifference.

“Is it any less barbaric to kill these children through economics at a far distant remove than to kill a few people operating in a war zone directly with a sword?”

Most of the time, yes, because the bankers are not making the choices that are the proximate cause of the children dying. It’s more likely that a corrupt dictator or ruling oligarchy has chosen to line their own pockets, or buy new cattle prods and prison cells for the secret police, instead of seed corn.

Was it “immoral” for the bankers to get involved with the borrowers in the first place? Or to impose the conditions that led to the hard choices? Sometimes yes, sometimes no: each case needs to be examined on its own merits.

But “barbaric” rarely, if ever, describes the situation well.

well, perhaps the bankers are not doing it intentionally, but it seems more civilized to me to be aware of the consequences of your actions, and first ‘do no harm,’ and to always strive to understand the consequences. And, our actions overseas, especially when in the name of business, do cause consequences, and rarely do we see the impact of our economic choices overseas. And once someone tells you that you are causing suffering, if you choose not to look at the problem, then it begins to be gross negligence and intention.

Back to the war on terrorism, if we ally ourselves with people who we know are committing war crimes, are we morally culpable? If we stand by as hundreds of people who had surrendered were packed into cargo containers without oxygen, transported many miles with few survivors, is that okay? Is that negligence or intention?

http://bitterfact.tripod.com/afghan/massacre_at_mazar.html

It certainly is a lot easier to just get rid of all those people than to bring them all before a court of law and determine whether they were willing illegal combatants.

If you cultivate a culture of ‘not knowing’ so you don’t know what you’re feet are doing and therefore can’t take responsibility for them, is that intentional, or is it still negligence?

I would agree though that the Queda methods are engineered to cause us the greatest distress. We see American soldier’s faces. These are shrouded, a mystery, unknowble, the unknown, Other and therefore not human. And I think that Al Jazeera is just as bad as Fox in terms of politicizing news coverage. And one person’s suffering is awfu
l. Can we imagine 3,000? When do we ever see the suffering we have caused, but for the brave soldier who leaked the prison photos?

What if, hypothetically speaking, one of the shrouded folk you see in the Queda beheading were the son of someone who we suffocated through negligence in a cargo cart? And he committed to hunting us down and killing us one by one? An eye for an eye will make us all blind.

I knew a flight attendant on one of the WTC flights. The actions taken in her name by the us government disgust me. That she was cruelly murdered disgusts me. I met her at church camp, where we were ostensibly taught to turn the other cheek.

As a superpower, our country that engenders admiration also becomes an easy target, even if we never wanted to be one. There is nobody to contain our behavior but ourselves.

If Disney, et. al., can kill all media downloads, and A**croft can kill all er0t1c downloads, how will the phone and cable companies continue to interest their customers in broadband internet connectivity? If all that are left are low-bandwidth applications, the carriers will be forced to drop prices, and dividends. I expect they’re catching on.

Democrats must stop kowtowing to unionized public employees.

There is no significant public interest in government employees having a right to bargain collectively, as they face no private employer subject to a profit motive at the negotiating table.

It is often said by Democrats that we should have ‘public financing’ of political campaigns.

In fact, we **already do**. Unions have the power by government fiat to compel union members to pay dues, a portion of which is used for financing campaign contributions “hard” and “soft”. *Every* worker in a union shop (outside a handful of “right to work” states) is, in this manner, “taxed” by law to finance political campaigns.

However, well-nigh 100% of the funds go to Democrats.

It’s even worse in the case of public sector unions. Aside from a general taste for Democrat policies favoring labor unions and big government, public sector unions use their “tax base” of government mandated contributions to finance campaign to influence *their employer* and its policies toward specific workers.

It is this morass of public financing of campaigns benefiting only the Left that has produced all the horrors of public sector union of the past 25 years, including the multiple debacles of the California Prison Guards’ union.

Thankfully, as a rich man willing to expend personal capital on his beliefs, Arnold is immune to these shenanigans. The Democrat majority in the legislature (and former Governor Davis) have been, unfortunately, in their pockets for years.

Sorry, Dan, but it’s not possible to “honestly reflect the value — the cost to shareholders– of stock options”. To do so requires a prediction about the future, together with a prediction about human behavior (that is, how many optionees will cash in their options, for what price, and when).

With options that are traded on the open market, it is possible to determine that option’s value, based on what someone will pay for it. With employee stock options, it’s guesswork.

Nevertheless, Black and Scholes came up with a formula. The problem is, their formula was for options openly traded on the futures market. Their assumptions are violated since options can’t be sold; they have to be exercised by isolated, emotionally involved individuals that don’t behave like the economically rational automatons in the textbooks.

The Black-Scholes formula makes a lot of assumptions, like interest rates remaining constant and known, efficient markets, no dividends paid, and the like. So in the end, we’re talking about replacing one fake number with another fake number.

Given this, I wouldn’t worry too much about it, except that it’s helping to bring historic Silicon Valley practice of widely dispersing stock options to an end. If options become a more expensive perk to hand out, the execs will reserve the perk for themselves. A lot of engineers in the valley managed to make the down payment on their houses from stock options; this will no longer happen.

A lot of accounting methods are artifical. Anything other than “cash” accounting, for the most part, is artifical. Accounting works because everyone applies rules and methods consistently.

The formulas for valuing options may be flawed, but it will work as long they are in the ballpark and all companies follow them consistently. If shareholders can understand how tech company inflate their numbers without expensing options, surely they can understand the formulas’ flaws?

GM is expensing options. Why can’t tech companies do the same?

If “it isn’t fair” because tech companies enrich more rank-and-file employees than old-economy companies, perhaps we should consider whether it is fair this Valley’s engineers priced everyone else out of the housing market.

If stock options truly cannot be valued accurately, then it should change into something that can be correctly valued. (Such as real freely-tradable options on a real stock market) Otherwise it is giving companies the right to manipulate their books. Do we want *that*?

Nice article, keep up!