The MPAA Funding Public Surveillance As Well
from the why-stop-with-stalking? dept
The entertainment industry really is trying to watch everything you do. On the same day the news comes out that the entertainment industry spent months trailing the CEO of Kazaa's Sharman Networks, another story says that the MPAA will be funding surveillance cameras in downtown LA. The entertainment industry's own enforcement arm won't be watching the videos -- instead, they're being piped straight to the police, which is probably cheaper for the industry anyway. So, does this mean I can set up surveillance cameras in any public spot and tell the police to watch the resulting feeds? Of course, the MPAA's own definition of piracy: "If you haven't paid for it, you've stolen it," certainly suggests that they're offering "stolen" videos to the police. The police didn't pay for it, after all... Perhaps that definition isn't quite that accurate.
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A Perp is but a Perp
The kinds of people who share files, or sell CD's from under their trench coats on the street, are at elevated risks for other crimes.
Over in Japan, 8 teenage girls were arrested for ganging up on another girl, forcing her to take off all her clothes, then taking pictures of her with their cell phone cameras and sharing the files.
As the semantics of word usage change over time, "file sharing" could come to refer to more serious crimes of involuntarily taking embarrassing pictures.
http://headlines.yahoo.co.jp/hl?a=20050531-00000111-kyodo-soci
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So how much is the MPAA paying?
How much are they going to be paying all the "actors" in these new reality videos? After all, "If you haven't paid for it, you've stolen it."
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kickback?
what's with the 'tag=techdirt' in the url? Does techdirt get something for sending traffic to news.com.com? Just curious.
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Re: kickback?
what's with the 'tag=techdirt' in the url? Does techdirt get something for sending traffic to news.com.com? Just curious.
Nope. Just an extra way of keeping news.com aware of any traffic we send them. Figure we might as well do that instead of all the various tag data they use as that wouldn't be accurate (i.e., if I use the URL with the tag data showing how *I* found the article, and then posted that here, it wouldn't actually be how you found the article... so we replace it with techdirt, so they know how you found the article).
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Re: kickback?
Makes sense. Thanks for the explanation.
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