[LINK] $60 million music piracy operation

[Chirgwin, Richard]

Robin - it still makes the "$60 million" hard to swallow. A coupla kids
processed 12 million CDs? When, exactly? Number plucked out of the air:
three minutes handling per CD (write it, pack it, post it). That's 68
person-years of work.

RC

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Robin Whittle [mailto:rw at firstpr.com.au]
> Sent: Monday, 28 April 2003 12:11
> To: Link mailing list
> Cc: Chirgwin, Richard
> Subject: Re: [LINK] $60 million music piracy operation
> 
> 
> Last night I received a briefing from one of my network of
> secondary-school-based intelligence operatives.  He/she reported on a
> lucrative sounding piracy operation involving a $5 payment 
> for an audio
> CD, burnt onto a CD-R.  For an extra payment the pirates would print a
> CD cover for you as well.
> 
> But the clanger was that these were not direct copies of CDs.  The
> enterprising little future Captains of Industry (actually, "little"
> doesn't apply since this generation grows like beanstalks . . .
> something to do with the growth hormones in chickens I guess . . . )
> generally never even possessed the the copied CD.  My 
> informant tells me
> that the tracks are reconstituted from miserable MP3 files downloaded
> from the Net - I guess via some peer-to-peer file sharing network.
> 
> 
> My original theory was that MP3s via the Net were a minimal cause of
> lost CD sales compared to straight-out copying via a CD-R burner.  But
> the new intelligence shows the the situation is more complex 
> than that.
> 
> 
>    - Robin
>