Slashdot Mirror
(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.
I guess this is fine - yes - but what about the quality? I work in a company doing video-on-demand (VoD), and VoD in less quality than 2Mbps MPEG-4 isn't a good thing.
... I'll love to see this 'hacker-proof' format of theirs. I bet a hundered dollars it's already creacked :-)
And
roy
Computers are like air conditioners.
- They stop working when you open Windows.
I wonder how much sway MPAA has in Taiwan. Certainly in the US this little "problem" would be fixed quickly...
Better mark Taiwan up on the Axis of Evil list too..
Nevermind. It's been done. (And turns out <weirdformat>==real audio. Yawn.)
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"
So now, for a dollar, I can not only make a 20 minute phone call with 10-10-220, but now I can watch Shrek on my 'puter.
Heh. Eat that, Terry Bradshaw.
So long, michael. Don't let the door hit you...
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
OK. If the data is sent to you and you can use that data to watch a movie how do you prevent that data from being stored somewhere?
It seems to me the content producers are trying to do the impossible. In this case and in other cases where they try to do copy protection.
Copy protection is the attempt to create something that will send a good signal to a display device but a bad signal to a recording device. Every implementation I have seen to date sends a less than perfect signal to the display device resulting in unwatchability at times.
When it comes right down to it, all you need to do to copy the signal is create a recording device that emulates a display device well enough.
I have 1 DVD that will not play with my current DVD player. My other DVD player had trouble with 2 different DVDs. Macrovision resulted in a distorted picture with the combination of hardware I was using to view VHS.
Is it too much to ask that I be able to view the content I've paid for?
Coding Blog
Can somebody point me to the governing body that issues the legal release date? Or better yet, where do I have to apply to have my home videos protected from the Tawainese laws?
/., but they need a way to make a return on their investments just like you and me.
Although it's nice that someone sticks it to the MPAA, how many channels would they need to go through to protect their wares. I don't like their bully tactics anymore than the rest of
I really hate Dan Patrick.
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.
They got plenty of movies, $1 is pretty cheap. I can use my Video/Audio Out from my computer to my VCR and record all those movies. So I couldn't care less about the 3 day rule.
When I first acquired broadband (a landmark event in my life). I figured it would be the nice thing to share out all the movies that I had downloaded for myself. All the movies I had downloaded were fresh releases, sometimes I had prerelease copies that weren't even in the theateres. I offered them in a format that could be saved to your hard disk... for free!
but the MPAA managed to hunt me down and send me and my ISP really naughty obscene letters. they quoted obscene literature such as "Copyright Act, Title 17 United States Code Section 106(3" and "we hereby state, pursuant to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Title 17 United States Code Section 512" Eventually the letters started to get to offensive so I decisted all activity. But man, if I only had a team of lawyers at the time....
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!
On an off-topic note, I have the plugin in both Netscape and Galeon and I still get the "not detected" problem. What are these sites doing to "detect" plugins, and why? Why don't they just send the damn stream and let the client worry about how to handle it.....
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!
Um whats the reason to be that much anti-realplayer? Don't tell you are following Steve Gibson's fantastic ideas that Wmedia is good, Real is evil...
As I am on Slashdot,its even more interesting. They may have AOL in the back but Real isn't the only propetioary firm/codec giving you Linux/BSD client?
oh, I worked on AV business, let me say... Of course, Quicktime is the best one (if they can code a client that can do true fullscreen, argh) and Real is the second. Its my personal view. For me windowsmedia is the least suscessful project of Microsoft, forever.
If you want an open format? No, it won't happen, than people with T1/T3 whatever corparate lines will "leech" all movies from them.
Maybe it's just my connection, but I can't seem to get to this site very well. If it can't suvive the /. effect, exactly how are they going to succesfully stream video ?
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
These guys definitely have gonads. Not only are they throwing a big "up yours" to the MPAA. but they are also charging for access to hit TV shows like "Friends."
Some of their pricing decisions seem a bit arbitrary, however. For example, you can view the 3h17m movie Magnolia for the price of a single download, but the similarly long Schindler's list is broken up into three streams that must be viewed separately.
I give them five days before the US government threatens to give China the green light to annex unless the Taiwanese government cracks down on this site.
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
Yup, is a disgusting tax that you have to pay regardless of wheter your watch BBC or not, and regardless of whether you earn £5000 a year or £500,000.
However life sucks. And BBC doesnt get adverts.
Has anyone been able to actually test this service?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Importing IP into the US is far easier than buying other IP such as drugs in Mexico.
Interesting that you consider drugs to be intellectual property. Care to expand?
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
one of the really cool features back in the day of the bbs was a program that would detect when you were downloading an image and display it as it came in. This worked totally seperate from the terminal program.
Wouldn't it be cool if you would put a machine on the network that watched every packet going by and detected when you were receiving a stream of data and would write that stream of data to the drive and then convert it to DivX? Then it could have streaming software and a web server to show you everything that is available and to present it to anyone in the house.
-- Never make a general statement.
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 in the movie business, specifically visual effects, and I strongly feel that we are on the precipice of a cliff in film budgets. CmdrTaco opines that he'd 'see a lot more movies if they were only a buck', and that would no doubt be true, but there is no way that anyone will ever be able to finance film extravaganzas like Pearl Harbor or, more to the point for this group, The Lord of The Rings for a dollar a ticket. Of course, in this Taiwanese case, the studios are probably getting $0.00 for each ticket, so it's even harder to break even.
The only way to finance a movie in this new world is to sell the eyeballs that are watching the movie for other purposes. Already theaters make about half of their money on concessions, for example. The two other obvious ways of making money on the film is ancillary merchandise (toys, etc.) and product placement (advertising) within the film.
Future films will have smaller budgets, as these ancillary sources of revenues probably cannot replace the big ticket prices being charged today. One can make exciting movies for less money, of course. We worked on The Fast and The Furious last year, which was a low-budget (by today's standards) movie that was designed to get the most bangs for the very limited visual effects bucks that were available. We've been fortunate enough to be named to the "Bake-Off" for visual effects this Wednesday night, where they will choose the Oscar nominees -- which demonstrates that you can do competitive visual effects-laden movies on very limited budgets.
This may not sit well with the ILM's of the world -- but it is also inevitable. While with music there were huge profit margins that gave the record companies some slack with the advent of song sharing over the 'net, the movie studios don't have that kind of margin anymore. Once movie sharing becomes ubiquitous, they just will not be able to make $100M blockbusters.
Enjoy them while you can.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
It's hardly theft. And it's not a loophole. The MPAA et al are not entitled to any amount of copyright protection whatsoever merely as a consequence of having created some work. Not even in the US.
There has to be a law affording them protection, in order for them to have any.
Firstly, even in the US, there doesn't _have_ to be a law doing so at all. Congress could give up the whole idea tomorrow, repeal copyright laws, and it'd be one big free for all... domestically. (foreign countries would still have their copyrights, presumably; copyrights are not international, though there are mutual recognition agreements in many instances)
It's much the same elsewhere -- England was the first country to have such laws, that was ~1700. Took until the 20th century for them to propagate in most countries. Why? Because no one cared about them, and if it isn't illegal, what's wrong with it?
Secondly, US copyright law has, IIRC, been limited to only books and maps (films would've been fair game, music was), only for American authors (foreigners would be screwed), and only for 14 years (a fraction of the modern span).
Isn't this just as arbitrary? Couldn't it be claimed that this is "stealing" by someone as unknowledgeable as yourself?
Taiwan should pass laws that the Taiwanese _want_. It is that simple. Don't like it; don't go to Taiwan.
(Besides which the word you're looking for is 'infringement,' not 'theft' or 'stealing.' There are specific meanings attached to each, and they're not interchangable. Go read some legal decisions on copyright some time and come back when you know enough to meaningfully participate in the discussion, kid.)
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
If there's one thing that can be certain, the island of Taiwan is the heart of true capitalism. Ever been to Hong Kong?
What are you really trying to say? Hongkong is not part of Taiwan. Or do you just mean the region? Hmm join the navy and not know the difference between Taiwan and Hongkong.
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
Ah, but why not vote with your vote, and pass a law mandating that the price be reduced?
That _is_ the sort of thing you'd expect in a democratic society, is it not? Major music publishers have been frequently accused of illegal price fixing -- but if we adopted your view, they could do as they please, and antitrust laws a thing of the past.
Glad I don't live in your fantasy world.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
The *buffering buffering buffering buffering 3%*
Da *buffering*
mn *buffer--*
movi *buffering*
e got sla *buffering buffering buffering buffering 3 hours remaining*
shdot *buffering*
ted! *buffering*
--joshua
A new development - the site was slashdotted - it's extremely slow and video downloads do not work!
I can almost hear the engineer in the background... " She canna take much moore of it, keptin! "...
I'd suspect that even if they have access to the fattest pipes in Taiwan, the international feed to Taiwan would be saturated with
Here's to their good luck!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
It's hardly theft. And it's not a loophole. The MPAA et al are not entitled to any amount of copyright protection whatsoever merely as a consequence of having created some work. Not even in the US.
How the hell did this get moderated up? Perhaps you need to read up on the Berne Convention to figure out what protection is afforded to parties for creation. Taiwan, it should be noted, is not a member. This little stunt, though, could easily turn them from a developing country into a country that gets hammered not just by the US and the MPAA, but by 95 other countries that actually value the efforts of individuals that create content.
Because it's too much of a pain to download movies. It's worth a buck to not have to try to find somebody with a copy of a movie I want to see, try to download it, get interrupted, dealing with different versions, downloading a Gig file and finding the quality sucks, ...
.
load "linux",8,1
Hah! They don't even control the client hardware.
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
They've got some pre-1923 movies, that are out of copyright now. Look in the classics section. Imagine a service like this, if copyright only lasted 20 years...
I can't get it to work with either Netscape or Galleon (using the Mozilla plugin). Haven't tried Moz itself yet. Any tips for getting it to work with Linux (or alternatively stealing the URL so that the video can be saved)?
HH
Uh huh. Perhaps you need to read the Constitution of the United States of America to see what protection is afforded to parties for creation. The answer: NONE.
UNLESS Congress chooses to utilize its power to so create such protection, and then only within certain limits set by the Constitution, as interpreted by the Judiciary. Congress merely can pass such laws -- it doesn't _have_ to. In the absence of such laws, where would you claim copyright protections to eminate from?
This is what I mean by artists not being entitled to copyright protection. Were they, it wouldn't take an enumerated power of Congress and actual passage of law by that body to do it. (and even then, the criteria used is based upon the progress of the arts -- not an automatic entitlement)
Similarly, the Berne Convention does not impose copyright law on any non-signatory; how could it? It's a treaty! Furthermore, it doesn't establish any international copyright law so much as it requires signatories to grant a copyright to works copyrighted elsewhere. Even then, within certain bounds.
And frankly, the US's lovely utilitarian copyright system could care less about the efforts of individuals that create content -- it cares about the social benefit of said content.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
And it's not TOO bad. It's worth a buck to see a movie that I wasn't sure I wanted to see, if they fix the damn bugs... it's not worth a buck if I really wanna see the movie.
I created an account and started watching "American Pie 2". The first three things I noticed out the gate... the sound SUCKS, the picture at 300K is very small, and the subtitles (which you can't turn off) are almost always completely wrong. On the up side, there was NO slowdown or stutter in the video or audio over the course of the entire hour I was able to watch the movie.
After about an hour, the stream suddenly stopped, giving, instead, an error message that someone had just logged in as my user name, so I was being logged out. The message further indicated that it was likely my fault for handing out my login information.
I then spent over a half hour trying to log back in to no avail. It is apparently impossible to log in... period. Ultimately, I created a new account again, ran the free movie (Frankenstein in College), and was confronted with the same problems again... to include my "stolen account". I find the odds of that happening, TWICE, staggering...
At any rate, it could be a decent service if they offer a larger screen version, fix their sound, fix/remove the captions, and repair their screwy login system.
Well, my $0.02, and that's probably overrated...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Well one, you're over a hundred years too late. Antitrust laws are on the books, and generally work pretty well.
Companies are indeed forced to lower prices, even on luxury goods. (among other regulations) This is particularly true when they have engaged in anticompetitive practices in order to control a market without concern for typical market forces.
If you don't like complying with the laws of a democratic society, you can of course attempt to change them (just like everyone else does), suck it up like a man, leave, or be an outlaw.
You appear to be opting to leave (the marketplace) at least. But do you really think _EVERYONE_ will do so? I'm not talking about regulating prices to the point where profit is impossible, only where it is acceptable to the public. A truly efficient capitalist will take any opportunity to profit he can get.
You just sound greedy.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Why do Chinese people have so much trouble making plurals?
Probably because marking number on nouns is optional in Chinese. Chinese has a noun for "one or more men" or "one or more" of anything else, and you can add adjectives that translate as "one" or "many" to make the noun specifically singular or plural.
Just add an 's' and be done with it!
That doesn't work on all nouns. Child does not become *childs, and sheep does not become *sheeps.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Heh.
As it happens, I'm an artist myself, and although at the moment I'm back at school, I've supported myself as an artist for years.
Please, point to the bit where I said that copyright was a bad idea. You won't find it.
I think it's a perfectly good idea -- when it's done right. Artists should be able to have the opportunity (there's no guarantee one's work won't flop) to support themselves.
BUT, carried to extremes, copyright monopolies harm society's interests in being able to freely access and use works. They harm other author's interests in being able to modify works. (e.g. Disney's movies based on other people's fairy tales) They harm the efforts of preservationists to keep pieces of our culture from being lost permanently.
These same ordinary people have an interest as well in seeing there be a broad diversity of works. It is in everyone's interest to afford _some_ protection to authors.
Some.
Where it makes sense for our society as a whole, not where it only stands to fatten the wallets of artists (or worse yet, cause harm w/o even any benefit to an artist b/c their work flopped).
It is up to the people and governments of EVERY country to determine for themselves where that balance lies. A nation with few artists stands to gain little by affording them great protections. The US used to be one of these countries. Do you dare claim that one country should be subjugated to the law of another country unless the first has shown a willingness to do so!
For such a triviality as copyright! That would be mad.
If Taiwan _WANTS_ to develop copyright law, that is its business. If it insists that authors seeking copyright protections comply with their laws or forgoe those protections, that is its business. As Taiwan is not a Berne Convention signatory AFAIK, is has placed upon itself NO obligation to respect foreign copyrights as though they were its own. This works both ways -- we need not respect theirs. Nothing compels us to do so.
I can't imagine how you think that attempting to circumvent the legitimate Taiwanese government in order to impose laws that the natives do not want is in any way just or fair. You advocate a violation of soverignty, because you don't like someone's internal practices.
This kind of thing led to centuries of war before, when attacks on soverignty were undertaken for religious reasons. Took the Treaty of Westphalia for people to recognize that countries can do within their own borders as they like. Don't throw this away.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
This was a program that very briefly let people download streaming RealMedia files to their hard drives to watch later, or even convert them to open formats like MPEG.
Does anyone still have a copy of this program? Can you try it on this site to see if it still works? I know after Real got the company shut down they changed their format around to break a lot of Streambox's functionality.
Every day I still curse Streambox for bending over and let Real have their way with them. If only this site were using Windows Media! ASFRecorder is still working flawlessly even on the latest WM8 files.
- JoeShmoe
.
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
I can't believe the reaction this is getting on Slashdot. This is basically giving the MPAA all the ammunition it needs to get their increasingly restrictive controls approved.
I am completely against all the extreme restrictions that things like the DMCA can put upon us. But, I am completely for the protection of intellectual properties for their creators. If the movie houses don't make money off of their movies, you can expect the quantity and quality to go way down.
It's not ever really about lowering prices.
Part of capitalism is the idea that prices will naturally flow to a fair point, since companies have to keep their prices low to be competitive. Antitrust comes in when companies try to beat the system and remove competition from the equation so that they can have high prices.
"Price fixing" is never a company charging "too much". It's about systematically removing the competitive element from a market so that you can control it. In the case of retail industries, price competition starts at the end consumer purchase. The retailer doesn't care all that much if an item costs say $50 from the distributor if they can charge $100 for it. However if competition with other retailers lowers the price to $55, the retailer will start putting pressure on the distributor (perhaps by threatening to stop carrying their products) to lower the distributor's price to $25. This creates competition among distributors and lowers their profit margins.
In the case of the record companies, they sought to avoid this trend not by defining the prices that retailers could charge (which is highly illegal) but by defining the price that they could *advertise* (which is less illegal). Most consumers won't do very heavy comparison shopping unless an advertisement clues them in, so this prevents the retailers from putting much pressure on each other; as a result most of them just charged MSRP. What's the point of having a lower price if you can't advertise it, anyway? This results in no pricing pressure on the record companies, since the retailers are making plenty of money per unit at MSRP.
The government never sets any sort of price limits for an industry unless they decide to formally regulate it, which is never done with luxury items. Antitrust is about certain methods of doing business which must be illegal for capitalism to work.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
I haven't looked it up, but from what I understand it's perfectly okay to sell a region-specific DVD player. On the other hand, there's nothing the big publishers can do to prevent you from taking your DVD player to the shop downtown and having it de-regionised to play DVD's for other regions, I've definitely seen shops and electrical technicians advertising that particular service in the past. Region encoding was in some way ruled as an anticompetitive practice, I think, but I don't have it as firsthand information.
I'm guessing but it probably came in about the same time that all the parallel importing restrictions were lifted a decade or so ago. They were temporarily put back for movie material a few weeks ago by the Labour government on the grounds of "protecting local cinema" from all of the currently released movies coming in on parallel-imported DVD's at the same time. That said, I'm not sure whether that actually involves de-regionising of DVD players or if it's actually just importing the videos and DVD's to New Zealand in the first place. I suspect it's only the latter.
I noticed the other week that Wellington library even advises on the shelves that some marked DVD's they loan might not play in region 4 players, so if it's not legal (but I think it is) then I guess there's some significant civil disobedience coming from local government employees.
Can anyone with a better understanding expand on this?
Up until 5 years ago, I was a HUGE movie buff. I would go to see 1-2 movies at the theaters. When I went to school, I stopped watching movies much, because I wasn't watching television. Without TV, no commercials, no connection to pop culture... It was quite strange. I'd still see the occaisional movie, but I didn't hear about many.
Now, I'm over a year away from school and have a home entertainment system. Until I got the system, I was watching movies and television again. Now with a ReplayTV, I don't see commercials. The cost of movie tickets is $9.50, so for the cost of the two movie tickets, I can buy a DVD and watch it at home in surround sound on a HDTV. If I want to watch the movie later, I can. I don't really rent movies because of the hassle of returning them.
I never thought that I would stop going to see movies, but I mostly have.
I'll still see an eye candy movie, but the rest? I'll watch at home. There is no reason to go see a movie that isn't for the eye candy. I have a better sound system than most of the theaters, so I'd have to go to the good one 30 minutes away.
I dunno, I seem to enjoy having people to my place and watching a movie much more than going out.
Now, if you don't really like to watch TV and Movies, the $5k startup costs for a decent system (what my "midrange" system cost) is rediculous. However, if you don't really care, you can do a passable job for $1500 and still enjoy the experience.
Summer action blockbusters won't go, as those are more fun in the theatre. However, I no longer see them 2-3 times there. I see them once then buy the DVD when it comes out.
I doubt that the blockbuster will go away, but the theater as a way of distributing artsy films may go away. That's okay though, digital cable and better encoding algorithms should open up plenty of channels for them, and artsy films need to make less to do well.
The $100m film won't look good on your computer screen compared to a real theater, and when shit blows up I want to be screaming and yelling with the audience. However, $20 for two people to see a silly comedy is a bit much.
Alex
If the movie houses don't make money off of their movies, you can expect the quantity and quality to go way down.
...and don't even get me started about appointed presidents and the poor quality of government. Will Rogers must be chuckling somewhere.
They seem to be making plenty of money, the quantity is up, and the quality is crap for 95% of the offerings. Hmmm... how can it get much worse?
Will Rogers said, "People get the government they deserve." I guess the same goes for entertainment. If we keep paying them to go see crap, they will produce more crap.
"Go on, take the money Enron."
-- Steve Miller Band (with a little help from current events.)
War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. - George Orwell or George Bush?
The site is awfully slow now and I think that the wise thing to do is to bookmark the page and try to visit it sometime next week.
Also, I would like to note that this will surely not last, as the long arm of MPAA will reach them, sooner rather than later.
Anyway, this is a great idea, but we all know what happens to great ideas if the BIG companies don't approve them...
Caveat emptor,
Here is what you agree to (among other things) in the Terms of Service:
"You agree to indemnify and hold us. . . harmless from any claim, demand,loss and damage whatsoever including reasonable attorneys' fees, made by any third party due to or arising out of your use of the Product, your connection to the Product, your breach/violation of the TOS, or your breach/violation of any rights of another or any existing laws (local, state, national and/or international) whatsoever."
(abridged, emphasis added)
In other words: you could get busted for this, and that's your problem. In fact, if someone (MPAA, government) sues us because you have been using this service, you get to pay our attorney's fees.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
404 Not Found, dammit.
I've got this problem as well, and after a bit of superficial checking out, the problem appears to be that the Real Player plugin helper isn't registering itself correctly with Netscape, calling itself rpnp.so, instead of Real something or other. Since the detection routine is expecting a string containing 'Real' it fails. I had a look on the Real plugin forum and some users have already noticed this, but there's no word on a solution yet.
I believe that the tcpdump requires root privileges.
Here's how to use it:
1. load up movie88 on your Linux machine (with properly configured RealPlayer) or another machine on the same hub - Windoze works fine for this.
2. 'order' a movie. It should show you a list of all movies that you've ordered, with a button for 300Kb/s.
3. run this script on your Linux machine.
4. Click the 300Kb/s link in your browser.
tcpdump will intercept the RealPlayer's request and pass it along to wget.
Voila!
I find it difficult to believe that you think that the Constitution _isn't_ the last word on how the US government runs. Wasn't that rather the point. (it'll likely be a while before we see an amendment concerning copyrights)
Treaties cannot override the Constitution, for it is what grants and governs the authority to enter into treaties. Laws passed by Congress in furtherence of treaties cannot override the Constitution, for it is what grants and governs their lawmaking ability.
You called nothing. Perhaps you'd like to try again?
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
You are allowed to apply different rules to your own citizens and their works. For example, the United States does have registration requirements that must be met if you want to sue for certain kinds of damages. If a US author doesn't register, their remedies are limited. If a foreign author doesn't register, they aren't limited. Yup...US law actually treats foreign authors better than US authors (and if you are going to pirate...pirate domestically!).
What's probably happening, assuming that there is a grain of truth to this story, is that Taiwan is doing what the US does, and subjecting their own people to extra requirements. So, it is believable that a movie made in Taiwan that is shown and not registered does not get copyright, but it is certainly not true for foreign (to Taiwan) movies.
For what it's worth, one of the sole benefits of living on the Chinese mainland is DVD's for 7 Chinese yuan (US$0.84)! Sold at foreigner-friendly restaurants - you get to flick through a huge selection of DVDs (little prOn though) and settle the bill for food and movies together. New releases are available about 2-3 weeks before debut screening in the US.
A dream is good. A plan is better.
Through Time Warner, I've got HBO OnDemand and iControl. Both let me watch movies/shows at exceptional quality. The cost: $3-6 / movie and ten dollars a month for HBO OnDemand.
Worth it all the way. HBO can be thin at times, but iControl even let me watch Half Baked... pause, rewind and all. Only $3.95 for all day pass.
Get your Unix fortune now!
... and as such is signed up to TRIPS which requires adherence to the Berne Convention.
...
In fact, I believe the change in copyright law came a couple of years ago in preparation for their accession to the World Trade Org. - so the copyright law mentioned is seriously out of date.
Certainly, the Taiwanese government was making an effort (without much effect) last year to stamp down on piracy etc. to convince the rest of the WTO that they'd be 'good neighbours' - but now they're in (as of January 1st) they might not care as much
Who said there's no copyright protection in the US? I said that there's no copyright protection afforded by the Constitution, and that there is no copyright protection without the affirmative passage of law by Congress in accordance with the Constitution.
Viz., there is no copyright law that is universal that we should expect Taiwan to be held to; that each country crafts its own laws for its own people's own best interests. The US is no different -- the substance of our laws may be the same, but the origins are no different.
Claiming otherwise is as foolish as claiming that there is a correct side of the road to drive on, and that local custom can be wrong.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
So they are using real's streaming technology.. let me guess what the first movie you get is "Buffering" and if you like that one, the sequal also referred to as "Buffering" can be had for only $1 more.