Piracy Much More A Crime Than Property Theft

[Dubh Aingeal]

Ars Technica for a dissertation on how detached and manipulative the discussion about copyright is becoming.

NBC/Universal general counsel Rick Cotton suggests that society wastes entirely too much money policing crimes like burglary, fraud, and bank-robbing, when it should be doing something about piracy instead. 'Our law enforcement resources are seriously misaligned,' Cotton said. 'If you add up all the various kinds of property crimes in this country, everything from theft, to fraud, to burglary, bank-robbing, all of it, it costs the country $16 billion a year. But intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions [of dollars] a year.

Ars points out how completely specious that "hundreds of billions" is.

Of course we all know that a botched heist that results in injury/death is much less important than some movie/song being copied.