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(Almost) Free Movies On-Line... Sorta
Snaller writes "See the latest movies on the net? Its possible - apparently the law in Taiwan says that for a movie to be protected by copyright law one has to apply for such protection within a month after the opening in the theaters. This rarely happens and as a consequence movie88 has opened a virtual movieplex: See any of their films for 1 dollar. The movie is streamed in a format that doesn't allow you to save it on the harddrive, but for that 1 dollar you can view it anytime and as much as you like for 3 days. The selection includes movies like "Shrek", "Legally Blonde","American Pie 2","Gone with the wind", James Bond and Batman." Yeah this'll last.
Right. But it really demonstrates what TV will be like in the future
when you have access to thousands of movies. And the buck a film
rate strikes me as awesome. I'd watch a lot more movies if they were
only a buck.
With such a large amount of movies available for streaming, the amount of people involved in transferring and encoding must be staggering. I'd like to know what sort of source they used to get all of these movies on disk.
I can't imagine that this will stay around for long, as the content producers will go nuts when they hear about it. It would seem that they took all this time to do this in futility.
with such a large library of movies and if this ever really gets off the ground will there ever be a future problem of full faith and credit and copyright laws between nations...such as say it is legal in tawian and aloud to be on their server but the process of me d/ling it to ohio where say perhaps it would be illegal to posses how would it all be werked out...virtual tribunal?
Somethings that are free are not worth the price.
On the other hand, a dollar, euro, etc, is probably the minimum that most people would pay, since much less is possible too much of a hassle. dollar stores, dollar menus are popular because people think these provide good value, even if it is not true.
and think: when was the last time you changed a candy bar to a credit card? by itself? there is a point when paying by electronic means is perceived to be too much of a hassle.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Seeing the MPAA react to their "business". It will yield 2 results. Improve the MPAA's copyright restrictions WorldWide, allowing the recording industry to follow suite, or create very bad blood between tiwan and the US, resulting in less exporting of movies, which affect DVD sales internationally, and things like movie paraphanalia. Betcha the Tiwan government will close them down before the US does.
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
You get a movie for free and a five dollar (5 movie credit) just for signing up. You can watch - dont pontification and see it go down or get slashdotted -- regardless of whether you feel it should stay up.
Even thought it is real streamed at 300k bps, you'll get an idea of what the future could look like if we really could get our film libraries live.
Remember that many US concepts of copyright, fair use, etc don't translate into equivalent laws in other countries. This may be legal now and forever for agreements executed under the laws of Taiwan (this site). Note that some countries consider region coding to be unlawful (NZ?.
Note that the fair use concept in the US is stronger than in many others.
US owned a lot of IP and is considered to be unfair in its licensing practices in other countries -- they don't like embargoes on content, restrictive format licensing on contects, copy protection, delayed release dates in other countries and other US centric concepts.
(That was of course a rhetorical question). Just a few hours ago, there was a /. article on Square Pictures closing its studios in Hawaii. The film revenue did not cover its production costs. Maybe, just maybe, if all the people that used services like this one had gone out and paid to see the movie like they should have, Square could be lining up another great movie.
And $1 for a streaming film is theft. No argument can be made to the contrary. This website is using Taiwanese legal loopholes to make foreign produced movies available. You can be damn sure the film studios are seeing none of that $1 fee.
You could argue the movie companies have enough money already. ooooh, bad film executives. Evil MPAA. But, at the end of the day, when cuts need to be made, it's never the senior management that go. It's the little guy cleaning the hallway or the young girl desperately making tea for everybody in a bid to break into the industry.
MP3 trading is theft. DivX movie swapping is theft. Streaming movies against the license holders wishes is theft. Do not try and hide it under the "information wants to be free" flag - It is stealing, plain and simple. And even though you are still paying to see the film, it is no more legal than knowlingly purchasing a stolen car or computer from some dodgy looking chap in the back of a lorry.
Somethings that are free are not worth the price.
Amen to that. I've downloaded several divx movies and after the nuisance of finding it in the first place, followed by a couple of weeks of broken and resumed downloads (and thats with a reasonably friendly file-sharing utility), using the better part of a Gig of bandwidth, and having other miscreants weezing stuff off my hard-drive, I'd rather go out and spend 20 bucks on a DVD. It's a better picture and sometimes they even throw in some other goodies (though I thought the tone poems on the Episode 1 DVD kinda sucked). I really wish someone would clue in the MPAA to this: That downloading movies is a pain in the ass and though I can't speak for everyone else's preferences, I really don't think that movie attendance or DVD sales is going to be threatened by it in any perceivable way. Please leave off the copy-protection shit and the regional encoding...you don't really need it.
You're using her as bait, Master!
One dollar is a lot for 80% of the world, about right for a lot of the far east, and "too cheap" in the US. This would be the same even if it is DVD quality.
The nice thing about buying items from the rest of the world is that it is often at a much lower price point overseas. Importing IP into the US is far easier than buying other IP such as drugs in Mexico.
I wonder if the US government is going to threaten a trade embargo with Taiwan until its government passes a DMCA-like law. But then again, could the US really afford such a trade ban with Taiwan? Almost everything is made there!
Open or not, proprietary or not, unless the quality is as good as *at least* television, I don't want to waste my time.
If I'm paying for it, I want to enjoy it; nothing political about it; Real SUCKS.
:)
This is just as legal as the copy of Visual Studio Enterprise I bought in Taipei for $1
It can't even keep track of my username. "Welcome VISITOR" after it tells me 'signin successful'.
It's a big endless loop of 'sign in', choose a movie, 'sign in', etc.
Already slowed to the point that it's worthless...
Also, no 'Clerks' or 'Chasing Amy'. Or the search function just doesn't work...
sigh.
I'm not convinced that you're right about the impact of cheap online movies on ticket sales. For the forseeable future, the best quality movie that can be reasonably distributed electronically is going to be highly compressed, e.g. MPEG-4 or similar, video streams. While this format looks okay on a computer monitor, slap it up on your home entertainment system with 60-inch TV and 18 speakers, and the result will look and sound like absolute crap. That is why people are going to keep going to movie theaters -- to see a movie with very high fidelity on audiovisual equipment that they could never afford. If anything, look for ticket prices to keep going up as this will become the major draw of movie theaters.
Where this sort of streaming will have a big impact is in the video sale/rental market, which depending on the movie accounts for anywhere from 20-80% of total revenue. After all, an online stream or download is likely available before the video is released, is cheaper by far than buying the DVD, and likely looks better than the thouroughly beaten up VHS tapes at your local rental store. If anything, look for audiovisual effects to be regarded as a defense against online availability of movies in the future. Then people might actually go out and see the movie in a theater after downloading it, just to see/hear what they were missing.
On the other hand, $100M is an awful lot of money to spend making *anything*, and is certainly out of line with what is spent on most works of art. The protesters dancing outside the WEF in New York right now might have some ideas about how that money could have been more productively used. If summer action blockbusters go the way of pyrimid building as an art form, many would argue that cinematic art would be better off.
Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
And don't scream about not being able to save it locally. Why would you want to?
Some of us don't have super-fast internet connections like you seem to have. I've got 512Kbps cable and streaming video is pretty poor on it, however, downloading the stream while I'm at work to watch it in the evening is a viable option.
Virtually all of the cost of new drugs is in finding or creating the one out of 1000s that has significant beneficial effects vs damage and then going through exhaustive trials to make sure you didn't miss something.
... The IP of knowing how to make it is only value due to IP protection.
Actually manufacturing the resulting drugs is sometimes expensive depending on the process, but it usually nearly free. In third world countries there are often identical drugs that are 1/10 or 1/100 the blockbuster price in the US. And generics are often drastically cheaper even in the US.
The raw materials are often virtually free, aspirin, codeine etc in bulk powder form went for at most a dollar or two per KG, when I last checked about ten years ago.
Not unlike the cost of your homemade copy of windows on a CD vs from the manufacturer or the cost of the truly high quality plug and play fully functional "Rolex" knockoff vs the one that the Rolex company makes, or YSL dress or Gucci bag