FBI says it's now seized "multiple" ROM piracy sites, claims downloads resulted in $170m losses in just three months
Following the Federal Bureau of Investigation's widely reported seizure of pirate ROM site Nsw2u.com last week, the US …
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It also claimed these websites had seen cumulative downloads of 3.2m in just three months this year - from 28th February and 28th May - resulting "in an estimated loss of $170m".
In other words:
Given that both these blatant falsehoods match the propaganda that big media parasite corporations started pushing a few decades ago, it seems pretty clear who the taxpayer-funded FBI is working for.
They assumed that every download was by someone who would otherwise have paid over 53 USD for it, which by itself is an absurd delusion.
You're wrong, your presumption assume one single person to download a single file he/she never ear about.
What's most likely, people download ROMs for nostalgia, ie: something they, or their parents, bought them when they were children. So, if we assume someone download their "childhood library" which was already paid, of about ~30 cartridge (admitted the download is the right one, and didn't required multiple download attempt); in the view of the FBI, that single person "stole" 3180 USD he/she paid ~20 years ago.
You're not just supposed to lose the things you bought, you're supposed to be fined (for attempt to play the product you already paid) with price updated to current industry standard.
RIAA math
If that's the way it works I'm going to set up bots to pirate every Mario game over and over till Nintendo goes bankrupt and I can buy it for pennies on the dollar.
One of the pirate party guys made a Raspberry pi doohickey that did exactly that to show how stupid these calculations are. It constantly downloaded to a null device, or moved it to a null device once compete so the file never existed except incredibly briefly. I think it also tracked how many times it was downloaded so the "cost" could be calculated.
That's brilliant. It's a shame it will have no impact and the copyright mafia will continue their relentless assault until we are all microchipped at birth with neural inhibitors that physically prevents us from consuming digital material we haven't purchased. Brain-implant DRM is the end goal.
Reminds me of the math used by cops when they seize drugs to come up with an absurd amount of money to make it look like they're having an impact on the never-ending war on drugs.
So we've got a kilo of cocaine, but thats gonna be cut to 4 or 5 times its weight probably, so let's call that 5kg. Then lets assume each of those 1000 grams is gonna be broken down into 50 20mg single doses, and lets say those addicts are gonna pay 20 bucks for a single dose. Thats $1000 per gram, time 5kg, we've got ourselves a nice 5million dollar bust here. Call the papers and print it.
Don’t forget the include the weight of the equipment and other supplies. In reality it was 500g of cocaine and the weight of the suitcase and shoes that were adjacent.
"Then they're gonna grind up the suitcase, which the action alone is worth at least 13¢ per turn of the grinder. That's approximately draws numbers with finger on the table $62Bajillion, and then they're gonna sell the suitcase powder to children, which children are worth $10,000, so each life destroyed by "carry-on crack," that’s the street name... Factor in life insurance, media advertising, and college tuition, that's EASILY $14Bajillion! Finally, those shoes are gonna be sold on eBay, which Air Jordans are probably worth $5000, so that's $10000 for the single pair of shoes. And, if you'll look in the room, everyone is wearing shoes! Which is worth another $1600Bajillion!!! We just took $5761Kajillion of drugs off the streets and saved our taxpayers $54Billion! And all at the mere cost of our $400Million annual budget!"
How data driven are cartels, anyway? Seems like they should be getting stats on loss rate to busts and calculating that in. They run as a business and want real numbers.
They're a group that builds their own autonomous submarines. They gotta be calculating this.
Don't know how accurate it is, but I've heard of even CSAM being inflated this way in police busts, where if there's a video that's X seconds long and has a framerate of Y frames per second, it will be described as X * Y "images" (so a 10-second 60 fps video is treated like it's the same thing as 600 photos) instead of plainly describing a video as being a video.
Exactly. When I "used to" pirate games (dear me! I would never dare break those little laws now) it was originally because I was way too broke to pay for them. When I had more pay I later bought nearly everything I had pirated and actually played on gog or steam. Since then it's just easier to use steam or GOG than to pirate and scan and install and mess with my firewall and install the crack and diagnose wtf I messed up. Since then I only ever pirated games I'd never ever buy. If you count every game I pirated (sometimes up to three times based on if there were issues, virus scanner pings, lost the file and reinstalled on another drive, etc...) as a lost sale I've potentially caused up to 10k or more in losses over the hundreds of games I've illicitly downloaded. Most of which, again, I downloaded with a bank balance that hovered near 0$.
I mean, it's a Trump appointee. Was there ever any doubt?
there is a reason humble bundle's pay what you want model worked, lol. I bet if humble bundle allows company to get data back for pricing analysis, it would greatly help the indies.