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Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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DVD Sales Climb 111%
This Woman Owes You Money
Get Cash From RIAA
Norwegian DeCSS Author Acquitted
Disk Sales Slump, Pirates Not Storing Data
Piracy Only Cause of Music Sales Slump
Centre for Manuscript and Print Studies
Keeping Airports Sane
Tuesday, January 7, 2003
Russian Piracy Problems
Piracy is a legitimate concern for the film and music industries, just as it is for the software industry. Sadly, it's not real pirates the industry is trying to stop. The real problem is large-scale piracy, often government supported, in Asia, Russia, and other Eurasian countries. The industry doesn't know how to stop this so they focus on harassing legitimate customers. It's a very unfortunate situation.My stance against the media industry's bone-headed, technophobic anti-piracy policies and corrupt, political machinations should never be construed as a piracy endorsement. Rather it's an endorsement of an individual's right to read, listen, and watch without restraint, while simultaneously supporting legitimate efforts to stop large-scale piracy operations.
Russia battles against CD piracy
Tuesday, 7 January, 2003, 14:08 GMT
BBC Russian serviceBy Alexander Koliandre
[...] Russia has the second largest music piracy market in the world, after China, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the organisation representing the recording industry worldwide.
It also has one of the highest piracy rates in the world at 65%. More troubling is that the 200 million pirated CDs produced in Russia dwarf the country's total market for CDs by eight times.
Pirated CDs made in Russia are smuggled to the Western Europe and can be found in Paris, London and Amsterdam. [BBC News]
DVD Sales Climb 111%
Chopping yet one more leg from the "Internet piracy is killing our business" stand is the latest research on DVD sales from the UK. No doubt Jack Valenti will find these figures "stunning".
Record year for DVDsDVD players hit record sales of 3.8 million last year - double that of the previous 12 months.
And DVD disc sales reached 80 million last year, representing a 111% increase on 2001, according to the figures released by the DVD Committee of the British Video Association. [...] [Ananova: Business]
This Woman Owes You Money
Make Hilary pay.
Get Cash From RIAA
If you bought a CD between 1995 and 2000 you are entitled to a refund of up to $20 as part of a price fixing settlement against the Big Five recording companies. Go here and sign up.Remember, this is the same group that is under Congressional investigation in California for its contract practices with musicians. Basically, this is an industry that cheats both its suppliers and its customers (on a massive scale) and then pays technophobes like Hilary Rosen to make impassioned public speeches about morality.
The music industry STILL owes you $20!. Man, this is disappointing. Every US resident who bought a CD in the US between 1995 and 2000 is entitled to up to $20 from the music cartel as part of a court-mandated settlement over the labels' illegal price-fixing, which is one way that the music industry has ripped off the public.All you need to do is sign up at this site, and the RIAA will mail you a check. If so many people sign up that the settlement ends up getting spread too thin, the RIAA will mail charitable organizations the checks instead. You can't lose!
Unless you don't sign up. Despite notices of the settlement in TV Guide and throughout blogistan, the cash remains unclaimed. What are you waiting for? Claim it! [Boing Boing Blog]
Norwegian DeCSS Author Acquitted
Today's NYT (registration required) has an article on the Oslo ruling in favor of DVD-Jon, the creator of DeCSS. I had hoped the Norwegian court would show some modicum of rationality and common sense:
[...] Head judge Irene Sogn, in reading the verdict, said no one could be convicted of breaking into their own property, and that there was no proof that Johansen or others had used the program to access illegal pirate copies of films.''The court finds that someone who buys a DVD film that has been legally produced has legal access the film. Something else would apply if the film had been an illegal ... pirate copy,'' the ruling said.
The attempt here by the government -- to show that Johansen had violated laws and cheated the MPAA by viewing his own movie on his own equipment -- shows the depravity of the MPAA/RIAA position. Their war is not against piracy -- it is against users, legal or not. They're seeking a position of unequivocal control over how, when, where, and why users view films or listen to music. No right-thinking individual can support that. The industry is entitled to add or subtract functionality to any or all of its products, in any manner it sees fit. But it can never be allowed to eliminate competition by fiat, or dictate the way users access legally purchased property.
Jon Johansen acquitted!. Jon Johansen, the Norwegian teenager who helped develop DeCSS -- a piece of software that allowed him to watch the DVDs he'd bought in France on the DVD player he'd bought in Norway -- has finally been acquitted. Pending appeal.
The three-member Oslo City Court found Johansen, now 19 and a household name as DVD-Jon in Norway, innocent on all counts in a unanimous 25-page ruling in the latest setback for the film industry's drive to prevent film copying.(Thanks, Jim!) [Boing Boing Blog]''I'm very satisfied. We won support on all points. I had figured that we could win, but it can go either way,'' said Johansen after the verdict was read out.
The prosecution said it would decide in the next two weeks whether to appeal. Johansen said he expects another round because this is the first such case in Norway...
Prosecutors had called for a 90-day suspended jail sentence, confiscation of computer equipment and court costs, all of which were rejected in the ruling.
Monday, January 6, 2003
Disk Sales Slump, Pirates Not Storing Data
The reported billions of pirate music downloads being made every month sure aren't helping the disk drive manufacturers. Shouldn't all that music be leading to ever more disk storage being sucked up by the devious pirates? If music sales fell 10 percent, but disk sales fell 21 percent, where is all that music going? Is piracy destroying disk sales, too? Gee, these numbers don't add up.
Disk storage sales carry on slumping. IDC surveyWith "just say no" the dictum for storage buying, IDC has estimated that total worldwide spending on external disk storage systems slumped to $13.3bn last year, down 24% on 2001. That marks the second year in which disk sales have fallen heavily. In 2001, IDC now estimates that they fell by 21% - up on an earlier estimate of an 18% fall that year. [...] [The Register]
Piracy Only Cause of Music Sales Slump
I am continually amazed, though not surprised, that the music industry considers itself immune to the global economic slowdown and attributes it's entire sales slump to piracy. It must be nice to have such a quick, simple, and handy explanation to cover the entire gamut of your real problems.No other industry in the world has such a ready scapegoat for its performance slump, and most are suffering far more than the music industry. It's sad the media is so useless in pointing out the basic reality of sales declines across all industries.
ARTS NOTEBOOK Music industry blames piracy for sales drop. globetechnology.com Jan 6 2003 12:02PM ET[...] Hilary Rosen, chairman and chief executive officer of the Recording Industry Association of America, blamed the decline mainly on illegal downloading of music off the Internet.
"There's no question that the availability of free music on the Internet is not having the stimulative effect that the proponents of this piracy suggest," she said Friday. Citing RIAA surveys, she added: "Our younger buyers are telling us they are buying significantly less albums because they're finding what they want for free on the Internet." [...] [Moreover - IP and patents news]
Centre for Manuscript and Print Studies
Gary Frost points to what looks to be the beginnings of an interesting academic effort in the history of books, reading, and printing.
Centre for Manuscript and Print Studies. The Research Centre in the History of the Book has now merged with the Centre for Paleography to form: the Centre for Manuscript and Print Studies. [future of the book news]
Sunday, January 5, 2003
Keeping Airports Sane
This airport thing will eventually smooth out, as long as we keep making loud, public noises every time they get out of control. Let's face it, the kind of people who sign up to be security guards have a statistically greater probability of going gung-ho over the line with their petty power mongering. But we don't have to tolerate it, and we don't have to be quiet about it. Enough black eyes will eventually trickle down into better training, and error correction for the security managers. That, in turn, will mean a better, smoother, safer flying experience for everyone. But I do think we need to be on the lookout for passengers being handled unreasonably, and document it however we can.
Penn Jillette, airport patriot. Penn Jillette, nerd squillionairre and fearless bad-boy magician, had a bad experience with Las Vegas airport security, where a security guard grabbed his crotch during a frisking without asking permission. Penn, who knows his rights, told the guard that unless he asks first, grabbing a person's groin is assault. The guard told him, basically, that he doesn't have any rights once he's in the security checkpoint, and shut up. So Penn asked him to call the cops so that he could press assault charges. What follows is a tragicomedy for the twenty-first century, in which various airport personnel insist that poor Penn will be late for his flight if he doesn't back off of this pressing charges business, and a Las Vegas cop (who's an enormous Penn and Teller fan) tells them, Penn's right, you committed assualt, and Penn stoically insists that he won't mind missing his flight, since he can always catch a later one.The punchline is a call from a PR person at the airport who offers to ensure that he gets VIP treatment from now on whenever he flies out of Vegas.
I explained the problem. "Do you allow your crotch to be grabbed without being asked?" I didn't exaggerate, I said that there was nothing sexual, I wasn't hurt, and it wasn't my genitals. I just said it was wrong. She said "Well, your feedback is really important because most people are afraid of us..."(Thanks, Joe!) [Boing Boing Blog]She said, "Well, you know a LOT about this." I said, "Well, it's not really the right word, but freedom is kind of a hobby with me, and I have disposable income that I'll spend to find out how to get people more of it."
She said, "Well, the airport is very important to all of our incomes and we don't want bad press. It'll hurt everyone, but you have to do what you think is right. But, if you give me your itinerary every time you fly, I'll be at the airport with you and we can make sure it's very pleasant for you."
I have no idea what this means, does it mean that they have a special area where all the friskers are topless showgirls, "We have nothing to hide, do you?" I have no idea. She pushes me for the next time I'm flying. I tell her I'm flying to Chicago around 2 on Sunday, if she wants to get that security guy there to sneer at me. She says, she'll be there, and it'll be very easy for me. I have no idea what this means...
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This Page was last updated: Wed, 02 Jul 2008 21:06:57 GMT
