And so yet again we hit another season of hell and troubles when it comes to the nut cases from the various RIAA/MPAA associated organisations.

Here we have general counsel for an MPAA member organisation boldly claiming that piracy (that is, the digital kind) is worse than Burglary, Fraud and even Bank Robbery… All combined.

You see, the total cost of those 3 classes of crime comes to only about 16 billion US dollars a year. But internet based piracy of intellectual property accounts for “hundreds of billions” of dollars in lost income and so on… Yadda, yadda, yadda.

Me thinks he should have asked the MPAA for their figures first. Even they’re not so crazy enough as to make that kind of claim. As bullshit as all the figures they use often are, they’re at least smart enough to stop at the point where people don’t disbelieve them.

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.” Cotton’s comments come in Paul Stweeting’s report on Hollywood’s latest shenanigans on Capitol Hill.

Copyright coalition: piracy more serious than burglary, fraud, bank robbery – Ars Technica

I’m sorry, but personally I’d much rather a cope showed up at my place when I report a burglary than have to sit and wait while they’re down the corner checking all the kids iPods for pirated music or movies.

I’d much prefer a cop to be at the bank stopping people getting shot up than walking the malls making sure no kids are passing discs with the latest copy of Spiderman 3 around.

Still, this complete disassociation with reality seems to be the normal aspect for the media companies.

I think they still believe that the value of intellectual property is substantially more than that of items that have a real and tangible value based on the rules of scarcity. For example, I can sell you a hammer, but unless you’re a smith, you can’t forge a copy of that hammer and then sell as many copies as you like while still retaining the original. Its far harder to do that than it is to pass a copy of a digital item. There is no rule of scarcity for any digital item.

This is also something that the SecondLife community never seemed to come to grips with either. Just look at the whole CopyBot affair.