Showing posts with label rick cotton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rick cotton. Show all posts

20 June 2007

As I Was Saying...

...the New Great Lie is the beginning of a larger attempt by traditional content owners to put the genie back in the bottle. Here's some more of the same:

Wright praised Cotton's work with the Coalition Against Counterfeiting and Piracy, work that drew criticism after Cotton suggested that US law enforcement resources were "misaligned" and that too much energy and money was spent stopping burglaries and bank robberies and not enough spent on piracy prevention. Cotton's plan is a "groundbreaking and far-reaching set of proposals," according to Wright, who made clear that the full power of GE was behind the plan.

15 June 2007

The New Great Lie

Here's a dangerous development:

“Our law enforcement resources are seriously misaligned,” NBC/Universal general counsel Rick 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 is spearheading the new effort, christened the “Campaign to Protect America,” as chairman of the newly formed Coalition Against Counterfeiting and Piracy.

This is clearly total poppycock: the figures for the supposed losses due to "piracy" are hugely exaggerated and the result of wishful thinking - as if every copy represents a lost sale, which is patently false, even for analogue goods, never mind digital ones. Moreover, comparing the theoretical loss of revenue because of copying with the very real loss and pain that a burglary causes is a total insult to the victims of the latter.

It's also worth noting that in the "Campaign to Protect America" we have an apotheosis of weasel words: protect it from *what*? I think we need a campaign to protect everyone from the Coalition Against Counterfeiting and Piracy, who are clearly a bunch of sad and selfish people if they can come out with statements like the one above.