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Send Them Your Money: A Campaign to Send The RIAA/MPAA Billions

sendthemyourmoney.com

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Re: Send Them Your Money: A Campaign to Send The RIAA/MPAA Billions

#31

Post by corin_ »

Seeing the title, here's what I was expecting to read:

"They think illegal downloads happen because people want to steal, we think they happen because people what better digital distribution. Send them money [real, actual payments] so they think 'holy shit, look how much money we just got sent, think how much more we could make by offering good digital distribution'."

Which would be a more interesting, more thought-provoking campaign, in my opinion - though one with obvious flaws, and I certainly wouldn't personally endorse it.

Re: Send Them Your Money: A Campaign to Send The RIAA/MPAA Billions

#32

Post by jstalin »

crymer11 wrote: post #29
belorn wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question on how much Joe would have paid is interesting in an academic setting, but quite impossible to answer. To make an example, tap water is worth exactly 0$, but had my only option been to purchase water from the store, then the price I would be willing to pay would be substantially large. The way west society solved the question on how we pay the utility guys who maintain the water supply is with taxes. Cop…

1. Where I'm from, I regularly pay a bill for my water/sewer usage, thus tap water is certainly worth more than $0.00. The funds collected are used to fund the operation of the water utility, not taxes. 2. I'm sorry, but I don't understand how copyright is an outgrowth of taxes. One is a mechanism to generate funds for the government, the other is a means to protect intellectual property. Could you clarify your point…

Copyright is a form of rent seeking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

It's not a tax per se, but a cost imposed by the state solely for the benefit of a private party. The original US copyright act allowed for 14 years of protection. Of course, a portion of the rent-seeking copyright cartel's revenue goes to lobby the congress for ever longer copyright terms, making the original intent of the constitution mangled beyond recognition.

Re: Send Them Your Money: A Campaign to Send The RIAA/MPAA Billions

#33

Post by ekianjo »

ck2 wrote: post #3

The irony here is it's a much worse federal crime to photocopy US currency. You can get around this by making sure it's (much) smaller than the original and only copied on one side. http://www.secretservice.gov/money_illustrations.shtml

He's talking about sending DIGITAL copies.

Re: Send Them Your Money: A Campaign to Send The RIAA/MPAA Billions

#34

Post by anthonyb »

> They've made it very clear that they consider digital copies of physical property to be just as valuable as the original.

Wow, talk about missing the point.

Digital copies of movies and music are just as valuable as the originals, particularly as CDs and DVDs become obsolete. Copies of dollar bills are somewhat less so - you can't buy stuff with them.

If you actually want to argue against the movie and music industries, you'll need to use real facts, not convenient, pretend ones.

Re: Send Them Your Money: A Campaign to Send The RIAA/MPAA Billions

#35

Post by anthonyb »

marshray wrote: post #15
maeon3 wrote: post #10

Very creative and thought provoking, but wrong. A DVD version of avatar sells for say $20 and Riaa gets some percentage of that. Joe blow downloads avatar for free from google or some other website, ptp or sneakernet. Joe blow sends the riaa some percentage of $20 in photocopied money. That does not provide the same utility for riaa as the avatar.mp4 did for Joe blow. Whether or not Joe blow's download of avatar for…

What if Joe Blow watches Avatar and then comes to the realization that he's wasted 2 hours of his life? How shall that be recovered?

By not wasting any more of his money on shitty movies? "Fool me once, shame on you" and all that?

Re: Send Them Your Money: A Campaign to Send The RIAA/MPAA Billions

#36

Post by bithive123 »

I am concerned that sites like this do more harm than good because they misrepresent the issue. Taking this joke to its logical conclusion, why not instead post a shell script that makes a trillion copies of dollar_bill.jpg and then offer to "license" it to the RIAA for a modest fee?

Re: Send Them Your Money: A Campaign to Send The RIAA/MPAA Billions

#39

Post by tikhonj »

anthonyb wrote: post #34

> They've made it very clear that they consider digital copies of physical property to be just as valuable as the original. Wow, talk about missing the point. Digital copies of movies and music are just as valuable as the originals, particularly as CDs and DVDs become obsolete. Copies of dollar bills are somewhat less so - you can't buy stuff with them. If you actually want to argue against the movie and music indust…

First of all, I'm sure the actual original copy actually has more value for collectors and the like.

The real argument is that they are just copies and literally cost the studios nothing--that is, the studios do not have to spend any money on your downloading the film from a third party. So, by extension, you pay them in a way that does not cost you anything, by using a copy of money.

The only value a copy--distinct from the media its on and the bandwidth it takes--is through copyright. If you do not believe in copyright, or at least not in the system as is, (and I imagine the person who set this up does not) then these copies do not really have value. The analogy is to the smell from a restaurant--it costs the restaurant nothing, so if somebody outside enjoys it, they do not have to pay the restaurant anything.

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