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As much as I love shouting "ARRRRRRRR!" at my friends, dressing up in full regalia and talking about the FSM, waving a cutlass around, and boarding treasure-laden ships in order to relieve them of their doubloons and swooning womenfolk before scuttling them, when the discussion turns serious it just pisses me off to be called a 'pirate' for the sharing I do using BitTorrent.

The site where I do 95% of my uploading and downloading is dedicated to movies that are old, out-of-print, independent, or rare; movies that have cult appeal; arthouse movies that the average American has never seen or even heard of; subtitled Asian cinema that is only marginally popular with English speakers, and films that are so ridiculously bad they circle around the back of awfulness and become good by virtue of their entertaining badness. My favorite torrent site doesn't even allow big Hollywood blockbusters unless they are old enough to be classics.

The site has to support itself with donations and advertising. Google Adsense and many other ad brokers won't allow their ads to be shown there, because they consider it a 'pirate' site... even though what we do there actually stimulates the sales of DVDs for films that are either too obscure to sell well, or too old to be effectively milked by giant corporations who don't actually give a skinny rat's ass about art.

Secret Cinema has private forums, where a core group discusses films and does most of the uploading for the site. These are people who are much net-savvier than your average p2p user, people who are thoroughly familiar with the torrenting scene in general, and who know where and how to download for free virtually anything they want to watch or listen to... yet a recent poll of this very group revealed that approximately 82% of them still buy authorized versions of DVDs and CDs. Why? Various reasons... some are simply collectors, and like to have the tangibles, with official cover art and DVD extras and so on. Some like to support the studios and directors who in their estimation make good cinema. Virtually ALL of them end up giving money to MPAA/RIAA for movies and music that they would never have bought (and would possibly never have even heard of) if not for online filesharing.

Why does MPAA/RIAA call these people 'pirates'? Why do they make it so difficult for sites like Secret Cinema to make enough money to survive? It's clear that p2p filesharing stimulates legitimate purchases of box office tickets, DVDs, and CDs... yet they want to sue us all, lock us up, shut down our sites, put rootkits on our computers and DRM on the legitimate media we buy.

Compounding this utter stupidity on the part of MPAA/RIAA is the fact that they expect the public to buy goods from them sight unseen. I wouldn't buy a car without taking a look at it (and taking a test drive) first, would you? Why should I buy a DVD or a CD without knowing if I like the movie or music on it? Why should I pony up at the box office or the concert hall without having some kind of familiarity with the product I'm paying for? If it's GOOD and not utter SHITE, I won't mind paying for it even if I've already seen it on my computer monitor... but MPAA/RIAA wants to keep their products under wraps until we pay up, so that they can continue cranking out GARBAGE and selling it to an unsuspecting public! This is probably why Hollywood has degenerated into the massive crapfest that it is today; they know that they can make money from inferior product, as long as the trailer looks good. Screw that, I want to see what I'm buying before I pay for it, and that doesn't make me a criminal.

http://www.secret-cinema.com/

The torrent is now up again, and being seeded... COME AND GET IT! http://www.secret-cinema.com/

There is a documentary film about Toshitsugu Takamatsu, with Masaaki Hatsumi in it as well. It's a Japanese film, the title in English is "Takamatsu Toshitsugu, the Last Real Ninja". It's based upon a black-and-white movie filmed in the '60s that shows Takamatsu Sensei teaching Hatsumi Sensei in a park. Takamatsu Sensei demonstrates unarmed techniques and weapon techniques from the nine schools, with comments in Japanese (subtitled in English) by Hatsumi Sensei. A torrent for this film was uploaded to Secret Cinema http://www.secret-cinema.com/ a while back. It's dead now, but I am busily working on getting it back up again, so if you're interested check Secret Cinema for it in the next few days.

This, of course, has led to hordes of scientists meticulously documenting the wanton torture of stem cells. If it goes on, we'll soon be seeing the entire population of Earth making holograms of themselves setting fire to the concept of a zygote.

http://www.secret-cinema.com/ Cult, Arthouse, Badfilm, and more!

Secret Cinema, the Cult/Arthouse torrent site -- http://www.secret-cinema.com/ [secret-cinema.com] -- has been doing the same thing for almost a year now, but instead of inserting a clause into their ToS and threatening to ban people, they simply ask nicely that users don't block their ads.

Well that's mighty considerate of them... Asking politely to not block their ads so they can cover their expenses hosting torrents of pirated content...

LiveJournal might be a little over-the-top in actually introducing this as a deal-killer in their ToS, but I can see their point... hosting and other expenses have to be paid for by someone, after all, and it's far better from a user's perspective to pay for the tools and content you access by allowing a few ads to show on your screen than it is to have to whip out a credit card and give money to every site that you find useful. Secret Cinema, the Cult/Arthouse torrent site -- http://www.secret-cinema.com/ -- has been doing the same thing for almost a year now, but instead of inserting a clause into their ToS and threatening to ban people, they simply ask nicely that users don't block their ads. LiveJournal might find that they make slightly less money, but generate more goodwill, by taking a similar approach.

Any actions that China takes like this are just a matter of saving face. BT sites are allowed to operate in China and are even registered with the government. Check out Secret Cinema sometime, they're based in China: http://www.secret-cinema.com/

I'm sure the Baidu decision is just a way of saving face and shutting up elements in the US that protest China's IP enforcement. China still allows lots of sites to operate that facilitate p2p... Secret Cinema (http://www.secret-cinema.com/ is located in China, and is even registered as a BT site with the government there.