ESA Sent Takedown Notices For 45 Million Infringements In Fiscal 2009 81
eldavojohn writes "The Entertainment Software Association has released this year's fiscal report (PDF), putting out their numbers to level the finger at new targets. Following up on last year's published report, this one has a whole bunch of new numbers to ponder. The top five P2P game piracy countries this year are: Italy, Spain, France, Germany, and Poland. The ESA's anti-piracy program notes, 'Chief among this year's actions were five separate law enforcement raids against game pirates in California, resulting in the seizure of several thousand games and dozens of modded consoles, and the arrests of five individuals.' But don't worry, they've expanded to other countries. 'The ESA sent takedown notices to ISPs covering more than 45 million instances of infringement of member company games in more than 100 countries worldwide.' They also strive to show they are actually doing things, like endorsing 43 bills aimed at regulating content or controlling access to video games — with not a single one of them making it into law. They did put some into effect at the state level; mostly making it a crime to sell mature games to minors. You can also find their activities localized to you, as this report has sections arranged by state and country. Conspicuously absent this year are any global numbers of what piracy cost the entertainment industry, so unfortunately Ars Technica will have to find someone else to audit, although Venture Beat has a good breakdown."
So this works out to what... (Score:5, Interesting)
Course they probably don't work weekends or holidays: more like 2.075 notices per second with taking time off. Oh... wait! They only work 9 to 5, right? Assume an hour for lunch... that takes it to 7.143 notices per second!
I don't really know how long an individual notice is in words, or how many are sent through email. We can probably assume that for any given delivery it gets printed out at least once... so that makes about 5400 trees worth of copy paper.
Once again, assuming it only takes one page, and assuming they are using a relatively efficient printer... this works out to what? $1,800,000 worth of ink just to print all this out once?
I guess it really didn't say 45 million notices, just infringements. So I guess I'm also assuming from all this that one infringement = one notice. I'm sure that I'm also being conservative that one notice also only takes one page.
Re:Oh come on! (Score:1, Interesting)
I wouldn't be so sure about that.
I got a copyright infringement notice for downloading a no-cd patch.
How many of them are for actual infringers? (Score:5, Interesting)
We got one of those once. We host a mirror of the IF Archive (text adventures), including three games named Days of Doom 1, Days of Doom 2, and Days of Doom 3.
Here's the local copy:
-rw-rw-r-- 1 seebs users 116471 Oct 17 1999 Doom3.zip
They sent us a threatening letter because they believed this was the retail version of Doom 3.
I assume the rest are comparable.
What's wrong with modding hardware? (Score:2, Interesting)
They bought it, it's theirs. Sure they were pirating games and that's illegal, but there is nothing wrong with modding the hardware. I'll bet they learned a bit about electronics in the process. I'm sure they were aware that they voided their warranty.
There is nothing wrong with modifying hardware you own!