This poor guy got hit with a $180,000,000.00 fine for trying to build a device that would intercept and decrypt digital satellite television broadcasts. He didn't succeed, but the industry predicted they would have lost loads of money had he done so, and the courts then punished him according to that formula. I'll repeat that: no theft occured, a working device was never built, yet this guy has to pay for the potential losses according to a formula set by industry itself.
The whole idea of losses to electronic theft is questionable. If someone steals a book or a car from a dealer, that is an unquestionable loss. But theft of electronic media isn't lossy theft, its just unauthorized duplication or access. So now losses are defined as income they didn't receieve for the disbursement of their product. In the case of the car or book theft, the product is now missing and thus the seller loses the chance to sell it. But with eletronic theft, the original is still there. If someone pirates a satellite feed, it doesn't impinge on the service to everyone else. It costs the company the same amount of money to broadcast the signal regardless of how many subscribers or pirates are tuning in.
The article linked above mentions that the industry currently loses $4,000,000,000 a year to the 3,000,000 or so people who use illegal devices to unscramble subscription satellite signals. This calculation is questionable from the start if you try to break it down: for 3 million people to provide 4 billlion in income, each person would have to subscribe to $1000 in services a year. I don't know anyone who pays that much. Even if I were to get the complete satellite package offered by SkyPerfect! here in Japan, its only about $65/ month, or just under $800/ year.
The broadcasters must be calculating these "losses" by summing up the subscription cost of each channel independently instead of calculating prices as if sold in a discounted package set. That's just weak.
But even before we get to this point, we need to consider if these are actually losses. It's only a loss if the people stealing the broadcast would pay for it under normal circumstances but are stealing it. If the people stealing the feed wouldn't subscribe to the service if there was no theft-enabling devices available, the streams they steal shouldn't be considered losses. I'm not suggesting that the industry just accept this or that people who can't afford satellite should be condoned for stealing it, but at the same time, you can't honestly say that the industry would be $4,000,000,000 richer if the hotboxes hadn't been built.
This is kind of what is so stupid about the RIAA's current MO of charging downloaders $350,000 per downloaded song, seeking to punish thieves and copyright violations. Only thing is that most of the stuff downloaded by people wouldn't have been bought anyway, so how can it be losses?
Posted by Nutrimentia at June 30, 2003 02:07 PM | TrackBack