Tag: piracy

Kim Dotcom on “60 Minutes.” Meh.

Getty Images.
Getty Images.

Last night, CBS news magazine 60 Minutes aired a segment featuring the flamboyant internet pirate Kim Dotcom (Kim Schmitz), whose Megaupload cyberlocker site was taken down in early 2012 after a dramatic raid on his luxury compound in New Zealand.  Charged with contributing to, inciting, and profiting from mass copyright infringement as well as related charges of racketeering and money laundering, Dotcom, a German, remains under mansion arrest in his adopted country hoping to avoid extradition to the United States, where he would stand trial.

If you only understood half of what I just said, (e.g. what’s a cyberlocker?), you’re not alone. Not only do I believe relatively few Americans have ever heard of Kim Dotcom or necessarily know what he did, it’s likely that an even smaller set of those who have heard of the man are at this moment particularly concerned about his fate — this despite Kim’s efforts to cast himself in the role of Robin Hood to the MPAA’s Sheriff of Nottingham.    Fortunately, this particular message isn’t really flying with just about anybody other than those one might call internet extremists, and I was pleased that CBS’s Bob Simon did not provide Dotcom a soapbox for his bogus ideological prattling.  That said, that’s about as much credit I can give to the segment, which was a bit of a puff piece, to be honest.

While Simon did push back at Dotcom for his claims to be “just a businessman,” he did let slide the oft-repeated argument Kim has made that it’s not his responsibility who uploads what to his site.  For one thing, Simon might have pointed to the fact that the charges against him include incitement to promote mass infringement by offering Megaupload users money and other forms of compensation specifically for uploading highly-popular filmed entertainment and music.  Even if this weren’t true, though, Dotcom is effectively asking people to believe he was siting there in New Zealand just minding his own business thinking (read with German accent), “I haff no idea ver zees millions of dollars are coming from! Please tell somebody ziss is not my fault!  I do not mean to be making all ziss money!”  Yeah, but really, that’s what he’s saying, and Bob Simon could have jabbed a little harder at the assertion that Dotcom didn’t know what he was doing.

Instead, the segment did include just enough time touring Kim Dotcom’s luxury compound that CBS can probably share the footage with MTV for a Cribs episode (is that still on?). I get why having Schmitz on the show might have attracted eyeballs, but overall the journalism felt mailed in, particularly in light of the fact that the 60 Minutes demographic probably skews toward an audience that doesn’t really know much about the issue of piracy or how it works. Simon didn’t do much in the way of providing context for the viewer or explain the nature of the charges against Dotcom.  Even the segment title “Hollywood’s Villain” is a bit glib and careless, considering the issue of internet piracy goes well beyond a feud between a couple of movie studios and one man.  In fact, one might have thought Dotcom suggested the title himself since his latest spiel is that Hollywood and the USDOJ  singled him out just because his lavish, super-villain-like persona make him such an “attractive target.”  Granted, as my friend said, “He’s like Auric Goldfinger without the class,” but I don’t think anyone sane believes for a moment that’s why he’s under indictment. Thus, even the few minutes in the segment devoted to examining this proposition, while entertaining, was a waste of time that could have been spent addressing some of the facts in the case.

There are interesting people in the world doing some extraordinary things with technology, some who even propose to address numerous challenges faced by millions just in their daily struggle to survive.  Against this backdrop, 60 Minutes has to work a little harder to make a guy seem interesting because he got rich by enabling already-privileged kids to watch Transformers: Dark of the Moon for free.

End Piracy? As if…

Think back to January 18, 2012, the day Internet companies led a blackout (it was more gray really) of  their websites in protest against the dreaded SOPA & PIPA bills.  On that day, Google backed a petition with a slogan that sounded so reasonable.  It said, End Piracy, Not Liberty.  It was classically effective because they could count on anyone who wasn’t paying close attention to the issue — and that would be nearly everybody — to think the message makes sense, that of course, companies like Google want to end piracy as long as the methods don’t threaten liberty.  Who wouldn’t agree with that?

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Of course, Google had no intention of doing a damn thing about piracy, and they knew that millions of people who clicked on that petition two years ago wouldn’t be paying attention to the matter by the morning of January 20th.  And since that day, which has been treated as the web industry’s Alamo and Yorktown in one, Google and friends have steadily promoted piracy, which I believe is the opposite of ending it.  So, I guess what I’m saying is that headline, which drew millions of pavlovian clicks, was unalloyed bullshit.  As mentioned a couple of posts ago, a Google search on the term “movie piracy,” takes you to what is now the top result only because Google wants it to be the top result.  I refer you to the earlier post, but this link will take you to an article written in support of  an anti-copyright, libertarian, Koch-funded organization that just happens to be wonderful for Google’s bottom line.  I don’t care if you hate copyright, this is just a tiny example of how dangerous it can be to have one company presume to “organize the world’s information.”  To serve whom exactly?

Steal a Little: Piracy & the Economy

I’ve wanted a sailing yacht for years but have never been able to afford one — until now.  Thanks in part to a report on piracy and counterfeiting by the GAO and this explication by CCIA (Computer & Communications Industry Association)  lobbyist Matt Schruers, I now have a plan that will put me at the helm of the sloop Larceny by the Summer of 2016.  And the best part is the whole family gets to collaborate to make it happen. According to my rough calculations, all we have to do is steal groceries like a Dickensian gang for three full years, and we’ll save enough for a substantial down payment on the boat.  I’m thinking Beneteau 45ft, but if any seasoned mariner out there has a recommendation, let me know.

Now, you might think shoplifting food is a bit radical as an alternative financing option, but that’s where you’re wrong.  See, if the cops nab me or one of my kids while boosting a chicken from the local farm stand (we’d steal organic of course), all I have to do is point to this GAO report, which according to Mr. Schruers, advocates a truly progressive economic principle most of us have never considered.  If you want more things than you can afford, steal some and pay for the rest. Why is that okay? Because in the economy overall, it’ll be a wash. To quote Mr. Schruers:

“So what is The Issue of Which One May Not Speak?  The fact that money not spent on pirated content is, in many cases, still spent.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office pointed this out in a widely discussed report in 2010, observing that “effects of piracy within the United States are mainly redistributions within the economy for other purposes and that they should not be considered as a loss to the overall economy.”  Money does not “just vanish.”  A Swiss Government commission made a similar observation the following year.”

Go back and read that again. Because full-grown adults are saying without a hint of irony that if you don’t spend the money in your pocket, it doesn’t just disappear but will remain there until you spend it on something else! The concept is quite a mind-blower when you come to recognize its elegance. The money you have is the money you have. It’s zen-like.  I am sorry to report, though, that the money spent to reveal this discovery is in fact gone forever.

Of course, in my scheme, when I do get pinched for shoplifting my way toward boating bliss, I have to hope the prosecutor only reads Matt Schruers’s post and not the GAO report because the report itself mostly says piracy and counterfeiting are likely very harmful to the economy in several ways.  In fact, the report devotes a lot of ink detailing the inconclusiveness of many studies that look either positively or negatively at the effects of piracy and counterfeiting, but if we’re just pulling quotes at will, how about this one:

“For example, when pirated movies are sold, it damages not only the motion picture industry, but all other industries linked to those sales.”

 That’s just common sense, and it seems to me the only point worth making if one is going to assess the macroeconomic pros and cons of actually stealing from any industry.  While it’s true that not paying for selected goods and services  will undoubtedly leave you with more disposable income to spend on other things, the industry you’re not paying for will eventually shed jobs.  And if those jobs were held by people in your community, they will no longer be customers for whatever it is you’re selling.  See how that works?  It’s the same economics we learned in high school because it’s pretty damn basic. Perhaps Matt Schruers skipped class that day to hone whatever budding skills would produce this paragraph:

“Normatively bad isn’t the same as an economically bad, however.  Not all normative transgressions necessarily have macroeconomic consequences.  And yet those two items are invariably linked when studies consider infringement.  Infringement is bad, therefore we must assign an economic cost to its badness.  Hence, study after study makes the repeatedly discredited assumption that every infringement is a lost sale, usually calculated at the highest retail price for which the good was offered, and every lost sale represents a commensurate economic loss.”

Strip away words like normative that make the above sound smart and thoughtful, and it’s really just proposing a thesis — that infringement might be a form of theft that doesn’t cause macroeconomic harm — for which Schruers can offer no support.  In fact, were he to refer to the same GAO report, he would find quite a few assumptions of macroeconomic harm from piracy and counterfeiting.  Instead, Schruers segues to the repetitious, obvious, and irrelevant observation that not every individual infringement represents a lost sale.  One doesn’t need a study to draw this narrowly-focused conclusion, and the lost sale analysis is not an indicator of macroeconomic loss. Also, if we’re just going to repeat the words the average 14-year-old will use to justify torrenting music and movies, it’s a safe bet we’re not riding the wave of avant-garde economic theory.

One of my colleagues in the artists’ rights community asked if I were going to sail my new, ill-gotten yacht to Neverland, and the joke resonated more than I think he intended.    Each time I encounter some new attempt to construct a logical or economic argument for the supposed benefits of mass theft of intellectual property, it feels very much like a visit to Mr. Barrie’s  imaginary island — a place where boys refuse to grow up, where they feast on food that isn’t there, and all they really long for is someone who can tell a good story.

See Chris Castle’s “Stealing is Good for You…”