“Content-providers”: mainly losing money in their own minds.

Content-providers (and other pro-SOPA agents) frequently claim they lose X, Y amount of money to piracy.  This assumes that if people weren’t stealing the content, they’d be willing (and furthermore, would) purchase the content at current market prices.

It’s highly questionable that people would purchase the same amount of a good that they would access freely, especially when it comes to something such as information (something increasingly easy and economical to store about; something which there’s not a lot of cost to dumping and retrieving another copy of later, assuming free and easy access of information).

The amounts these companies “expect” to lose (as if these “expectations” aren’t biased by extraneous concerns) due to piracy is not the issue.  The issue is what we consider property, and the rights of certain market players over fundamental social privileges and rights.  What’s more important: freedom of information and the benefits it could (and does) bring to our species, or the potential (and imagined) profits of businessmen who wish to treat that information as a physical (non-electronically-represented) good?

Should we be concerned that PetCo is losing an estimated* 35 billion dollars a year due to stiff government regulations on infant sales?  Whenever somebody is magically free (despite the harsh rules and realities for the rest of us) to post their own appraisal of value as fact, you should always ask why.

* We could calculate an estimate, according to pro-SOPA logic, by multiplying whatever price seems favorable by the number of adoptions per year.

Military buffoonery

The US and Iran have been squaring off over the Straight of Hormuz.  US military officials have admitted that Iran has the capability of closing the Straight, responsible for moving ~1/5 of the world’s oil supply (according to the NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/13/world/middleeast/us-warns-top-iran-leader-not-to-shut-strait-of-hormuz.html).  Given the wave of analysis on what can, will, and ought to happen if this came to pass, the US news media is succeeding in establishing economically damaging Iranian moves as plausible: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-12/an-oil-strategy-in-case-iran-s-navy-shuts-down-the-strait-of-hormuz-view.html.  When arms and wallets dance in US public policy it’s hard to tell who’s following and who’s leading other than “us” and “them”.

It’s hard to ignore the hypocrisy in play here. Iran is being “aggressive” by reaching for waters ~30-40km of their borders.  The US is halfway across the world (yet again) projecting its military strength, yet this is not similarly “aggression”.

In a move repeated often over the past 70 years, the US is appealing to the needs of international economy (read: its own industry) to trump a nation’s sovereignty when that sovereignty becomes inconvenient.  Iran simply doesn’t line up with US goals for domination of the region.

An excerpt from the NYT article above:

“You get cowboys who do their own thing,” Mr. Connell said. One officer with experience at the Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain said the Revolutionary Guards navy shows “a high probability for buffoonery.”

I wonder if they accept that US military detachments carry with them a similarly high probability, or if their estimates are biased?  (Link to the latest video of US military atrocity, the desecration of corpses.)  When one or two Iranian captains go rogue and posture before US ships, that’s apparently ground to conclude a high probability for buffoonery.  But catch some US soldiers acting like animals on tape, and all we have here are a few bad apples I’m sure.