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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.
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"
According to the Bern convention, you don't need to register for copyright protection.
But Taiwan was thrown out of the UN and most international bodies, in order to please China.
And thus Taiwan couldn't take part in the negotiations, didn't modify it's national laws.
Nice sideeffect.
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...
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.
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....
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!
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.
They use Real (sucky)...
.rm or .ram file that you are streaming off of. If you have any sort of network monitor you'll be able to see the exact URL where you can download the file and save it to your hard disk.
You don't really have to crack it. I've noticed they technique they use to make it difficult to change around links. they open up a no permission browser window and then from there redirect to the link of the actual
Just found a link. I almost thought it was damn near impossible to download the basic real player anymore...
x e
http://www.littlechapel.com/downloads/rp8-setup.e
It's a church site that lets you download real player to see one of their presentations. I guess they felt that it was sinful to let someone endure the pain of trying to navigate through www.real.com.
For those interested in the dirty details, may I recommend:
With that combination (and sometimes "strings") I can download ANY Quicktime or Windows Media video that I want to - permissions be damned. Plus, get this: mplayer on Linux does a better job of playing Windows Media files than Windows Media Player on Windows! (And at a higher screen res too!)
BTW, the secret letter is 'm'. (This may become apparant if you have done the above.) I don't have time for a complete downloading HOWTO, but ... mov = wget, asf = wget, asx = asfrecorder, wmv = try asfrecorder then wget.