“Our law enforcement resources are seriously misaligned,” NBC/Universal general counsel Rick 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.”

NBC makes the case for stricter intellectual laws. And who doesn’t think that society would run smoother if most of the law enforcement people were taken off homicide and armed robbery details, and instead assigned to keep a 12-year-old boy in the midwest from uploading music videos to YouTube? Hands?

“The motion picture industry employs over a million people in this country, and most of them are not high-priced stars,” Glickman said. “Most of them are blue-collar workers, or craft workers, who are just trying to make a decent living.”

Many of them, in fact, are too poor to afford to pay for entertainment.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 15th, 2007 at 2:45 pm and is filed under Copyright, DRM, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.