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The Two Towers Hits the Net
tfreport writes "The Drudge Report is reporting that The Two Towers has already began to be file swapped online. This is four months before the movie is set to debut! An executive in New York promised if this is indeed part of the film that they would be punishing anyone and everyone that downloads the film or distributes it to the full extent of the law."
if only!
I win. pr0pz to sp0rks worldwide
a/s/l here. Sorry, adding domain tags to your s
Touch, but don't look! That'll be interesting to see how they plan to enforce their policy on anyone who may have downloaded it.
Calm down, it's *only* ones and zeroes.
Geez...
/. decides to make the headline THAT!??!
With only 9 days left before the first anniversary of that "day", and
I thought it was something completely different, until I read the actual story submission.
user@host$ diff
give me a download link.... please fast lines only....
Do not acquire from user MovieMogull. He is a mole wanker.
But user M0vHax0r is ok.
Let's all use our better judgment here.
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
WOrd to yo momma! I gotz the poastest with the moastest!!!
If this is indeed the real film, this isn't good. Piracy online is at least understandable if not excuseable when the movie has been out for 4 months in theatres.
Now this is crap...
We already know such declarations are not to be taken seriously. What will they do ? Sue 4,500,500 gnutella nodes ?
Karma cannot be described by words alone.
Why don't they focus their efforts on finding who leaked it rather than going after the people too anxious to wait till the release (who are likely to go see it when it comes out anyways)?
And we wonder why the RIAA and MPAA are screaming at their senators to kill P2P systems? Movies have always partially made it into the Internet before they were released, but only now with the relative ease of file-swapping have they been so readily pirated. If we want to convince *anyone* of the legitimacy of P2P networks bull**** like this has to stop, now.
------- "From bored to fanboy in 3.8 asian girls" ----------
Watching the new He-Man and the Masters of the Universe movie last night brought so many emotions to me: joy, for seeing my favorite characters brought to the small screen once again; skepticism, in trying to believe these are the same characters as their original counterparts; and a sense of being overwhelmed, by the sheer number of revelations and surprises Mattel and Mike Young Productions managed to pack into an hour and a half of television.
Truly this is an historic moment for He-Fans everywhere. No longer is our favorite childhood hero banished to a one-time existence in the mid-1980s. Now it has been revived in a refreshing and powerful new series and toyline. Now our He-Man will take his place among the ranks of G.I. Joe, Transformers, Star Wars, and other franchise creations that have permanent appeal over many generations. What the new cartoon proves more than anything is that the concept for Masters of the Universe is timeless.
"The Beginning," which will be split into three "Origin" parts for regular airing, aspires to do something never before attempted in the Masters of the Universe canon. The original cartoon (and toyline) begin during He-Man's heroic career, never explaining how he got the sword or how his rivalry with Skeletor developed. Instead, we were fed constant hints as to how these things happened (Sorceress was assigned the job of giving the swords to their destined owners in "Origin of the Sorceress"), but never truly told the straight story on how a cowardly prince became the champion of Eternia. Mattel and Mike Young Productions have chosen not only to finally tell He-Man's origin story, but Skeletor's as well, interlocking the two permanently.
Skeletor's origin story still leaves many questions to be answered. The writers have chosen to use the Keldor tale first popularized in the 1986 series Mattel mini-comic, "The Search for Keldor!," which insinuated that Skeletor was King Randor's long-lost brother. Whether or not they are siblings remains a question mark, but what we do know is that Skeletor was once known as a goatee-sporting villain named Keldor (and goatees are always a sure sign of evil, right?). By the way Randor warns the Elders in the Hall of Wisdom, we understand that Skeletor and his army are fast approaching, threatening and invading every corner of Eternia. It is apparent that Randor and the Defenders (the new title of the Heroic Warriors that shows they are constantly on the defense against Skeletor) are struggling to keep the planet safe. While Mattel has chosen to show how Skeletor got his skullface, they have left the story of how Skeletor became Eternia's chief enemy up to question. This leaves all sorts of room for Hordak, King Hiss, and any number of threads to weave into Skeletor's past. But at this point in his life, Skeletor seems to have asserted his rightful place as Eternia's resident master of destruction and created a loyal band of warriors to fight his cause. When Skeletor and his forces attack the Hall of Wisdom, a clash with Randor leaves Skeletor faceless. When Skeletor tosses a vial of poison at Randor, he deflects it with his shield, and the poison sprays all over Keldor's face. The animators try so hard to make this a "Big, Important Moment" that they use dreadfully sluggish slow motion to It is thrilling to finally see Skeletor clutching his head screaming, "My face! My face!," and it is even more satisfying to know that Randor caused the deformation. If there was not hatred between these two before, there definitely is now. Mattel has worked hard to incorporate Randor more tightly into the He-Man/Skeletor rivalry and give Skeletor real motivation to detest the king of Eternia.
Another longtime hole in Skeletor's story has been how Eternia fought him all those twenty years while waiting for Adam to grow up and assume the powers of Grayskull. There have been many theories as to how this might be explained, but Mike Young Productions has come up with the best one I've heard yet. The Council of Elders banished Skeletor and his gang to Snake Mountain (in the "Dark Hemisphere," perpetuating the idea that Eternia has a dark half and a light half). The Sorceress and Man-At-Arms generated a mystic wall to imprison the villains in their own sub-world. This is the cartoon's first symbolic union of science and magic, as Man-At-Arms thrusts a generator into the ground and the Sorceress ignites it with her magic power. This is the first time in either cartoon series that the Sorceress has really performed a jaw-dropping magic spell. The shots of the mystic wall are breath-taking, and we understand immediately that this Sorceress will be a force to reckon with.
Unfortunately, the Sorceress is a failure. Gone is the maternity and soft-spoken spirituality of a kind-hearted woman in bird costume. She has been replaced by a female Egyptian pharaoh that speaks cold declarations and looks with hard eyes. I always imagined the scene when the Sorceress bestows the sword upon Prince Adam to be a beautiful, loving scene where the Sorceress would gently explain Adam's destiny as he, overwhelmed but fully aware of the moment's importance, dutifully accepted his new role. All hopes for such a moment are dashed by the icy Sorceress and frightfully bratty Prince Adam seen in "The Beginning."
Mattel has decided to make Prince Adam a boy and He-Man a man, which is a decision I very much approve. Michael Halperin, who wrote the original He-Man series bible, wanted Adam to be a teenager given the power to fight like a man, but Filmation nixed the idea in order to make He-Man and Prince Adam the exact same size and build to ease the difficulties of animating them. The new Adam provides endless avenues for personal growth and development. I think the writers chose to make Adam so unlikable in this first episode so that he would have some place to go and room to grow as the series fleshes him out. He certainly has the most potential of any of the characters in a series where the villain is usually the star. Adam's new look is a breath of fresh air, finally freeing him from that gaudy pink vest and giving him a look that crosses somewhere between Robin Hood and a punk rocker. The new story is more a fairy tale about how a child assumes the power to defeat bigger and stronger enemies, following classic myth-making principles.
But while writer Dean Stefan's decision to make Adam bratty now so he can become manly later is probably a smart one, it makes Adam's performance particularly hard to swallow. He jokes, chides, and ridicules the most important moments of his life, making him appear flippant and disrespectful. As soon as he meets the Sorceress, he makes a crack about sending her a birthday invitation (the guardian's silent response is the only moment when her frosty coldness truly works). Adam possesses reverence for almost nothing--his warrior training, his duties as a prince, his destiny as revealed in the legendary Castle Grayskull. Whereas his attitude in the old show was purely an act, this Prince Adam really does behave like this. It will be most interesting to see if, as Adam grows and accepts his challenges over time, he will grow out of his childishness and learn to act foolish only as a disguise for his secret identity. As told in "The Beginning," He-Man is merely a muscular costume for Prince Adam. Our hero is developed only minimally and possesses no life of his own. I always enjoyed in the old show how you could never really separate He-Man from Adam and vice versa--because even though Adam's behavior was all an act, his inner self was completely formed from the principles and strength of He-Man. One could not exist without the other, but there are times when Adam tires of being He-Man ("Into the Abyss") or outright gives him up ("The Problem With Power"). The writers for the new series seem to be going with the idea that Adam is the whole person and He-Man exists as an incidental, alternative form. If the writers are smart, they'll begin blending the two as the heroics of He-Man begin to have a maturing effect on Prince Adam. The new series promises us huge character development stories for Prince Adam, allowing us to fully understand the growing pains of suddenly becoming your planet's crowned champion.
Writer Dean Stefan produces an unexpected twist in the revelation scene at Grayskull when Adam completely walks out of it, mid-ceremony. Man-At-Arms, having known Adam's destiny all along (he and the Sorceress share a lot of secrets, don't they?), takes Adam to Castle Grayskull when he realizes the time has come. Adam hardly takes any of this seriously, which is a real shame. While I understand what the writers are trying to do, Adam's behavior subtracts not only from our love for him but also from the mystique of Castle Grayskull. If a teenage brat will not shut up when he enters Grayskull just from the feeling of being overwhelmed, then, well, he's a real brat. Adam's nonchalant attitude explodes when he declares, "I'm no great warrior. I'm just a kid. Thanks for the magic show," flagrantly refusing the Sorceress' offer. He flies back to the Royal Palace, where Skeletor and his minions have already wrecked havoc. Suddenly realizing that his family is in danger, Adam understands why he was asked to become a hero at this point in time. Some of Adam's behavior can be explained by his sheltered childhood lived in the safety of the Royal Palace. As Adam asks in his first scene, "What forces of evil? . . . They're history." He has never known evil, so how could he not have a carefree attitude about all this? By making Adam leave Grayskull prematurely, the writers force Adam to choose his destiny rather than have it simply bestowed upon him. Seeing the Palace in ruin, watching Man-At-Arms, his protector, jet off to the Evergreen Forest to join the fighting, hearing the words of his distraught mother, Adam has no choice but to return to Castle Grayskull and accept his adulthood. This plot twist allows Adam the power of choice and strengthens his character, even if it eschews the respectful scene I had always imagined in my head.
The problem with Adam's flippant attitude is that it belittles Grayskull in its very first scene, when it should feel the most powerful and grandiose. The director has chosen low angle and surveillance shots to give us a wide perspective on Castle Grayskull, mostly to make Adam feel small and lost in its expansiveness. The newly redesigned Castle Grayskull is another major weak point in Mattel's re-imagining of the old series. Rather than being a castle obscured by a twisting and elaborate Evergreen Forest, the new Grayskull is a vertical tower stuck in the middle of a jungle. It makes more sense now why no one could find Grayskull before, but that does not make for its frighteningly vertical design. Trying to better Filmation's Grayskull was a fruitless task from the beginning, since Castle Grayskull stands as the original He-Man's only true work of art. The huge jaw mouth, the deep, penetrating eye sockets, the animal-like body of the castle, its leg-like bones supporting its weight over the bottomless abyss, the organic green interior--how could the animators of today even begin to top all this? They don't even try. The new Castle Grayskull looks like any other stone castle with a skullface slapped on front. Instead of a dark interior that shifts and seems somehow alive, we are given dusty brick walls and empty corridors. The castle feels lonely more than anything else. The gargoyles peering from the rafters bring echoes of "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" that I'd rather not acknowledge and, again, reduces Grayskull to a castle like any other. The designers give Grayskull no cohesive concept for its interiors. The entrance is a gothic stone corridor, the Sorceress's throne is an Egyptian pyramid, the labyrinth bears Roman coliseums, and the underground chamber is a haphazard mix between She-Ra's Crystal Castle and some vast region of outerspace (although the underground design certainly trumps all the rest of Grayskull). It's as if four different animators with completely different concepts for Grayskull decided they would each control a part of it. In the end, they succeed in making Grayskull into a confusing nothing. This is why the Sorceress's new Egyptian design does not fit in at all. If Grayskull were a pyramid, it would be appropriate, but not inside this castle. The Sorceress, the series's spiritual center, should be beautiful and simple, but the new design weighs her down with ornate designs and a heavy golden headdress. The new Castle Grayskull is this series' ultimate failure, unable to recapture almost any of the aura, suspense, or power of the original. Instead, it is an architectural mishmash.
The only attempt to capture the mystique of old comes when the Sorceress leads He-Man to the underground chamber. Her firefly light leads Adam through Grayskull's corridors, allowing for some of the best lighting and direction in the entire episode. As the Sorceress and Adam descend to the underground chamber, echoes of "Origin of the Sorceress" abound. Since that episode provides our only idea of what it is like to receive the powers of Grayskull, it becomes the benchmark by which this new scene must compare. And, unfortunately, it falls short. The underground chamber is the only Grayskull location that takes our breath away even for a second, as the crystalline expansiveness wows our eyes. The Sorceress sends a ray down into a black abyss, hinting that the abyss may be just as important in providing Grayskull's power as it was in the old series. An ornate chest rises out from the blackness, revealing Adam's sword. I do like that this entire sequence is free of dialogue, as if the Sorceress knew Adam's decision without asking him and he knew what to do without being told. But the scene lacks any pause, any breath, any learning. Adam picks up the sword with little or no hesitance, whips it above his head, and declares, "By the power of Grayskull!," without even the least bit of encouragement. Even Zoar had to have some coaching from Kodak Ungor before she could become the Sorceress again. In a few wild anime camera moves, Adam becomes He-Man in a shock of electric blue light. The transformation happens too rapidly without any of the reverence it deserves. This should have been a quiet, powerful moment as Adam accepts his destiny, but instead it barrels over Adam's "It's heavy" protest to reach the finished product, a sword-wielding muscle man named He-Man that almost seems foreign to the whole event.
He-Man himself appears oddly disconnected and undeveloped in his first outing. Having just been created, he lacks any real personality of his own. The writers have taken great pains to improve our hero from the one of old. He-Man's action sequences are a lot like his old ones (picking up a boulder, deflecting Skeletor's blasts, stopping a fall in mid-air by plunging his sword into the cliffside), but they are a lot harder for him to perform. Lifting a boulder appears to take all his strength, as he carefully cuts the rock with his sword, pulls it up from the ground, and takes his time rising from his knees to hold the boulder completely in the air. A huge problem in the original series was that He-Man appeared to do anything and everything almost effortlessly. When a hero is all-powerful, he becomes boring. The new series has taken great pains to show He-Man is strong, but his feats of strength are not necessarily easy. This allows room for He-Man to be weak, to fall, to make a mistake. Already the writers have cured one of the major ills of the old show. I particularly love it when He-Man catches Randor as they fall into the lava pits and Randor asks, "He-Man, you can fly?" in a stroke of comedic genius. He-Man, of course, can not fly, pointing out one of his weaknesses right from the start. He plunges his sword into the mountainside to stop, but fails, and he has to let go of Randor to make the second attempt work. This is far more dramatic than He-Man quickly and effortlessly saving the day. Unlike the original series, the action sequences of the new one will actually be interesting.
If there is any message the new series is trying to send us, it is this: THE ACTION SCENES WILL BE MUCH, MUCH BETTER. At least a third of "The Beginning" movie is spent on battles, pairing up different character so they can square off and demonstrate their weapons and abilities. Just like "Diamond Ray of Disappearance," Mattel is using this as a toy commercial to demonstrate all the "neat things" each character can do, enticing us to buy. But such commercialism can be excused because the animators go to great lengths to make these tiffs interesting and exciting. One of the major problems of the old series was the "one strike, you're out" formula, which dictated that any time a villain was struck, hit, or kicked, he was automatically defeated and completely out of commission. This is why battles on the old series happen so quickly and quietly: all it takes is one action for a hero to knock out the villain. The new series has much more faith in the resilience of its characters. When Man-E-Faces knocks Mer-Man down, he stands up again and whips out his sword (cleverly using his belt emblem to hide his sword). The villains are not defeated easily and the heroes are not perfect, making the action scenes far more intriguing. The heroes might actually lose against these ferocious enemies.
While I do not have space to talk about every character individually, I would like to write a few quick impressions about each one:
Man-At-Arms - a more quiet force than I first expected, he maintains his fatherly presence with a bit more strategic intelligence. His once useless battle mace can change shape and produce strategy plans, and he seems more like a middle-aged warrior than the aging engineer of old.
Man-E-Faces - one of the most useless characters of the original toyline, Mattel could have ditched him this time around. But instead, they are trying to finally integrate Man-E with the rest of the cast. He still has not found his place, but he is more active than I expected. The question still remains whether his shifting faces actually change his personality and his powers or if they do nothing to him at all.
Ram Man - does not really have much to do here, but maintains the clumsy, dumbfounded personality of old, and his beefier redesign fits his powers perfectly
Mekaneck - this new series works hard to give Mekaneck the purpose he never really attained in the original; the fact that his neck can bend and twist will aid that goal a lot.
Stratos - not much different from the Stratos of old, his main purpose is to be the Defender that can actually fly.
I was actually amazed at how much Mattel did NOT change from the original series. Most of the characters' redesigns are variations on the old ones, and they all possess the same powers and even the same weapons of the originals (and the cartoon has managed to integrate the weapons in ways that Filmation never bothered to).
Teela has a refreshing new anime look, given long ponytail hair and a ferocious, wide-eyed attitude. She does not seem nearly as reserved and harsh as the old Teela; in fact, she comes across as playful, youthful, and freed up. This allows her to have more of a bantering sibling relationship with Prince Adam than the almost parental relationship of old. The new show chooses familiar ground with which to introduce them--the traditional training sequence in the Royal Palace courtyard under the watchful view of Man-At-Arms. Returning to this place assures the audience that nothing has changed at all. Adam and Teela's spirited attacks on each other tell us right from the start that their attraction is more than just the kind of bond childhood friends share. Teela's backflips and snake staff action prove she will certainly have more than her fair share of great action scenes in the new series.
Orko remains surprisingly unchanged from the original series. His more wizardly outfit works well, but his high-pitched squealing and Freudian slips prove he will be comedic relief all over again. That will probably be okay, since the writers must know Orko was overused in the original show. The writers have done an excellent job of solving yet another mystery from the original series: how Orko found out Adam's secret (or why Adam would tell him it at all). Orko and Cringer follow Adam to Grayskull and witness his transformation, becoming the only two other than the Sorceress and Man-At-Arms to know the secret. I like that Cringer and Battle Cat are unable to speak in the new series. It allows Cringer to be frightened constantly without the whiny voice (he looks more like a real cat too). Battle Cat's new design is disappointing, however. The animators have scaled back his armor, but his head is way too small for his body. Orko, Cringer, and Battle Cat always bear the burden of being the funny sidekicks, and the jury is still out on exactly how they will function in this new series.
King Randor and Queen Marlena are remarkably muted in their twenty-first century redesigns. The gruffness of Randor's original voice is missing, and he almost sounds like he could be He-Man's age. The animators have chosen to dress Randor and Marlena in the same brown and orange colors, but this has a dulling effect. Whereas the original Queen Marlena, in her striking and simple green gown, provided a commanding presence even when she did not speak, the new Marlena seems quiet and unaware. She's a token mother figure without any of the intelligence and power of the original. I can hardly imagine this Queen Marlena being a headstrong astronaut from the planet Earth.
But while Mattel and Mike Young Productions have done a credible job with the heroes, their energies have obviously been better spent on the villains. Maintaining the looks and color schemes for the Evil Warriors, the animators have wisely sharpened the appearances and powers of Skeletor's ratpack. Here's my rundown:
Mer-Man - the Best Entrance award goes to Mer-Man, who pops out of a swampy pool in foreboding, grand style. The animators have taken away the bumbling oafishness of the original and made Mer-Man's fishy origins an asset. His razor-sharp teeth, piercing eyes, and throaty voice make him dangerous and full of malice. His scene with the giant floating blowfish goes on way too long, however, and having Man-At-Arms trapped in its belly is a little too "Jonah and the Whale" for my tastes.
Beast Man - the quintessential first henchman, Beast Man fails to return to his darker roots from the first episodes of the original series. Instead, the writers have opted to go with the bumbling, clueless Beast Man that became the norm. His chief allies appear to be the Griffins, which allow him to swoop in and rescue Skeletor whenever necessary. The scene where the two ride Griffins and the wind flies against them is one of the strongest sensory moments in the episode and proves that Beast Man is Skeletor's right hand man.
Trap Jaw - thankfully, Trap Jaw's foolishness has been reduced and his powers emphasized. His huge robotic arm supports almost any weapon, and he actually seems threatening now.
Clawful - the loneliest of Skeletor's first season band, Clawful was a villain who always had great potential with his echoing voice and devilish eyes. The new series kills that potential by giving him the idiot voice and brain that Trap Jaw abated. But, like all the other villains, his terrific redesign and blazing powers reveal a triumph of brawn over brain.
Whiplash - how did Whiplash get so big? He's huge now, and the better for it. His tail cracks down on Teela, and if that doesn't frighten a person, Whiplash sitting on you will.
Tri-Klops - the "odd man out" of Skeletor's original five cohorts (Beast Man, Trap Jaw, Evil-Lyn, Mer-Man, and Tri-Klops), Tri-Klops returns in this series with newfound purpose. His cyclops eye can shoot fire now (among other things, I'm sure), and his Doom Seeker robots attack when we least expect them to. The Doom Seeker have not been fully explained, but they add purpose to Tri-Klops. Expect a lot more from him in the future.
Of course the most improved villain is Evil-Lyn, who reaches her full potential in this new series. While the new design is a little too sticks-and-bones for me, the attitude and the power are all there. Whereas it was sometimes unclear her role in the original series, Evil-Lyn is undoubtedly second-in-command now. She stands alongside Keldor in his first scene, and takes over for Skeletor when he escapes with Randor. And just as Skeletor receives a tilting shot over his body upon entrance, so too does Evil-Lyn warrant a similar shot later on, proving that she is just as threatening. Her staff-length crystal ball is an improvement and her glowing purple eyes are a welcome addition to her sorceress ensemble. Whereas Evil-Lyn always seemed like Teela's evil counterpart in the original series, this Evil-Lyn positions herself far beyond Teela's level. As a longtime Evil-Lyn fan, it is a thrill to see her finally kicking butt. After Tri-Klops, Trap Jaw, and Beast Man each try to break the mystic wall, Evil-Lyn steps forward and declares, "Step aside, boys," and fires her magical best. While her attempt fails (allowing Skeletor to assume his rightful role as destroyer of the mystic wall), the sequence proves the hierarchy of the Evil Warriors and Evil-Lyn's place atop it. Perhaps no moment among the action scenes is more powerful than when Evil-Lyn sends a cosmic blast across the Evergreen Forest and turns it into a barren wasteland, turning the tables and making the Evil Warriors the team to beat. Never would the original He-Man series have produced a moment where it seemed so much like the villains would actually win. Skeletor's army is, on a hand to hand ratio, more powerful than He-Man's Defenders, allowing them to become the longtime threat legend has made them out to be. Now we understand why Eternia needs He-Man: these enemies are too strong for anyone but him.
Evil-Lyn's rise to power could not come without a hint of mutiny. Writer Dean Stefan chooses to end the episode with a tacked-on scene where Evil-Lyn questions Skeletor's authority. "Perhaps you think you could run things better than I," Skeletor coldly says to Evil-Lyn, eliciting the conciliatory reaction he wanted from her. The scene is rather useless in "The Beginning," but it does promise plenty of classic tension between these two power-starved villains. Evil-Lyn will be her own force in this new series.
But just like "Diamond Ray of Disappearance," the true star of this premiere episode is Skeletor. Retaining the wit of the original, this Skeletor is far more powerful and threatening than ever before. His voice leaves much to be designed, but Mattel has successfully re-imagined him as a warrior. The new Skeletor is far more physical, allowing him to fight He-Man almost equally. His flips and jumps into the air, his amazing sword slashing, and his dynamic mid-air moves all reveal the potent influence of anime on the new Masters of the Universe. Skeletor can do almost anything, and that makes him a stronger villain. Thankfully, the animators have brought back the Havoc Staff and added a royal cape, giving Skeletor a captive elegance and form he did not quite possess before. The director has overused the red eyes glowing, which are supposed to signal the moments when Skeletor gets most angry. The red eyes were used throughout original He-Man memorabilia, but Filmation chose to resist it. It was inevitable that the new cartoon would employ the red eyes, but the animators should be frugal with their usage. On the other hand, director Gary Hartle chooses brilliantly to obscure Skeletor's skullface until he finally reveals it to King Randor, the man he blames for his deformation. As Randor wisely responds, "You did it to yourself," cleverly pointing out that Skeletor's evil will poison himself and ultimately bring his downfall. Obscuring Skeletor's face, shrouding him in darkness, and granting him legendary fighting skills and magic powers have bolstered Skeletor to the level he was always meant to achieve--a serious, powerful supervillain almost incapable of defeat. Skeletor still delivers terrible dialogue about threatening He-Man and ruling Eternia, and he still surrounds himself with blundering idiots (he gets annoyed with Beast Man), but he's a much stronger villain than the one Alan Oppenheimer voiced (even if Oppenheimer's Skeletor laugh was much better). As always, Skeletor remains the star of He-Man's show.
Mattel and Mike Young Productions have done an amazing job of streamlining and retelling the often incongruous He-Man mythology. The Hall of Wisdom, which never appeared in the original series, finally establishes the Council of Elders as the center of wisdom and power in Eternia. When Keldor attacks the hall, the Elders vanish and declare Captain Randor king of Eternia (finally proving that Randor rules over all, not just part, of the planet, but vanquishing the King Miro mythology of the old series). The Elders' disappearance marks a powerful shift for all of Eternia. Randor, standing alone in the now empty hall, hears only the voice of the Sorceress in falcon form. She declares, "Peace will come only for a time. A hero shall emerge to protect Eternia." Director Gary Hartle takes care to obscure the Sorceress until Adam meets her, cleverly hiding her in shadowed shots of her wings. The Sorceress explains to Adam that the Elders joined their powers and gave their energy to the Sorceress to protect. While this would seem to answer the question "What is the secret of Grayskull?," it does not quite make sense. If the ultimate power of Grayskull is the the power and knowledge of the Elders, then what did Grayskull exist before they stored their power in it? Why was the Sorceress living there? When Skeletor grills King Randor for information, he asks, "Now that the Council of Elders is no more, who controls the power of Eternia now?" What is this power of Eternia? Does it allow one to control Eternia, or the entire universe? Is is simply the knowledge and power of the original Elders? And why did Grayskull exist before it became the storage place for that power? Since Skeletor is still looking for the Elders, he does not even realize that Grayskull exists, adding an interesting new twist to the mythology. Skeletor will not attack Grayskull until he learns that the Elders' power is stored with in it. I am hoping that Grayskull houses more than just the Elders' magic. The original Grayskull kept its secret mysterious, but always offered the power to control the universe. This new series does not quite say if Grayskull offers this kind of power anymore or if the "power" is just the concentrated wisdom of Eternia's oldest Elders.
Furthermore, is the Hall of Wisdom still standing? With all the energy put into creating the Hall of Wisdom at the beginning of this movie, we would expect its presence to continue. I wish the animators had put as much effort into Grayskull as they did the hall. The opening shots and music in "The Beginning" are unrivaled by the rest of the story. On the whole, the music is banal and disinterested, providing more coverage than truly adding excitement. Places where the music should have provided the most emotion (such as Adam receiving the Power Sword) is where it remains the most unmemorable. The direction is vastly improved, showing what twenty years can do to children's animation. The moving camera shots, low angles, and blazing action cuts show the new influence of anime and modern cinema on animation. Director Gary Hartle has done a supreme job of making the once stagnant He-Man characters practically jump off screen.
The new He-Man series brings almost hundreds of welcome improvements upon the original, including better action scenes, better continuity, and darker villains, but it fails miserably when it comes to voices. King Randor and Mekaneck and Man-At-Arms all sound like the same person. Skeletor's voice is hollow and posses none of the resonant vocals of Alan Oppenheimer. He-Man's voice sounds the way a boring muscle-man's should, lacking any of the maturity and moral depth of John Erwin's performance. Even Evil-Lyn, who has the best voice of all the new characters, sounds grainy and desperate when listened against the golden confidence of Linda Gary's witch. All the characters look fantastic, but when they open their mouths, I want to cry.
Still, my complaints are largely nitpicky. Mattel and Mike Young Productions have overcome the major hurdles by firming up the mythology, finally telling the origin story of He-Man, and re-envisioning the entire cast of characters without taking away the appearances, powers, and personalities that first made us love them. I am impressed by how much has not changed, and most of the changes are welcome improvements upon the original series. Executive producer Bill Schultz has succeeded in guiding this new series to its rightful place. On the whole, "The Beginning" is off to a great start.
Well, if you want to see a really shoddy quality movie on a small computer monitor with more than likely bad quality sound and some stupid warez logo covering part of the screen, your screwing yourself.
I'd rather wait 4 months and pay my money to see it the way it is intended ! - BIG SCREEN, dolby surround sound, comfy chair, popcorn etc.
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
Hollywood, CA - Copies of Spider-Man 2 have been discovered circulating in IRC and on pirate sites. Experts say this is the first time a movie has been pirated before it has even been filmed. Movie pirates infiltrated Raimi's home while he slept. They used an advanced EEG imaging system along with Apple's new QuickTime 6.0 beta with Brain2Vid technology to capture the movie. Pirates then edited out the unnecessary portions of what they captured such as images of Raimi's mother yelling at him because he forgot to take out the garbage.
Director Sam Raimi has confirmed that this is indeed the movie he is about to film. "I knew I shouldn't think about what I'm going to film. Now it's loose on the Internet. I doubt the sequel will be able to break the $500,000 mark in 2 weeks now. I'm just really glad I didn't have that goat dream."
"This is outrageous," said MPAA president Jack Valenti, "These criminals by releasing the film before it has been released are not only stealing revenue from the producers but also ruining the movie goers magical experience. If the pirates do this to enough movies then the summer blockbuster season will seem like a cavalcade of unoriginal dreck which I admit isn't much of a change but still!"
Initial reviews of the film have been extremely positive. "Usually sequels don't live up to the first film unless you count Aliens, Terminator 2, The Empire Strikes Back and a few others, but this one really exceeds the expectations created by the first," exclaimed Jolly Roger in IRC.
According to one Internet research firm says the film was downloaded over 700,000,000 times in less than 14 hours and will cost the studio at least $5 trillion in lost revenue. "We stand by our numbers even if they might see a tad exaggerated. We really need the press," a spokesperson for the firm said.
Pirates have also tried to steal Episode III from George Lucas' brain for several months, but keep coming away with a blank screen.
Invoicing, Time Tracking, Reporting
How to do this:
Yes, that certainly is very bold, isn't it?
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
You are a fucking luzer that wouldn't know a first post if it was sitting on your face and wiggling around. Don't bother responding to this post, as you have nothing clever to say.
just had a look. fair few files called two towers.avi etc but all are obvious fakes/renamed files.
update comments set karma=-1, reason='offtopic' where sid=26315
They're going after everyone who *downloads* it? That's going to take some doing...
Either way, plainly put, the quality is going to suck, the movie is worth seeing no matter what, I'll just consider the alleged posting (if I find it) as an appetizer before watching it on a massive movie screen with full Dolby Digital surround...
If one followed the logic of the idiots in Hollyweird, anyone who ever read Tolkein is already in violation of their hush hush rules...
I mean come ON now, who here hasn't actually read the books by Tolkein? Bueller? Bueller? We know how the story goes, the movie is just a way to see how well the books can be fleshed out... Kind of like Cameron's Titanic (spoiler alert: The ship sinks)...
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
An executive in New York promised if this is indeed part of the film that they would be punishing anyone and everyone that downloads the film or distributes it to the full extent of the law
:-O
*shivers in fear*
Hopefully, no executives from New York dressed in black will come into my innocent house in northern Sweden to punish me to the maximum extent of the law.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Instead of putting a bunch of people in a room for a screening test, they release the movie into the net (but not admiting it .. saying instead that it was leaked).. Then they measures the acceptance of the movie through the number of downloads made in any p2p network .. Has anyone though of this? >;)
One day your head will be your box, your brain will be your client, and all energetic problems will be solved...
all of you who immediatly started their Kazaa/Gnucleus/whatever to find it.
Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
TSIA
They are just doing it for the challenge. It'll be a crappy divx ...No fun at all
True movie lovers will wait for the official date to see it in a big screen and for the DVD.
It would be interesting to know whether the movie file was leaked by someone who is part of the team - or if someone cracked into their system and stole it. I quess the cracker possibility could be quite potential too, because: they clearly use a lot of digital/computerized technology - even probably for communication within the team (so there probably would be the possibilities to do it) and because I doubt that the one who leaked the previous episode would have had the balls to do it again. If it was stolen by a system cracker - I would not like to be in the shoes of their sys.adm / infosec specialist who did not take enough action to make sure it does not happen again.
Shouldn't the movie studios/recording industry pour all their efforts into finding the source of these leaked files rather than blaming everyone else on the 'net for their lack of basic security?
You know, simply NOT allowing their staff to send emails full of huge mpg files, or carry out CDRWs full of company assets would seem to be a good idea, would it not? It'd certainly be easier to stop this sort of thing at the source.
Imagine if the mints (places that "make" money - not the sweets) had security this lax? Everyone in the country would be a potential criminal. Mind you, the RIAA already think this, so...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
couldn't find nothing but "8-legged Freaks," FOTR renamed Two Towers, and FOTR renamed Two Towers in Catonese with Mandarin subtitles.
Damn it.
I'm one of those guys who is buying a DVD player partly because of the LOTR DVD, who spends some time reading a Quenya (elvish) course. But I suppose the question concerns most of us.
Who the hell would like to view an unfinished, probably mostly-SFX-free, score-free, unperfect version of the Two Towers ?
I want to watch it in the better conditions possible, not a shitty tiny pre-alpha version. I would watch that even if I was forced to. This is just ridiculous.
Cinema is art. You don't steal somebody's unfinished painting just to have a peak at it before anybody else, do you ? Let's wait for the final, fully worked movie. That's what we are wainting for.
theefer
There is no release of LOTR the two towers, none. Just a piece of gossip that could be true but no one bothered to verify
Well we'll just have to show them how much we like it by going and giving them another $250,000,000 in its run, and twice that in DVD rentals...
Of course some people won't see the movie.. But then there are people like me who own the DVD, saw the movie, bought the books, etc.
You have my cash... Now let me have a peak!
Tournament Management Online &
I just looked on KaZaA, and tbh I don't see squat that could be TTT. Sure there are lots of dickheads pretending to have it, but you only have to hover the mouse over the file and it'll pop up with some meta information about the film, which in most cases says "Eight Legged Freaks" or "Spiderman".
I kinda get the feeling that Matt Drudge has been taken on a leeeeetle wild goose chase.
That is, unless anyone can reliably confirm that they have downloaded it and it is the real thing (something I seriously doubt, I would expect it to still be in post production at 4 months from release).
Chris "Ng" Jones
cmsj@tenshu.net
www.tenshu.net
I'm also suspicious that nobody in the Drudge article claims to have actually seen this download. There *are* copies of the camcordered TTT trailer circulating; this has never been officially released, and was only shown in cinemas around March-April this year. Some of it (but not all) appears on the extras DVD of the Fellowship Of The Ring. Maybe that's what's causing all the panic. We'll see.
If not, that's just speculation from your side. But I get your point - a good movie such as the two towers *should* be watched on cinema.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
a large number of *BSD boxes? a CEMETERY!
[ conspiracy mode ]
Additionally, intentionally releasing a relatively clean copy of a movie that they know will be heavily traded provides them a great bullet point in presentations to Congress about how those eterrorist hackers are trading complete movies online and legislation needs to be immediately enacted to give them full search-and-seizure rights to your computer.
[
it's not out. end of story.
OK, so by the time The Two Towers hits your local multiplex, it will have been on the net for four months. It will be interesting to see how the box office is affected. LOTR stuff is prime geek bait, so you know that a large contingent of people with a nerdish bent will be scouring the net trying to find it. And these people would be the same ones lining up outside the theater in December. So let's see how the numbers add up when the movie is released.
Even thought we have no idea a) where this trailer is available for download, b) how to legally obtain the names of individuals who DO download the trailer, and c) whether the information is legit or not.
Actually, I don't really have any desire to see a crappy copy beforehand. The first film was good enough that I'd like the full-on experience of seeing it in the theater. But I will go ahead and see if I can find the trailer somewhere, just for kicks.
Why is it so hard for you bleeding heart left-wing liberals to understand that Iraq and Saddam, along with Syria and Iran, are at the heart of the clash of cultures that's been brewing in the Middle East since the creation of the State of Israel and is about to spread all over the world?
What I am talking about is the clash between a culture of religious totalitarian islamic zealots to whom human life has no value and the Western Culture based on the respect for human rights, the religion of love for one's neighbour and democracy.
Now, the State of Israel admittedly has her faults as a nation, but what nation doesn't? The fact remains that Israel is the only Western democracy in the Middle East and for the sake of the rest of the continent must remain so at all costs. Iraq and Syria are both sworn to annihilate the State of Israel. To everyone else than you liberals it is obvious that Saddam is trying VERY HARD to get his hands on weapons of mass destruction in order to strike against Israel and the Western civilization.
The conflict of these two civilizations is inevitable and if you don't want to end up on the losing side you will support whatever means it takes to counter the Islamic threat.
You know what would be even scarier to contemplate?
;)
If they leaked different sub-versions, each with a special "marker" in it to track how far they travelled online.
Think of the potential marketing statistics and numbers they could churn out the next time they want to justify exactly what you stated, namely how all the eTerrorists are infiltrating their industry and causing such a downturn in the economy... (my heart breaks...
I'll say it again. The United States is NOT the center of the universe.
These people need to grow up, take a good look around at this world we live in, and realize that money doesn't solve everything.
user@host$ diff
There are bunch of morons pushing files around the lame P2P systems claiming to be The Two Towers.
None of these is the real deal. The movie is *not* out there making rounds. Heck, I doubt it's even finished & edited yet. Anyone with any connections in this part of the warez scene knows it.
Slashdot messes up again...
Then again if these morons pushing fakes have caused few movie execs to pee in their pants, I guess some good has come out of it...
I suppose they'll be wittering on about how it's lost them $1,000,000,000,000 in revenue too. I think the opposite. If anything it'll bring more people into the cinemas because people will have seen it at home and will want to see it on the big screen. There's no such thing as bad publicity. Same goes for CDs I think. If I get an MP3 track and I like it, I go buy the album. If I don't then I won't. Win-win situation. If only they could see it.....
Like tinyurl, but one letter less! http://qurl.co.uk/
1: Write free software.
2: ?
3: Warez the two towers.
4: Profit!
But the real criminals are those responsible for initially putting it on the web.
And the fact of the matter is.....Most people won't download it and t ones that do
will only cause a spreading oif the word as to whether or not it's a good movie.
Hmmmm, how much money could be saved in mass marketing if replaced with the word of
mouth die hard big file swapers?
I smell hypocrisy.
All about me
If I recall correctly (and if I don't, I expect I will be politely corrected...) the rip of FOTR came from an Academy (read: Oscars) DVD that was circulated to possible voters. It came out quite a while after the cinema release of the movie itself; the first FOTR rip I saw was at a party in February, and that was from a camcorder.
Right now there is no complete TTT movie to send to Academy voters on DVD. There *might* be a rough-cut (no SFX, duff music, gaps with a whiteboard reading "big battle scene here") but that's all there is. Peter Jackson is still fine-tuning the release version (come on guys, you know what it's like trying to get finished code out the door...)
why not get the people who have the book of the film?? those could be real spoilers!!
Directly from the article...
But one AOLTIMEWARNER executive expressed serious doubt that a file is in play.
"...we will impose strict criminal penalties against anyone and everyone that downloads it!"
Last time I checked the only people capable of IMPOSING criminal penalties was the courts. Or have the studios bought that much power through lobbying and campaign support?
..considering that it is not illegal to take part of illegally copyrighted material in Sweden, it isa just illegal to distribute it.
Ofcourse the RIAA will claim that the studios loose half a trillion zloties in revenues over this, but I wonder if it really matters. I watched LOTR 1/3 three times now. Twice in the cinema and once on DVD. Judging from the geeks around me, most of them saw it at least twice legally and maybe once or twice illegally. For geeks its a must to see it in the cinema and they maybe even buy the DVD. They are also the only ones with a real chance (bandwidth and opportunity) of getting the full 700MB or so of this release, so chances are low that it will result in lower sales.
I do predict however that the revenues on Part Two will be lower. This because of the perceived downturn in the economy and parents therefore less willing to shell out large amounts of money around december.
Use Adsense for Charity
Fucking in University Towers (NCSU)
So it wasn't a complete waste!
However, what won't help their case is the obvious fact that TTT is going to take a shit load of money at the box office and an even bigger shit load of money from rentals and DVD/VHS sales. ;) ;), but I'd say they got their fair slice of pie from me. If TTT does slip onto the net early I will download it and watch it too. I will then go and see it several times at the cinema and buy the DVD on release day. MPAA can bite me.
FOTR already more than covered the entire budget for all three films just from box office sales in USA/Europe. Bit hard to cry about all the lost money from pirates when world+dog is seeing, renting and buying the movie until they bleed
I will fully admit to having downloaded and watched FOTR when it slipped onto the net before the theatrical release. I then saw it 3 times at the cinema and will be buying the 4 disc version in a couple of months. I guess that makes me an evil media industry destroying "pirate" (funny, I don't remember having boarded any ships or shouted "Land Ahoy" from any crows nests
Chris "Ng" Jones
cmsj@tenshu.net
www.tenshu.net
This looks like a major hoax. Drudge Report says it's a rumour but every big newssite seems to take it for real.
In fact, noone seems to have it, and those who claim they have it have fake files.
Many believe this rumour is actually spread by the RIAA and the MPAA, which is not too far fetched, imho. Especially considering that harsh quote from a "New York executive".
TheOneRing.net has a blurb of it, saying that they think it's a hoax as well.
...the release of "The Two Towers" was brought forward to September 11.
</tasteless>
Like car accidents, most hardware problems are due to driver error.
Anybody notice how the design of the towers on the movie poster have the same girder look as the WTC towers?
Coincidence or just Hollywood trying to play on people's conscience?
I wonder why stories like this get published on all the news sites without ANYONE actually checking to see if they are true or not.
Of course.... More advertising revenue... Sorry my mistake.
"I have serious question about this, I am not sure we even have a finished product yet!" said the executive from New York. "I don't know what this is, but if it is the movie, or any portion of the movie, we will impose strict criminal penalties against anyone and everyone that downloads it!"
Notice that the executive said "if it is." While that last comment is fairly hillarious, they rightly have doubts about the legitimacy of any "leaked" copies. A week before, I could see that, coming from the theatres. But four months before? There likely is not a final cut yet.
Remember what they say: any publicity is good publicity.
jrbd
Well, This is great news to the chinese. Now they have this firewall which always seems to be the same IP... so what do we got ? 4 billion people pirating the movie with one source IP :)
this is cool
That's like saying they wrote all the code, so it's just waiting to be released. Forget about debugging, test, customer acceptance trials, documentation etc.
The LOTR team keep bringing actors back to reshoot scenes for the second and third movies because the director changed his mind, or something didn't work right, or continuity blew it (sorta like debugging). They resynch all the dialogue in a recording studio, compose and record the music, create and tie in the special effects, edit all the film they shot into a coherent whole and effectively turn what they've got into a sellable product. This takes longer than principal photography, although it doesn't cost as much.
New Line don't have the next two movies sitting in a vault under lock and key somewhere. They are works in progress.
Good luck finding the IP address of every single person on Kazza or Gnutella who is distributing this, then downloading the file from them to keep as evidence against them and them proving it was actually that person who was using that computer at the time.
-- Hulver's site
Copy LOTR DVD.
mv lord_of_the_rings.dvd two_towers.dvd
connect to ISP
"connected 2400"
exec gnutella
share two_towers.dvd
"10 million downloads later"
"knock knock"
Mr. Gates? This is the MPAA your under arrest.
Why?
For reducing our profits.
It was Minority Report 2.
However, Tom Cruise has already started going to the houses of people who will go to see this movie in the future apologizing for the poor quality of the film, and encouraging them to pirate it instead even though they are fated to pay anyway.
Sounds like a scam of the most nefarious sort. Picture the MPAA, sending out little releases in the same vein as this one each time a new movie comes out- sure, they're crying wolf and the file really isn't there, but that's not the point. Picture later on the MPAA whimpering and bitching to congress sometime next year that "we are losing money hand over fist because of that damned internet filesharing! We've had 10 of the last 12 blockbusters released early! The Internet Terrorists may already have won!" Ad nauseum. Later on, Congress enacts stiffer penalities for file sharing, forces ISP's to block every port but port 80 and the MPAA laughs till it pisses itself. It's won this P2P battle by crying wolf. :wq!
Most traditional newspapers have fact checking departments and rules that information must be vouched for by two independent sources. Drudge doesn't do all that stuff, so in some ways he's a bit more vulnerable to hoaxing.
Since he's broken enough news that turned out to be true (thanks to getting on the 'A' list for leaks seeking wide distribution), he has enough credibility to turn out OK. And the traditional guys don't always do the fact checking they should, or in the case like this, they can report the fact that "Drudge is reporting that Two Towers has been leaked" which is of course 100% true.
Plus as you say, it sells more papers. In any case, the old adage holds: don't believe everything you read.
--LP
I heard that DVDs of The Two Towers were already on sale in China from a guy that was there recently. I am not sure that I would have wasted a few dollars on them!
For all you people you think that person from Peter Jacksons staff who released this is the real criminal I'd just like to point out the laws against knowingly acquiring stolen goods.
C'mon people -- all this time I've been hearing about how P2P networks allow people to space shift their movies and music collections. If TTT is really out there on P2P networks it is THEFT and people who download it obviously know the are aquiring stolen goods and deserve to be punished to the full extent of the law.
Even if they are stealing from the second biggest bunch of assholes to every run an industry.
Let's all stay on the side of truth and light here, ok?
A movie about 9/11? Cool. Gotta get it.
A monkey is doing the real work for me.
I translated Episodes I and II for local release and I had them on tape several months before the U.S. release. Imagine the pressure when you cannot tell anyone. :)
--- Frantisek Fuka (Yes, that's my real name and you have no idea how it's pronounced)
Someone could hand me a perfect DVD quality rip of this movie, and I would still wait until it is in the theaters to see it.
Dammit, I've waited 30 years to see this movie done right on the big (not just large) screen, and I'll gladly pay the $15 for me and my wife to see it in the theater on openning night.
First, create some files called "LOTR 2 Towers - divx REAL THING.avi" and put them on 50 or so gnutella nodes. Then "leak" the news that pirated copies have hit the P2P networks, and get it on slashdot. Then what happens? Your 50 seed copies turn into 10,000 bogus files. Then when the real movie hits, it will be harder to find the real copies. Its kinda like the insect control strategy of release millions of sterilized males to reduce the changes of real fertilization happening.
Oh well probably not, but I do think it would be effective.
Since I have no friends and more importantly no girlfriend, I have to either wait for the DVD release or download a substandard copy.
Swapped file is FAKE. Please stop posting unchecked stories. Thank you very much.
The first US paperback edition of the LOTR never earned Tolkien one cent because of the shady state of copyright law in those days. A US company (ACE Books) could get away with selling Tolkiens intellectual property without consulting or paying him.
And now US companies are educating the world on the ethics and legal consequenses of infringing on their copyrights. Wherever the money is eh ?
beauty is only a light switch away
Bah! It'd probably take me 4 monthes to download it on dialup...I guess I'll just wait.
Bugs are just features that have been fixed.
you mean like those emails I keep getting, that say 'AOL and microsoft are tracking this mail, and will donate $0.50 for every person that receives it. Forward this to all your friends, and be a nice guy for FREE!!!!'
Women have chunky days?!? Are guys really supposed to know this stuff? I am experiencing fear
If it's not listed here. Then I don't believe it. That site is the nearest to perfect "warez released" site on the net. If your a Warez group, you would have posted it there.
And trust me, if you got a full movie 4 months before it's release date, you definately would want to show that you won the "race".
Saving TWOTOW~1.DVD...
69,914,794 of 6,442,450,944 bytes
1% Complete
2,214,592 seconds remaining...
If it's 4 months before the release now, I'm going to be able to see it a full *3 months* before the rest of you suckers!
Laugh all you want, but I know whose door *you'll* be knocking on, come September 28th, once the download is complete!
-- Terry
I suggest to the MPAA that they stop putting movies on film and concentrate all their efforts on making high quality DVD. I myself have bought more DVDs in the past year than the amount of times I've gone to the movie theater in my entire life. The same goes for VHS tapes before DVDs became affordable. Sorry movie industry, I believe your days are numbered in the theater.
/dTd
If it were anywhere it would be newsroups; and it's not there.
The preview is though.
when I read this I thought, gee did a big net bring down the WTC?
Why would I want to see some extravagent Hollywood propaganda shite a la Pearl Harbor? What a waste of time.
The first one was, and according to the story, I'm assuming the second will be as well.
The first one was excellent quality (divx) and good sound. I watched it on a 21 LCD at a friend's house and it was better than any rental video, not quite but almost on par with DVD.
That having been said, I too declined a copy when offered and am going to purchase the director's cut DVD when it comes out in December (it will be the first DVD I've bought in two years, and likely the only one, and the only reason I'm buying it at all is because I watched the bootleg and enjoyed it enough that I wish to pay something back to the creators.)
Don't kid yourself, if the quality is on par with the last bootleg I saw, it will be very good indeed.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I watched it from start to finish last week, and was totally unimpressed. Maybe they'll pull together some nice finishing touches in editing, but the story has been weakened from the book dramatically, there are a lot of holes, and I really don't think that's something that a big screen and big sound can save. I guess we'll see.
Is your browser retarded?
Where I live, we have these exclusive cinemas called "Cinema Prive" where you get to sit on really cushy seats, with built in speakers, tons of leg room and arm-rest space + you can drink alchohol if you want.
It costs twice the price of a normal movie ticket, but my god, it feels like it's your own private movie house - you can totally immerse yourself in a movie without being disturbed because there's also a volume control for the built in seat speakers.
No jokes !
But I do agree that sometimes a normal movie house can be a cruddy experience - so I usually wait till the movie has been on circuit for a few weeks and take a morning off work (making sure it's not a school holiday) - best way to see a good movie !
I also reckon that DVD's should be released at the same time as the movie goes on circuit, or at least a week later.
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
...what's up with you people and the LOTR movies. Anyone who has actually read the books (and most people here are supposed to have read them, aren't they?) is able to see that the first movie completely sucked. It was just a bunch of dudes going around from here to there and getting into a lot of fights.
:)
The movie is ridden with Hollywood clichés ( Aragorn facing 1000 orks alone and smiling, without being killed in 0.001s, Boromir with two arrows stuck, still fighting heroically, etc. Oh, and, "Let's hunt some ork?" Puhleeeez!), massive character assassination abounds (Gandalf, Frodo, Merry and Pippin were all turned into a bunch of idiots).
Ok, it has some good things. Scenarios are cool, music too, Liv Tyler too (ah, maybe the answer's here
So I ask, why?
When are these guys going to realize that some of us don't want to do business with people who threaten us and accuse their customers of being criminals. They just lost my dollar.
It was the marketing men, look at the press coverage they are getting, what a plan! They can even use it in the MPAA we will placify the world campain.
Bet there getting the biggest bonus they've had for a while.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I wonder if Gnutella can be slashdotted?
Why don't they focus their efforts on finding who leaked it rather than going after the people too anxious to wait till the release (who are likely to go see it when it comes out anyways)?
It isn't beyond the realm of possibility that the footage was deliberately released in order to create exactly the kind of stir Hollywood needs to push through legislation and FCC regulatory interpretations designed to take away the last of our digital freedoms and complete the conversion of the internet from an interactive medium of information exchange into a glorified Home Shopping Network.
More likely, the emberrassment of having "one of their own" exposed as the culprit would diminish the MPAA's political efforts, so while they view the breach as unfortunate, the also will use it as a fortuitious political opportunity, and frighten the restless masses back onto the couch where they belong.
Either way, these thugs have far more incentive to avoid cleaning up their own houses while forcibly breaking into ours.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Somewhere they can't and they will not reach ;-)
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
It's your arse, so stop talking out of it.
The main reason I believe the price of drugs has dropped is the reduced border controls througout
europe, the fact that no-one cares anymore, has there be a reduction in conflict in the areas where drugs come from, or the routes they travel to get to the UK, the redurce cost and ease of Air travel.hmm.....
What is FOTR ? Ford of the Rings? Fart of the Rings?
How come they don't punish people to the full extent of the law (is it possible to punish someone with a 1/4 of the law?) every time they download copyrighted movies, reglardless of what movie it is?
The movie industry needs to get its shit together.
It's available via KaZaA and dal.net (and proabably other services). It is broken up in to three seperate DiVX parts, each one ~180meg. I've already received the first two of three... and am watching even as i write this.
And, yes, they filmed them all at the same time... though they didn't do the production work (touch-ups, choose which scenes, special-effects, etc.) on all three at once. It appears that they have just recently either finished production on TTT, or have come near enough to have a darn good movie available to us leechers!
/dev/random
whenever a movie gets leaked the company who produced it could put an equally shoddy version up on their site. Fast download, pay as much as you would for a movie ticket. Better than 1k/sec Gnutella download. People would pay. And they would pay again to see it for real in the cinema.
- thies
and it's legit.
Though for some odd reason, Jackson decided to make this installment completely animated.
I'll post a further review after I watch FOTR and TTT together in order.
If I bothered to look, he's probably mentioned 50 times by now...
Pirating movies is the equivalent of freely distributing GPLed code. Violating the GPL is the equivalent of claiming a pirated movie is your own work.
"This is four months before the movie is set to debut! An executive in New York promised if this is indeed part of the film that they would be punishing anyone and everyone that downloads the film or distributes it to the full extent of the law."
/. editors need bumper stickers put across the tops of their monitors to remind them the MPAA is evil? Are their attention spans that short?
Of course, the article wont't tell you that this is probably the same Madison Avenue marketing exec whose decision it was to release the "pirated" version of the movie onto the net to begin with. And what better way to call attention to it than to "complain" about it in the national media?
Seriously, hasn't anybody noticed that this kind of thing doesn't happen to the lower-budget and/or lamer flicks? Always the "highly anticipated" (by who?) "pending blockbuster" crap that gets splashed across the net and the news like this. The kinds of movies that have more than enough money involved to make sure these kinds of leaks don't happen.
The MPAA are downright experts on the uses and exploitations of digital rights management technology. Wouldn't it be child's play for them to fingerprint copies of the pre-release before dispersing them? What about asking why Bob over there is coming into the screening with a camcorder and a CD-burner? So why is their security so "lax" in these situations? Do I really need to spell it out for you?
The studio released its own "totally unauthorized" copy of the movie to build up yet more hype. It's actually quite cheap for them and effective on a consistent basis. After all, it's not like they have to pay sites like Slashdot to join in on the marketing bandwagon as well. Free advertising and teasing the raving fan(antics) as well.
Do the
Your tin foil hat is on too tight.
Oh god. Someone please shoot me now. I've had a brain malfunction.
Why has this anrachaic "free love" notion got perverted in to greedy self absorbed and self justifed crimminal behavior.
I don't actually see any comments yet from people who have actually been able to find the movie yet, and if so, where they found it. If someone wouldn't mind modding this comment up a bit, I'd be interested in hearing from people who successfully dowloaded it already, as well as speculation regarding the legitimacy of what you're seeing based on the content.
Please, if you have not found the movie online yet, do not clutter the discussion with unnecessary "I couldn't find it" commentary.
Thieves and pirates are criminals, dimwit, not customers. No way that posting or downloading the entirety of someone else's property constitututes fair use (read the clause?). If you're so convinced that it is legal, see if you can find a lawyer to represent you based on that belief.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Anyone who's actually into the VCD scene knows this drudge report crap is total garbage.
Get real you sorry fuck.
Trolling P2P networks for movies, LOL, right...
This guy obviously has no clue how the VCD scene works, if he or all the dumb ass idiots on slashdot did, they would know what a load of crap this story is.
Well, at least I am not interested in seeing a bad quality copy of TTT on a relatively small screen. It's a big screen kind of film, and so is most every new film. Until I get movie-theater quality and can afford a big enough screen, I am not interested.
- FF
while true;do echo -e -n "\033[s\n\033[u\134_\033[B";done
It is horrible that New Line is trying to profit off of 9/11! Whoever this Tolkein guy is, he's an insensitive capitalistic fuck face if he's making a movie with a title like that. I'll bet he's not even American!! What gives him the right!!!!
title says it all. I'm against the abuses of the draconian DMCA, but it's easy to see why it became neccessary. People who think its okay to steal something because it is not well locked.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Interesting the things people are willing to do for the Lord of the Rings crap. I wonder if they'll ever learn that there are far better things out there? Well, I guess they would some reading to do first - an unlikely turn of events.
... It's noticeable that when I looked at this story an hour or two ago, the five stories that are currently at +5, were then at +3. Not to say that the moderation system is necessarily broken, but it may be a good tactic to post early to stories. Again, sorry to be offtopic, but since there is no area to mention this and be ontopic, I will have to be.
We have been waiting for years now for the music and movie industries to completely lose their evil minds and follow the path you suggest.
Up to now, public awareness of the privacy and freedom problems posed by these two sectors of society is close to inexistent. The general public does not care much about this or that law, as long as some Britney has a new CD every six to nine months and the theaters have some new movies every summer.
Now, if you start jailing their sons and daughters, confiscating their properties and suing them into poverty for the sake of Disney, Sony and such other oh so poor companies, I believe we will see a backslash these guys won't forget for generations.
Some suggested the public reaction to the war on drugs should be seem as a sign that nothing will happen yet again. But I think these are two very different issues. Drugs and its criminal status are linked to issues like poverty, racism, mental illness and heavy health hazards. Britney is the opposite of it, as is Mickey Mouse. Jailing people for not paying a few bucks to very rich artists and companies will not be easily sold as a "Save the children" issue. Whose children, will ask John Doe, Hillary's? The Emperor's clothes will get pretty invisible here.
After that we will probably see the tide that will finnaly make some young executives sit back and start thinking about a new business model capable of keeping the money flowing instead of new laws.
When you see the lengths people are willing to go to to get ahold of the next episode of Sopranos you really have to wonder if these are signs of serious psychologocal addiction.
I know I watch too much TV and spend way too much money going to the movies and renting movies. Has anyone ever ready a study of the long term effects of video and video marketing?
Back to the point - With the number of people willing to sacrafice almost anything to get ahold of mp3Z and DVD Ripz I think the facts speak for themselves. The only rational conclusion is that we are addicted.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
But they try to hide it behind the cloak of freeing the media from the man or something. All ideas are open source. That sort of thing. Unlike music CDs, I have nor problem paying $15-$20 for a DVD on movies I like. But beyond that, do you actually want to watch what is probably another par excellent movie as a crappy .mpeg anyway? That alone is incentive enough to stay far, far away from it.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
They don't have the right to punish. That's reserved for the courts.
The movie execs have the right to _prosecute_, but not much else.
They may think they're the law, but they aren't.
It seems like people are saying its okay to steal binary numbers but not other things. But you dont really want the binary numbers do you? you dont want to just hex dump "Rollover bethoven" you want to listen to it. So it has value right? and you have taken that value without paying.
If I break into your home you would not like it. If I break into your home with 1's and 0's and steal your 1's and Zero's is that okay? If I program you java enables toaster to burn down your house is it okay because I did not actually take anything from you I just gave you some extra 1's and zeros?
Big deal! I've been watching it on my palantir for a month already!
P.S. It rocks.
Cool funny t-shirts for geeks, gamers and everyone else
hehe, silly zathruss. back to your time loop! ;)
Chris "Ng" Jones
cmsj@tenshu.net
www.tenshu.net
In case you hadn't noticed, i'm not depriving someone of property if i download a movie or song. The store owner has to pay for the DVDs on his shelf, and if i steal one, he's out the money he was charged by his wholesaler. He has to replace that copy.
If i download a movie, he loses nothing - he can still buy that copy. And you can't prove that i was going to buy the movie in the first place. So, no lost sale.
Look up stealing in the dictionary and you'll see what i mean.
drudge is one of the biggest idiots on the net...I'm sure his mom's friends sisters brothers lesbian lovers monkey told him that it thinks it saw the two towers once in a dream, and might be on the internet, so he took it as absolute fact, and "printed" it.
Same thing happened with Jason X, it came out a few months on Kazaa before it came out in the theater. The qualiy wasn't very good, since it was filmed in a theather, but I went back to see it at the movie theater when it came out, and it was the same cut as was released on the net a few months before. So maybe, juste maybe, TTT is already done and what could be floating around on the Net is "The Real Deal".
>I mean come ON now, who here hasn't actually read the books by Tolkein? ... I haven't :)
I think all this nonsens about ring to be vastly inflated, I was dragged along to see number 1 and wasn't impressed. I'll be dragged a long to see number 2 and i suspect I won't be to impressed there either.
And whats with this supposed power of that ring? I haven't seen any special powers, ok it makes Bilbo invisible, but that's it apparently! Does it shoot laser beams! Does it move mountains! Can it make them fly (hell no, they have to walk!) - face it, its just a cheap trinket Sauron had crafted to impress the chicks down at Ye Olde Drunken Dragon Cafe.
Oh, and want a real spoiler? The ring did it!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Though this will undoubtedly dissappoint some: THERE IS NO BOOTLEG OF TWO TOWERS. It does not exist. Drudge probably got on kazaa, saw a bunch of japanese scat porn renamed 'two towers', and posted the story without bothering to check into it at all.
Look, there's a handy rule of thumb about this stuff: if the earliest source for a piracy rumor is Matt Drudge, it is not true. TT would be a big enough deal that it would have showed up in other places first.
Instead of making threats about the law, just point out that the downloaded version is crap compared to the real thing.
You know that everyone who downloads the movie is also going to see it in theatres so why get you're panties in a bunch?
I saw a downloaded bersion of the first one, and I still went to the theatre. I'd buy the movie if my roomates hadn't.
IF a movie is worth spending so much and risking so much, then isn't it WORTH the wait and the 7 bucks for a ticket and another 7 for popcorn and pop.
this is not an MP3. i like to hear an album before I buy it of coarse, i will download it and if i like it make the short trek over to CD Warehouse and get it, its the least i can do if its a good product. This does not transfer over to movies.
If you download the movie and trade it, you are going to reduce the cash that they make in the theater. Yes, Many will still go see it in the theater but it reduces the movie.
I downloaded starwars episode 2 about two weeks before it opened but i couldn't convince myself to watch it, and i will never download a pre-release movie again.
also, i have waited a long time for this series of movies, i will put my money down to see it, its worth it. the guys that made it deserve their fair share and by downling(stealing) the movie you are stealing directly from them. Their is no RIAA here, you are stealling from them. The studio that makes a film gets a BIG chunk of it and YOU ARE STEALING FROM THEM.
Remember this movie was leaked by an insider.
Someone with priviledged access to the (near)completed and edited version has released this movie. This is not the P2P networks fault, the real problem is lax security in their production chain. Once their product is out in the wild a few individuals will share it, but let's remember that the P2P networks didn't break and enter. One of the employees paid to handle or create this product has *released* a copy.
That is the root of this problem, NOT the file sharing, I just hope that congress is made aware of this when the bleeding hearts try to use this as another excuse to control an entire industry they did nothing to create or contribute to.
Is it a coincidence that an employee of the movie industry releases an early version of LOTR on file sharing networks just when legislators are deciding whether to legalize hacking of P2P nodes?
Unlike many people seem to think, the only film of the trilogy that's been finished so far is the first one. The movies were only filmed at the same time, their post production is done one at a time. Just like Fellowship, The Two Towers probably won't be in its finished form with soundtrack and all the effects in place until October. That's why the story talked about "part of the film". And most likely The Return of the King exists only in rough cut form for now, they won't even start working on it before TTT is done.
Conspiracy mode started a little too late...
You keep using those words. I do not think they mean what you think they mean.
"Instant cassettes! There're in stores before the movie is even finished!" (from Spaceballs)
Next time, before everyone spends a lot of time and energy debating the morality of copyright laws and the hypocrisy of Hollywood and the MPAA, we should probably take a look at the source of the article to determine how seriously we should take it (even though that's not as much fun).
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Gandhi
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Gandhi
If you believe pointing to a dictionary can defend you in court, go find a lawyer.
In fact, you are depriving someone of property. The movie you're stealing is intellectual property. You're depriving the owner of that property of their exclusive right to reproduce and distribute copies of their property. If you illegally download a movie from someone who has illegally posted it, you are acting to deprive the property's owner of that right. Lost sales might be an issue in a damage claim as part of a civil suit, but -- as open source advocates realize -- property can be stolen even if the owner chooses to give it away.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Corps steal from you everyday. F#@# Them!!!!! Until you grow up and see that you will always be a dumb little brat.
GOD when will people wake up...
Please help me I live with Idiots
Is there an upper clue limit to be a movie executive?
I hope that they won't be imposing criminal penalties on anyone. Last time I checked, it took a criminal justice system to do that. Regardless of whatever ridiculous laws are passed for these Hollywood morons, I doubt they'll ever be given the right to prosecute people.
Ah, so I wasn't doing it to watch it early, I was doing it to criticize it. Look at that little flower in scene 47! It should've been pink, not yellow! I'm disgusted.
That green slime had it coming.
This is NOT true! Please edit/update this post! Stop spreading false news.
screw it.
I think you'd find that "criticism" would mean a published review, essay, examination, etc., that quotes a portion of the piece in order to illustrate and support the thrust of the criticism. It does not mean "It is legal for me to steal this thing before its owner wants to release it".
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
How can anyone distribute the movie to the theater when
"... they would be punishing anyone and everyone that downloads the film or distributes it to the full extent of the law."
Why just a notice about the movie being out on the net? Why not a detailed review with just a few spoilers to tide us law abiding folks over for the next few months..
û = Alt+0251
"The kind of security you are talking about is just not possible."
.
How about sending just the script instead of the actual movie to translators, for a start . . . idiots . .
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
Those of you who think that stealing a physical DVD is somehow the same as making a copy of the numbers on it, should contemplate why there is a "fair use" clause in the copyright law, but none in the laws for physical property. (i.e. "a television may be removed from its owner's home for scholarly or nonprofit purposes").
Of course the fact that there are separate laws to begin with, the fact the copyrights expire (presumably), and the fact that there is a separate and specific clause in the Constitution about creator's rights should also suggest that these are different activities.
stealing: 1. the act of a person who steals
steal: 1. to take (the property of another or others) without permission or right, esp. secretly or by force. 2. to appropriate (ideas, credit, words, etd.) without right or acknowledgement.
I'll stop there. (Props to Second Edition Random House dictinary for allowing me the priveledge of citing their definitions)
Under steal(1), intellectual property infringement steals someone's right to exclusivity. Also, the mere existence of a copy devalues the original work, thus taking (without right) the artist and publisher's profit.
Under steal(2), plainly visible. That describes I.P. theft to a T.
Thus, it *is* in the dictionary. You are wrong.
You won't admit it though. But, you'd better find a new way to justify your crime. Oh, and look up crime in the dictionary while you're at it.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
maybe the riaa will post it on their website along with the linkin park album
when you take the media without paying for it, it's theft of services, and no different than an employer that refuses to hand out a paycheck to a programmer after a month of coding because it's just ones and zeros on a hard drive.
Employers enter into contractual agreements to pay. Copyright infringers don't.
I understand prices go up, don't necesarily like it but I understand it. $7 or 8 per movie ticket, $3.50 for a drink, $4 for some popcorn and $4 for the little box of m&m's... And don't even think about bringing your own food/drinks. If I remember correctly, I have gone to see *one* movie in the theater in the last 3 years. The biggest reason? The viewing experience. Sure, we've got umpteen gazillion watts of sound coming from almost as many different directions and digital video, etc, etc... But damnit, if half the audience won't shut the hell up, I can't enjoy the movie!! And damned if I'm going to fork out $30-40 for 2 people to sit through a movie we can't enjoy. If there's a movie I want to see, I'll download it or rent it - but I'm not going back to the theater unless they make *major* improvements.
Cracking DeCSS is breaking criminal law. Downloading copyrighted files isn't.
It would also legitimize their attack on p2p networks...
It doesn't really matter if it was deliberately leaked. The trafficing is illegal, no matter how the content got out into the wild.
How it 'escaped' is a seperate matter, to be dealt with seperately.
If I download the movie or not... I'm still going to see it multiple times in the theatre, and pick up all 6 editions of the DVD that they are going to release.
Some people are just dumb.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
"...making a copy of the numbers on it" is too broad. (In any case, intellectual property has little, if anything, to do with "physicial" property.) If you copy some of those numbers in accordance with the fair use clause, you're OK. If someone disagrees, they can take you to court.
/.'s think that is fair use, why don't they start countersuing the media companies?
If you copy the entirety of an intellectual property and post it on a global distribution network, you won't find solace in the fair use clause.
If so many
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Mod parent up pease! Or at least let's stop posting stupid stories.
I liked the Two Towers movie they played on CNN last year (somewhere in september) much better.
*IF* this is the real Two Towers movie, who really cares? Does anyone think this will affect the movie's grosses in the slightest?
Most of the criminals downloading this movie will agree with me, in that watching a washed-out and pixelated bootleg in your parents' basement can never compare to watching it in a theater.
~D:
Arandir pegged it. I'd also like to add that yesterday everyone was freaking out and splitting hairs because MIT "stole" a single image from a comic book and used it in a presentation given out to s small number of people. The outrage was palpable. What if I put those JPEGs on Gnutella? Then they'd be precious jewels of "fair use," right?
Petter Jackson and the entire cast and crew of Lord of the Rings worked very, very, hard to bring one of the greatest adventure stories ever written to the screen in much of its original glory. Shit, I feel like sending them money every time I watch my own damn DVD.
Darn, that's unbelievable. Shall I download it? Or shall I not?
Baseline: I'm a little sceptical...
Bizar technology?
If you don't spread it around too much, I can point you to a really good set of spoilers.
Try here.
I went to see XXX yesterday. I understand previews and enjoy them, even though it was the second time id seen the same ones.
8.25 for a matinee, 18 bucks for drinks, candy, and popcorn for my daughter and I then sit through endless slides and to top it all off 4 commercials before the previews.
Ok, Yeah I downloaded XXX as well. And Ive watched it twice. Ive seen it in the theater twice as well.
My first response to this article was to pop over to bearshare and search for two towers. Ill still see it in the theater but since it was made a while ago, it should jhave already been released. No need to sit on this film. its there fault for sitting on it. Everything gets leaked if you give it enough time.
Hope I find it. Will be enjoyable to see before it comes out. With the advertising im forced to watch in the theator I dont feel bad about downloading movies likes signs and watching them and not paying in the theater. Now the movie studioes have to actually count on movies being worth seeing for cinematics for people to pay for them.
What the Intetnet sector learned was that you cant have lots of money for nothing, Hollywood will have to learn that too.
PS: XXX downloaded version sucked. Hard to make out action and details, Thats why the theater. Ill buy the dvd when it comes out. Signs sucks, but it just sucked.
--- Always remember. 99.36% of all statistics are inaccurate.
It doesn't really matter if it was deliberately leaked. The trafficing is illegal, no matter how the content got out into the wild.
It certainly does matter, if public policy is being made as a result in a way that harms the many to protect the few who, it just so happens, are leaking the material.
That an adolescent with a computer and an easy way to download a hot new movie months ahead of release will give into temptation is hardly news, hardly suprising, and doesn't warrent the kinds of policy changes that are being made, snide remarks about tinfoil hats notwithstanding.
That that fact seems to be irrelevant to the policy makers, some of whome appear dead set on making exactly those sorts of changes, is IMHO indicative of just how far our erstwhile democracy has fallen.
That no one seems to care is, I think, the final nail in the coffin of the digital renaissance. There is really only one entity that benefits from this: the MPAA entertainment cartel. It is not inappropriate to question what their role in all this is, given the current political situation, nor is it unreasonable to be suspicious, given the history of their behavior.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
"Remember this movie was leaked by an insider."
That detail can't be repeated often enough, or loudly enough.
If I were in charge of this production, someone would be looking for a new job, and I would make sure their next employer was hiring him knowing that he was fired for grand theft.
Good movies can often be very expensive to make . Just because any guy on the street can get a video camera and a cheap video card does not make everyone Francis Ford Coppola (insert your favorite director here).
In spite of the fact that there are too many middlemen and not enough value added, I'd say right youare wrong. You seem to be saying that people are entitled to free access to other peoples hard work and I disagree. Perhaps after you give away all the results of your work, you will have a different point of view.
Ehm.. Oh.. i seem to be a little late..
Even if I say something insightfull or inteligent, it doens't matter cause I'm an ass.
Out of the people who download this movie, how many will not subsequently see it in the theatre? My guess would be that someone who goes through the effort of downloading a gigabyte+ file is a big fan and that would not prevent them from paying out the movie fee and seeing it again.
... I can see now why they would be upset.
So in the end, the only money that the movie industry loses is the money it spends on lawsuits to fight this.
The only things that I can see stopping someone from seeing a movie at the theatres that they already saw online are:
1) the movie was crappy enough that it was not worth the $15 that they are charging to go the the movies these days (doubtful in this case judging by the trailers)
2) that someone could not afford the $15 to see the movie in the theatres (doubtful since someone/someone's parents who can offord the computer equipment and broadband connection necessary to download these trailers can certainly afford the movie ticket price)
So the main effect that these pirate prereleases have on the movie industry is to force them to make their movie theatre pricing consistent with the quality of their offerings
You're obviously not watching your DivX:es (with AC3 sound, no bloody downmix) on a 10-feet-wide projection cloth in your living room (BIG SCREEN, dolby surround, comfier sofa, popcorn, single malt, a fuzzy blanket, and whatever the hell I like to wear in my own home).
Why did I get that equipment? Because I got tired of watching movies on a 19" computer screen.
Try to remember that these are the people who want to take away everyone's computers so they can usurp the public communication channel known as the internet. If they think *that* is feasible, then protecting a few dozen tapes should be trivial. Just do all the translations in a secure room with a big guard posted at the door. Search everyone going in or out. No problem at all.
You got exactly one first post! Hold your head high.
*yawn* anyways, FOAD.
Thx.
Perhaps they haven't even leaked it at all. Do YOU have a copy of The Two Towers? Can you even find one? I wouldn't put it past them to pretend to leak something and then cry blue murder to the press, the police, and the senate. But maybe I'm just paranoid. :)
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
Heh. Is it really spelled "Zathruss?" I always thought it was spelled "Zathrus." Or maybe I'm confusing him with his brothers, also named "Zathruss," and the other one, named "Zaathrus."
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
For the record, I have a strong willpower and will not be downloading this alleged film.
;)). In fact, they've been pretty open minded about mp3s as a whole. Was it their fans fault that their single got leaked? Nah. Someone within, or more likely, someone at yonder record distribution joint was responsible.
Okay, you got me - I'd be viewing it in a heartbeat (Arise, arise, viewers of Theoden!), but I've got a shitty 56k and I'm lazy enough to not leave my computer on for five days while it downloads.
Speaking of the MPAA, let's include the RIAA. A favorite band of mine, which just happens to do some Tolkien-related music every now and then, recently had an incident like this happen. One of their singles was leaked to the net months ahead of its scheduled release date. They were quite mad, of course, but didn't take it out on their fans. (Who went and downloaded it, because hey, we waited years for a new album
Same thing here. Are the millions of viewers of the Two Towers at fault for the leak? Nope. It's someone inside who had to release it.
Unless, of course, some nut was running through New Zealand with his camcorder. But somehow, I doubt that's the case.
Anyone remember Spiderman? IIRC, that got leaked before opening in theatres as well. As a result, it broke massive amounts of records. Ya know why?
Most people don't have a huge ass screen and full theatre-like surround sound in their homes. Not to mention that movies downloaded from the 'net suck quality wise.
Fans will still see the movie in theatres. (If only to mentally undress Arwen and Eowyn on the big screen.)
Anyway, I forgot what point I was trying to make, because I'm laughing so hard at the idea of suing everyone who views this 'early release'.
At any rate, my prediction is the opening week of The Two Towers will bring in more cash than the first two weeks of Fellowship.
FOTR. get it?
My guess (somewhat propped up by recent RIAA actions that are of the same general thrust) is that you're right, and this is a deliberate leak of a marked copy (or several differently-marked copies) for ease of tracking it thru the evil P2P networks, for the end purpose of waving its trail in front of the U.S. Congress. "See? You've got to do something about all this piracy! And not only American pirates, but all those evil ferriner pirates as well! Shut down the internet at the border, or we'll take our toys and go home!"
Hmm. If they get that "license to hack" bill passed, should we refer to the **AA as "privateers" ??
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I would say his post is the published review
See http://www.yarinareth.net/caveatlector/archive/wee k_2002_09_01.html#e000907 . The Two Towers isn't finished yet. There are no fully-complete copies, on Gnutella or anywhere else.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If you wanna go there, and obviously IANAL (but since you have stated otherwise, I believe YANAL too), the whole problem is that the megacorporations who control the content production and distribution are willing to make a copyright violation as serious a crime as murder, grand theft or drug smugling. This completely violates the long-standing principle of law that prescribes the punishment should be proportional to the crime. If you don't think this will cause a backslash I think you are misreading the public willingness to put up with anything the corporations want.
The only backlash here is the one against the anti-intellectual-property camp and their constant disregard for the laws and treaties under which we live
Here, I believe, you are confusing matters even more. Who, exactly, are you talking about? The Free Software Foundantion? The Open Source Movement? Would you care to point instances of their disregard for law and treaties?
And this, naturally, without even beginning to discuss the problem of how to deal with unfair, unjust laws. You are aware that sometime in the past the law used to say women couldn't vote, ain't you? And black people could not vote and could not do a host of other things.
If 'The Two Towers' is anything akin to 'The Fellowship of the Ring' and leaves out characters and entire parts of the book that spanned two bloody chapters I would just as soon save my $13.50 and download it. Yeah it's stealing, but so is charging one person that much to see a movie.
My guess is that the first x coppies you try to download, with x being the ammount of time from when people find out it's out there, will be some other movie that has been renamed, possibly pr0n, or possibly a couple movies for the different parts of the movie to account for length.
-- Any comments seen here are not mine, but a mixture of alchohol and lack of sleep.
Nobody but the people who created the DMCA "caused" the DMCA. Think for a moment about "cause" and "effect". We might just as easily say that we "caused" them to lower their prices, or that we "caused" them to put their products online in a form that would be as useful to us as the pirated reproductions, but none of that ever happened.
They "caused" the DMCA by deciding that radical technological developments didn't justify adaptive business models/practices. They decided it would not be for them to change...even though it could be argued that nearly a century ago their own industry, coupled with technological developments, spoiled the potential markets for live music performance, musical instruments, sheet music, etc...they decided it would be for society to change.
They would rather render new technology impotent to create new market realities. Did they consider whether or not this was the right path? No, I don't think so. It's just enlightened self-interest working its selfish magic. Surely the only question that they ever asked themselves was whether or not they had the political capitol and lobbying muscle to pull it off. They're doing a bang-up job, and they're not even close to being finished. They'll wine about piracy until they experience ever-expanding profits (pay no attention to the larger recession or the fact that they haven't shown anything valuable to distinguishing music "consumers" in years).
What bothers me the most is voices like your own, demonstrating the extent to which they're winning the PR war as well. They're taking away your freedom to use technology for perfectly legitimate purposes (betamax VCR "legitimate usages" = "legal product" precedent, R.I.P. Now, if it can be used for pirating we have to do something about it...obviously bad for technological development), and you're worried about them. It's so sad.
Every copyright entails a contract. "Copying or distributing without the express permission of the copyright holder is prohibitied." By definition, every copyright infringement is a contract violation.
There is a very good reason to download a copy of this. To figure out if it is actually out there or not.
I have a couple of very good reasons to believe that this has more to do with Drudge making up ways to be "relevant" than it has to do with actual reality.
First of all, they are not done with the actual editing of the film. Hard to do a bootleg of a film when the film is not even done yet!
Second, there is a longstanding tradition of mislabeling on the p2p networks. Much of what is labeled as "Lord of the Rings" is either the cartoon or something totally bogus. (Not to mention any song parody is labeled as being by "Weird Al" or "Dr. Demento", even if it has nothing to do with either of them.)
I take this as being crap-filled hype until proven otherwise.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
There is no copy of this movie on IRC. There is no copy of this movie on Usenet. There is no copy listed on vcdquality.com. I seriously doubt that there is a copy on p2p since movies are always released to IRC or Usenet first. Besides the fact that the movie isn't done yet.
They are probably just getting this confused with the clip about the Two Towers that is available on the Fellowship DVD.
I won't dispute that downloading the movie is illegal (and probably should be). However, regardless of whether I manage to download it before the release or not, I'm pretty sure I'll see it three times in the theater and buy both versions of the DVD. Given that, I can't really consider it unethical to download.
And if they are making money off of having a truly spectacular bunch of ones and zeroes it is going to be what is going to make them want to make more of those ones and zeroes, particularly since only a minority of films makes money. Investing in movies is highly speculative. Sure it is easy to see in hindsight that Spiderman was a super hit and that Pluto Nash was a mistake, but could you have told that when they were just a few pages of writeup about a movie based on a comic book? (Pluto Nash was an obscure independent book, but so was Men in Black!) That is, however, the point where somebody has to put down 100 million dollars to get the ball rolling. When they smack down those 100 million dollars you can bet that they regard those ones and zeroes to be worth selling and that anybody who thinks that they should be free to broadcast around the world (which is really what this 'sharing' is)is a thief.
The majority of films lose money and quite a number do not begin to make money until they hit the home market, which is exactly where these folks believe that they aren't 'stealing' if they just download the movie rather than buying or renting it or getting pay-per-view. If folks are downloading the movie it cuts into DVD sales, rentals, and cable TV revenues. Those are real revenues that make the difference between profit and loss for most movies.
Then there is the fact that most of what you pay at the theatre and at the video store does NOT go to the film company...it goes to the movie theatre or the video store.
So the person that you are most stealing from when you download the movie rather than buying or renting the DVD is the video store.
But it's not stealing.
Trespassing, yes.
You have not COST the movie theater a dime by sitting in an empty seat in their theater, watching a movie you didn't pay to watch.
Now, I'm not excusing it... I'm simply saying it's not the same as if you walk into wal-mart and steal six leather jackets.
Oh,puh-lease. Like *anyone* who would bother downloading an unfinished 1+ gig movie won't run to see it when it hits the theaters and buy it the second the DVD comes out?
;-)
Although I do not really believe this exists, since they haven't *finished* the movie, even if it does, just think of it as "time shifting" in the opposite direction of what we normally hear about. As a protected "fair use" right, so what if people time-shift to a period before they actually buy the DVD? Has anyone *EVER* seen a law that specifies that time-shifting must only occur in the forward direction?
Who, exactly, are you talking about?
I'm talking about you, you idiot. I'm talking about people who try again and again to argue that copyright violation isn't a crime, and that stealing isn't wrong because only the big, faceless corporations suffer. This is a foolish argument, and those of us with sense see right through it.
Calm down. There is no need to start calling names in a civil discussion. That said, I have NOT, in any of my comments so far, stated my position about copyright violation. I believe my first and foremost argument was about the social reaction the companies may suffer if they get really serious about sending to jail the boyas and girls who are downloading their property. I made no argument about the fairness or unfairness of stealing from a corporation.
I also said it clearly that I think I new business model is needed. That much should be clear. When most of your consumers start taking away your product for free somewhere, you have problem no law will solve. Your product has suddenly lost its trade value and to recover it you must investigate what is exactly that made people exchange the quality and confot of your product by the uncertainty and limited availability of a instable network.
But if you seriously think this is one of those times, if you seriously think that your right to free stuff is being violated, then you need to spend some time reevaluating your life.
Again, I was never talking about "the right for free stuff". I was talking about not having my privacy and my property violated because some company think I might one day violate their copyright. I am also talking about about keeping in touch with the real world, where the public does not really give a damn if Disney made 10 or 20 billion dollars last year. And where the public will find it very wierd if when a teenager got some years of jail time for a "crime" that costs the producer almost nothing (for what that particular individual has "stolen", if you can "steal" such untangible things as a string of bytes).
You are aware that you sound like an idiot comparing media piracy to women's suffrage or civil rights, aren't you?
Deep down you know it is not about copyright violation, but about the right for privacy and the advancement of technology.
I'm suprised that no one here has mentioned this yet but one knowing the "scene" the two towers is not released just check isonews and i'll check my top sites (no not those warez/porno ad sites a double meaning here) secondly complaining about quality is silly I got an svcd quality copy of the fellowship right after it came out the source was an oscar voting dvd copy. I watched the real dvd recently and compared it to my svcd and the quality loss was negligible on top of that my svcd was far far superior to the VHS so quality in the scene is a silly thing to complain about, but your most likely only complaining because your access is limited to kazaa or morpheous or some p2p bullshit where it's mostly asf'ed divx'ed bullshit instead of what the original release by the hard working groups was intended to be.
If copyrights create "property", then isn't it massive theft for the government to have them eventually expire? Imagine if traditional property became public domain ~100 years after being manufactured...
--
Benjamin Coates
goto the movie, buy it, and do all what you normally would, this just meens you can preview it first, if just as many or more people spend thier money on it that downladed it online where is the moral problem, and where is the problem with the movie industry, they probably won't try to sue anyone if it helps them
I just noticed that there is no mention of Lord of the Rings on the main Drudge Report page. Was it there before? Why wouldn't they have a link to it on the main page?
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
http://forum.sharereactor.com/viewtopic.php?t=2160 2&highlight=two+towers
Take the time to read till the end.
If nobody knows about it 'there', nobody knows it.
If someone claims (see previous thread) that has seen it downloading from the net, he/she obviously lies.
The only copy I found turned out to be a fake (Spider Man screener)... Judging from the number of similarly sized videos on WinMX, I'd have to concur that it's most likely a hoax...
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Copyright violation is civil, not criminal, litigation, you arrogant prick. No one is going to jail or getting a criminal record for sharing files.
Someone said it right a few posts back...pointing to a dictionary does not make you correct in a court of law.
I love how you people can be so flip and cocky about your statements when you're completely and utterly incorrect.
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
It is not theft, and you know it.
People people people...this is a joke. It is someone toying with you. It is a fake. This movie is not being traded on sites in the scene...and these sites are where most things you find on Kazaa and such begin. On a certain IRC server (which I cannot say) it was a big joke that was blown out of proportion. This movie is NOT out. Even if it was, I would see it in theaters..because it being shot in theatres crushes the quality of the movie. Camera shot films are pure trash (case in point Star wars II). I saw the movie 3 times in the theater. I got the camera version and I couldn't watch it: the quality sucked and crushed the experience. Please..do not become one of the mindless people that plague America today. Find out before you post, or open your mouth.
Copyrights don't create intellectual property. Property is produced by the person who creates it. Copyright protects that person's interests in his/her creation for a period of time, as defined in law. In the U.S., that period of time has increased subsantially. Also, creators of intellectual property can transfer copyright to a corporation or some other organization. This often happens, for example, when a musician signs a contract with a recording company. That company will hold copyright on the tracks on the CD, while the artist may hold copyright on the actual sheet music.
"Traditional", or physical property is also transferred from one owner to the next when the property is sold. If a piece of physical property -- say, a house -- is left without an owner for enough time, an element of the government will certainly intervene. That's not reverting to public domain, but it does represent government action in the public's behalf.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
How is copying a movie (which someone spent a lot of time and money creating) your right to privacy?
I can't see anything even closely resembling your "right to privacy" in pirating -- other than they share some of the same letters.
You misundertand me here. I am not saying that copying a movie is part of my right to privacy. I am saying that the same laws (both in existence and in the making) that are supposed to prevent copying of copyright content are also restricting the privacy (and left unchecked will go on to open your personal property to the eyes of the law enforcement without reason except that of protecting the profit of half a dozen corporations).
Secondly, how come there is this supposed "right of advancement of technology" yet someone doesn't have the right to have their art protected?
I don't think you should put words in my mouth. I never said content providers can't use technology to protect themselves. I just say that the law should not prevent the development of technology and the use of this technology. The recent trends in legal copyright protection are a menace not to pirates (they will keep triving elsewhere) but to technology development and even to the whole free/open software as a whole.
The DMCA has already been used to jail one programmer for some months. It can also be used to prevent the public from knowing flaws and bugs in proprietary software. New laws mandating CRM in software may be used to kill some pieces of free software. Even independent cryptography research is threatned. As it is, a state of affairs that pleases many governments.
Thirdly, what buisness model for the MPAA and RIAA members would you propse (short of giving it away) that would almost halt piracy. Even if you could download a CD for $8 (50% off) people would still pirate it as much as they do now. Even if it was given away, but you could not copyright it, it would still be pirated. Until more people become more moralistic (for lack of a better term), these laws need to exist.
Would they? Some years ago, before the advent of fast internet and MP3, were people actively buying pirated CDs made in China? Some were, yes, but most people were buying their CDs where they always did, in the stores. I know that if I can download the music I want at the bitrate I want through a efficient network for a fair price, I will do just so.
I believe the music industry problem is that they can't see a way to make people pay for the low quality of their offering except by law. If you could choose which songs you want from an average CD, 10 out of 12 songs would be left undownloaded, unheard and unknown. And that is an optimistic figure. But the industry has grown fat and lazy, they can't see a world where they can't make you pay for the 10 garbage songs to have the right to hear the 2 good ones, the ones that made you purchase the album.
I will agree that perhaps archival backup should be legal as long as they stay in the owners possesion. Fair use should exist, but not in the manner that most people on Slashdot think it should. Their idea of fair use, and probably yours, is that you can use any amount of a "work" you want and that's fair.
You judge me unfairly. If you peruse my comments in this thread you will never see a defense of free-loading on the artists shoulders. I even think the producers and distributors have a place, a value to add to the process. I don't think (and I don't know anyone who does) downloading a song from the P2P networks is fair use. But I know it is a fact, a fact that should warn the industry about their relationship to their consumers and to their artists.
I also think the companies should expend more time and money thinking about how they can make a profit with these new technologies, instead of expending their time and money in the halls of Congress trying to buy laws to prevent the existence of the said technologies.
...to post that
Before you start calling people arrogant pricks, perhaps you should apprise yourself of Title 17, Chapter 5, Section 506 of the US Code. Copyright violations can incur criminal charges.
Yeah, I'm also 6'2" and the seat in front of me is always a problem. And then I've got to find a place to put my legs too... Damn theatres...
If I were a major studio interested in limiting future trading and copying of my copyrighted works, and were a little unscrupulous, here's what I might do:
1) Find a movie that nerarly everyone knows about, and is eagerly anticipating.
2) Inform the news that a copy has been distibuted online in advance of release (no acutal leak). Rattle the saber and declare that everyone violating your rights will be punished. (Again, realizing that this is, in fact, wildly impossible)
3) Expect article to generate public cognizance of issue, and outrage ("What ?!? they get to see it four months before we do! Jail Them!!!")
3) Realize that any retraction of said leak will appear on page 37 (bits 6,341,981->6,342,141 for any digital news). Outrage will not be affected by said retraction, but will dies off in a day or so when the next big story hits ("Angelina Jolie to Marry Actor")
4) Send your lobbyists to Congress to complain about your copyrights being trodden on, armed with a solid example (even Senators have head of Frodo)
5) Get overbearing, Fair-Use-unfriendly digital management legislature approved.
Of course, I might be paranoid, but what Slashdotter shouldn't be?!
Sure, resale of copyrighted material for profit, as in pirating rings. File sharing on p2p networks cannot and will not get you in jail under current law.
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
Setting aside the abuses of the DMCA. What does the DMCA say. It says you should not break in to my house just because I used an inferior lock. It's not my responsibility to protect my music/movies/software as perfectly as possible. It's your responsibility not to decode my works and give them away without my consent. THe fact the law even had to be written is what I was lamenting. Slashdotter's did not cause it per say, but their (minority one hopes) support for the right to steal is what made it neccessary to spell it out. Carrying burgulars tools is a crime, and so is carrying DECSS is what the judge decided.
For all you who imagine that electronic shoplifting is somehow different than walking into a local shop and pocketing a DVD, here's the text of the fair use clause from the U.S. copyright law [copyright.gov]. You will notice that "wanting to see a movie prior to release" is not listed as an example of fair use. Most people are well aware that downloading a movie is a violation of copyright laws. But does that make it right? Should it be a violation of copyright laws? I don't think so. And even if it were, I think the movie industry is being willfully beligerant if they try to "punish" anyone who downloads a copy of it, or any pre release version of a movie. If someone cares enough about a movie to waste gigs and gigs of bandwidth to download a rather crappy cam version, and risk the wrath of New Line Cinema, in the process, then wouldn't it stand to reason that they would also be willing to spend the $7.50 it requires to see the movie in 8 channel SDDS surround sound, on a 50+ foot screen, in almost infinitly better quality? When you watch a movie on a little 17" computer monitor, you don't come any where close to experiencing the movie, as you do in a movie theatre. Besides, if you have so much money that a broadband connection isn't going to put any sort of financial burden on you, then why wouldn't you buy a ticket, or multiple tickets? And have we forgotten Spider-Man, yet? A camcorder version of that was released two weeks before the actual movie came out. Did that hurt sales? No. Spider-Man still pulled in record breaking ammounts of money. I mean, what were they expecting? Simply put, pre release copies of movies are not hurting the movie industry at all. And if they're going to "punish" everyone who downloads them, then they are going to end up shooting themselves in the foot...
... and coughing and people shuffling in their seats and knocking your chair and giving away the film and asking questions and munching and slurping and laughing like a Hyena and etc ...
I always wait for DVD now.
it ends with a bunch of fucked up Muslim faggots that fly some aeroplanes into the twin towers, destroying them both.
My two bits regarding the conspiracy theory regard the movie BlackHawk down.
k ha wk.screening/
Bootlegs seemed to make it to Somalia quite soon after it first started showing.
http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/africa/01/22/blac
Nobody seemed to make a stink of this, because it was abroad? By a third world country nonetheless? We obviously have no problem tracking down illegal copies of software in nations more developed than Somalia.
http://www.rferl.org/mm/2002/01/4-250102.html
See endnote at site above.
Unless the real movie is a blank screen.
WWJD? JWRTFA!
...until, that is, you hover over the filename and find that its the animated adventure, and weighs in at a hefty ~900mb. now, as cool as this is, i dont think some people will be too happy when they watch it for the first time :)
Dont ask me...Im just the bass player.
Enough said? Anyone downloading it from the net is stealing. Please stop giving Hollywood all the excuse it needs to go after your rights. They are halfway there with the DMCA and they are about to be all the way there with the CBDTPA.
Please stop this nonsense. You can hide behind the "it's our way of protesting" all you want, but you know it's just the thrill of knowing you got it for free that keeps you downloading.
Thieves deserve jailtime and I sincerely hope that they find everyone who was downloaded it. Maybe it'll root the bad element out of this community.
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
First off: I'm on your side. But you fail to understand who you are arguing with, or why it will never amount to anything.
The "stupid assholes" simply see the distinction you're making as a strategy to change the subject. A "rationalization". As if they are the only ones allowed to be rational, and then only when it suits them. That you are trying to argue that the punishment doesn't fit the crime, falls on deaf ears, because again... they are the only ones allowed to decide the punishment, and they have no reason to show mercy. Who cares, if some college kid gets ass-raped for 5 years, because he let some friends copy a pattern of 1s and 0s off his harddrive or cd. It's not like it's them, or anyone they know.
And nothing you can say, short of agreeing with them unconditionally, will get you anywhere with them. Ever. And when it gets to be this way, as soon you will realize it to be, it's best to just shut up, and plot their overthrow. Try to figure out ways to starve the RIAA, and the idiots that worship them. Make them feel pain. They don't care about yours, and they've shut themselves off from ever sympathizing with yours. You even tried to reason with them, and look how they treat you? It's time to tell them to go fuck themselves, and be done with it.
My friend told me that a guy where his cousin works knew this other guy who managed to download Indiana Jones 4, AND IT HASN'T EVEN BEEN MADE YET!
:)
So how about that huh?? Quick, I'll put it on a website and submit it, and hey presto - news!
C'mon... you guys are like the Spanish Inquisition with news articles. It seems as long as it's been published on a server it MUST be reliable - there seems to be no attempt to even find out if its reputable.
And again like the Spanish Inquisition, no one excepts you when their server gets slashdotted
--- Why are you wearing that stupid bunny suit? | Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?
That's how it can get all these new movies.
Other posters have answered the philisophical elements of your essay far better than I could have. However, another problem with Intellectual Property as a concept is the difficulty in defining the elements involved and enforcing the rules around them.
What is a unit of property? How much must a piece of data differ from another piece of data to not be considered a copy? Is an artist's rendition of a beautiful cathedral a theft of the archetecht's work? What if the artist's medium is sculpture? What if it's concrete and steel?
Any visual or auditory medium can be copied well enough to be considered perfect as soon as anyone witnesses the property. People will smuggle high-tech recording equipment into theaters and concerts, and their data will be copied. It would be easier to legislate fingernail length than IP theft. No matter what technology is used to keep people away from the medium, at some point they will see or hear it, and they may be wearing special glasses or hearing aids.
The key ingredient to understanding the irrelevance of IP law is trying to determine what has actually been taken from the artist. When physical property is taken from an owner, they can identify the last time they had it, and the first time they didn't have it. This is not so with copied IP. The artist can't tell how many copies of her work have been made, or when.
Note also that the "value" of IP as determined by the free market goes up over time as it is purchased from the owner. No other kind of property can be re-sold in this manner.
"Hello, would you like to rent an apartment? I have only one, and I'm renting it out to a million other people, but you don't have to worry about waiting to use the bathroom because you'll get your own copy of the apartment. But you still have to pay me. Why? Because otherwise you'd be stealing."
"Hello, would you like some food? I can give you as many servings as you like and I will never run out, but I have to charge you for every serving or I will starve."
I guess I dipped into the philosophy afterall. Oh well.
No, while I'm certain I can't change your mind on this one - I strongly disagree with you.
I don't think "piracy" is really "theft" in the traditional sense, so I don't need to make up lies and become "self-brainwashed" to make myself sleep well at night over it.
As many people have pointed out before, the term "piracy" is ridiculous in the first place. It's a euphamism created to make the act sound much more devious and wrong than it really is. Pirates hijaacked ships with weapons drawn, and forced people to hand over items of value or risk death. It's insane to claim that copying "copyrighted works" is in any way similar.
The bottom line is, piracy ends up being yet another of the victimless crimes out there. Sure, you can create scenarios where someone gets injured by the act - but it's all based on quite likely incorrect assumptions.
Primarily, the assertion that by copying a movie or piece of software, I'm somehow depriving the author of revenue is, at best, a "straw dummy".
Can you prove I would have plunked down the cash for the product if I hasn't duplicated it instead? Fact is, I buy plenty of "virtual goods". I pay about $25 a month to watch whatever programming I'm spoon-fed via satellite TV, for starters. I buy software packages now and then, too. I own over 200 music CDs and a handful of vinyl records, not to mention 60 or 70 cassettes, 30 or 40 DVD movies, and at least 20 movies on VHS tape. I go to the theater occasionally too. When I had a Playstation 2, I bought around 20 games for it. I certainly feel I've done *at least* my fair share of contributing a percentage of my income to these industries over the years! Nonetheless, I've also "pirated" a large number of programs and music. I'm here to tell you, though, there's no way I'd spend more than I already on these things. There's no real "lost revenue" from any of the stuff I copied - because the industries in question already collected the max. amount from me they possibly could collect.
Reality is, when you're in the business of selling digital works, or recordings made on analog media, your real goal is to offer a vast selection of "tempting choices" for your customers to buy. Most people will get "illegal copies" of at least 2 or 3 for every one they decide to pay for. That's just how the business model works. Greed drives them to scare people with legal threats, because they're dealing with a largely saturated market. There are more works out there than any one person can digest, and most people already buy as much of it as they can afford.
The Two Towers is NOT on the net. I did a seraach on WInMX to grab the trailer to the movie to check out something. I was suprised when I saw "Two Towers 2002"
Well I did what any one would have done. I exclaimed, "Holy shit" and went to DL it.
Needless to say, I was in a long ass line. Well I went to find other sources and what did I get. Some Busty Asian porno movie.
Obviously someone is just renaming the movie to get us all in a tizzy.
(Why do I post this...? No one will read it, much less, moderate it)
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
How long does it take a palestinian whore to make a bomb?
9 months!
I mean it's not like popular music is all that good, let alone movies.
If they got their info from napster then it looks like the movie is just a renamed Hobbit! Came across this conversation during a search.
Okay, so what you need is a "Dialogue list" which has already been segmented into the different scenes where the dubbing will appear. Perhaps a little better narration so you can understand the context. These movies are probably being translated into dozens of different languages and each translator is redoing the same task of matching the dubbing with different scenes. This could be done once, reducing costs, and this would decrease the likelihood of it getting on the net 4 months in advance . . . Probably not that simple, but its taken 5 minutes for me to think of a solution when these guys have had years to get their sh!t together.
What you have to remember is that there are guys getting paid many times what you are, whose soul duty in life is increase efficiency and better safeguard the company's assets. However, they are screwing up big time and blaming the Internet for their inability to cope with a changing market. If you made such a big mistake in your job you would be fired in no time. However, these guys are immune to such treatment because they are safely buried behind the walls of corporate bureaucracy. So that makes them idiots with job security, and I don't intend to send any of my $ their way (you're an unfortunate bystander, sorry).
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
The master cut of Fellowship of the Ring was shipped from Weta to the U.S. on November 6, 2001, if I remember correctly. Does anyone really believe Peter Jackson would pass up 2 months of production time?
You are making your post on the assumption that people that download this film are both:
.0001% out there who are big enough fans of the series to download the movie and never sink a dime into the franchise, it's this kind of anti-filesharing mindset that will doom the filesharing industry not to expand until there are sufficient measures in place to make sure that the flow of information is always controlled by the media industry. It's like the ages (or at least months)-older anti-MP3 arguements. Sure, people may be downloading mp3s, they may even be burning them onto CDs. But those CDs will not compare to being able to say, "I own this CD, the original, not a burnt copy." And those CDs and live .mp3s will not compare to being able to say, "I was at Warped Tour 2002" or "I was at the Pop Sucks Tour."
a) not going to see the movie in theatres, and
b) not going to buy the movie on DVD.
Now, this verson of The Two Towers, no matter how good, would NEVER compare to the version seen in theatres, on the big screen (unless you have 10 million dollars, and a house with a true home theatre). I know that even though I may download it, or get it from someone who does, I'm still going to see it in theatres just as many times as I saw Lord of the Rings (which is every chance I get).
And once again, the picture quality of the downloaded version is going to be nowhere near DVD quality, will have none of the extras, etc. While this may be an issue when quality goes up, and bandwidth along the length of the internet to compensate, it's not one now. Once again, I may dl it, watch it a few times just because I'm bored and can't get to a theatre, but I'd do the same after I buy the DVD, which will have enough special features to warrant the extra couple bucks I'm willing to shell out.
While your concern is noted for the sake of all the
In conclusion, your arguement is flawed in that you make a crucial assumption central to your case. You assume that people download from file sharing programs to the exclusion of other mediums, as opposed to in addition to other mediums. Sure, I shop on Half.com, does that make me a thief, just because I want to buy CDs for less than 20 bucks apiece? Sure, I go over to my friend's house and watch his copy of "The Lord of the Rings" on DVD, does that make me a pirate, because I don't just buy my own copy to save me the 5 minutes of walking across the street, or *gasp* god forbid I were to borrow it from him, and rip it to my computer to view at my leisure. I'd still want my own copy eventually, when I stopped being as strapped for cash as I am.
And besides, I thought that copyright infringement protected artists from having me steal their work, and pass it off as my own...
-1, Disagree is not a valid option. Troll, Flamebait and Offtopic are not a substitute.
I drive fast as well, and this really would convince me to drive well under the speeding limit until the end of time.
Makes you wonder - maybe all those wimps driving 90 km/hr on a highway are onto something ethical, as in "I should not speed because the chance I take with my life and (most importantly) others' is just not worth it."
Similarly, perhaps there are people out there who do not download movies because it has more than a passing resemblance to stealing, or who would pay for the download (to the producer) if there was such an option. Just as there are people out there who do not lie, cheat, steal, and covet your wife because of their own morals, not because of the threat of hell on "the other side".
In other words, you cannot find many rules out there that do not stem from some ethical reason. There are people who obey them automatically for that reason, and the fines/punishments are there for the rest of us jerks.
Don't want you to stop commiting crimes, there jobs on the line
It is not theft...per se, but it is a street date violation. According to most release contracts the publisher of the work can fine the distributer an amount of money specified in the distribution contract PER COPY of the work whose release date has been violated. This means some company is looking at a very large fine because 1 person did something incredibly stupid because they can be fine on the total number of copies floating around on the net. It does not matter that there was only 1 origional violation now there are many. I they find out who leaked it it could very well bankrupt the company they work for. Also at the very least this is also an NDA violation.
This is just another example of spineless crap moderation here on
Mao Tse Tung, Hitler, Stalin, Castro, Pinochet, Mussolini, Marshall Joseph Tito, Slobodan Milosevic, Idi Amin, Ho Chi Minh, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi, Juan Peron, Ayatollah Khomeini, Ferdinand Marcos, General Suharto, Pol Pot, Fransisco Franco, and certainly the worst of the bunch, SLASHDOT's editing/moderating [read: censoring] "community"(*) ALL AGREE on ONE THING:
(*)Note, the word community used often on Slashdot, this is referring to a proto communist commune.
So, you busy little plebian proletariats, get busy, you have some censoring to do! FUN!
Good job you little neo-commies. Don't want to hear the other side, shoot the fucker in the head as an ENEMY OF THE STATE [In this case anyone who seeks to improve the sad state of
I have a Gun and the Constitution [Not the urinated-on pissed-on hacked fucked up one WashingTOON thinks exists, I mean the real one, with Jefferson and Madison at my side], please, give me an excuse to use them both.
A few haikus to commemorate the sucktitude:
Crack Pipe Moderators
Crack smoke wafts though air
Dumb shit moderator!
Try to suck less, please
The Humorless Moderator
Crack smoke wafts through air
Humorless moderator!
Why do you hate me?
The Proletariat
Slashdotting Commie
Moderator fears new idea!
Censor him quickly
The reason China blocked Slashdot is that when Jiang Xemin saw at how good "The Editors" at Slashdot are at suppressing the community, he knew that if more of his party members saw this degree of suppressive efficacy, he would be deposed, for the good of the people, of course, in favor of Rob Malda as the all new supreme dictator and premier of China.
SAYINGS, quips et al:
It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried. - Sir Winston Churchill (Especially when your democratic peers twist democracy into a reason commit cencorship, to squash dissenting or unpopular opinions, and refer to them as trolls, flaimbait overrated or offtopic when they aren't any of the said)
A monarchy is a merchantman which sails well, but will sometimes strike on a rock, and go to the bottom; a republic is a raft which will never sink, but then your feet are always in the water. - Fisher Ames
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard. - H. L. Mencken.
Democracy: The substitution of election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few. - George Bernard Shaw.
The reason there are two senators for each state is so that one can be the designated driver. - Jay Leno.
The Constitution poses no threat to our current form of governement. (Death to those who defile the root documents of a free nation to make economic freedom Supercede Freedom! Freedom First! Free market Second!)
Occam's Razor "Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily." "Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate" "Frustra fit per plura quod potest fieri per pauciora" "Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem" Translation: " "Simple explanations are preferred to complex ones" Modern fucking translation "JUST DO IT."
Reading Slashdot at anything above -1 is like trying to put a shit filter on your ass.
Get busy moderating this down, you little pack of obedient prefects of the corrupt state! You are the vanguards of purity, and dissent is not allowed!
========
OK, haha, enjoy the laugh. Now, let me give you a really simple thought-experiment to show how *EASY* it would be for Gnutella lawsuits to hit home:
You're a pretty smart guy/gal, right? You read Slashdot pretty frequently, you know the Internet, you've probably set up a few servers and you probably know at least one programming language.
You have just been hired by BigMediaCompany.com. They want to know if you're smart enough to figure out how to get the names and addresses of those people swapping files. ARE YOU SMART ENOUGH TO FIGURE IT OUT?
Damn straight, you are!
Now imagine that there are two dozen people at least as smart as you, well funded, lawyer-ed up, with access to federal law enforcement. Maybe they already have issued the subpoenas to the ISPs for their dial-up logs, DSL account databases, firewall logs, etc. Maybe the search warrants are already in the pipeline.
They don't need to get everybody -- just a few visible arrests will suffice. Sue a university sys-admin, sue a housewife in Omaha. Once the media picks up on it 50% of the users will hit uninstall faster than you can find a working node to download the new Eminem jam.
Revealing data gleened using watermarks means revealing the versions WERE marked and that the leak was ON PURPOSE. Such a revelation will seriously undercut the legitimacy of any study done. Also anyone prosecuted for distributing a copy will cry "Entrapment!" whether they are justified in doing so or not. The public loves to hear about cases of supposed entrapment and will be more sympathetic to the pirates than they otherwise would be.
Finally, if everyone figures out that the movie was released on purpose they will see it as a publicity move, and view it as legitimizing piracy. This is very bad for the studio in the long run.
In short, even if there are watermarks, I can't see any way in which making the existence of those marks public without the movie studio doing more harm to itself than good.
Lasers Controlled Games!
So easy to add some flick called "The Two Towers" to my blacklist of movies I don't need to see.
And if it has anything to do with LOTR I definitely won't see it, since the first flick sucked so badly. (Talk about saving money on the most important scenes, and cutting out Tom's valley!!)
It doesn't matter one bit whether downloading is legal or not (and that question matters where you are in the world). It matters who did it, since there was either a conspiracy against the audience, or a conspiracy against the producer.
And I have no interest in paying to see a film by someone who might be pushing for laws of seizure before proven guilt. What ever happened to "please see my film"? I saw one recently (Shaolin Soccer) that was totally hilarious, and the director, actors and lead actress came to the theater and thanked the booming crowd! They came from Hong Kong to Tokyo to do this! They served up something wonderful on a shoestring and everyone was delighted. Not like these newfangled people who shoot a film by paying for special effects, but then don't even pay enough to do it right that way. No thanks. I'll wait for Darwin to take care of inferior wannabees like that by voting with my wallet.
Too many memes to absorb already, hey they make it easy for us to choose what patterns join the kill list. Anything with Two Towers or LOTR is right up there for me.
Don't you mean IF the download complete ? **GRIN**
"It is better to know that you have lost than to not know you have won"
You may have been mod'd down for off topic, but I have to agree with you.
The last flic I went to see in the theater was 'Back to the Future Part 2'.
Before a lot of the readers here were born.
Don't think this is a sour grapes post either... prior to my personal boycott against bad seats, bad popcorn, and bad manners, I used to go see 2 or 3 movies a week.
I won't download a crap either, I'll wait for it to come on broadcast, on sale on DVD, or even VHS first.
It's not on www.nforce.nl or www.isonews.com therefore it's not a real release. The only other possibility is that a group released it untagged to avoid reprocussions... which I seriously doubt.
So all of you people downloading LOTR_The_Two_Towers-SVCD-TS-BLAH_1of2.rar
be prepared to watch a pretty good quality version of The Muppets Take Manhattan.
Gandhi's peaceful civil disobediance only works against an oppessor that loses its moral authority and is has a vested interested in change. The British occupation of India was a perfect case - India, btw, being one of the only countries to be run by a company (that had it's own army).
Gandhi's "invention" of Satyagraha (peaceful protest) was important to the changes in India, but even more so were two other things: the poorest castes of Indians thought of Gandhi as a hero - his simple dress, spinning, vegetarianism, and asceticism appeared genuine to these individuals. They felt as though Gandhi understood them as no one else. Coupled with Gandhi's moral authority, this was a powerful influence.
Second, the global situation of the World War II made the independence of India a guarantee. Gandhi actually failed to secure India's independence at the historical meeting in London (the "Round Table Conference"). The British press, which had initially built up Gandhi as a tremendous hero, blamed him for the failure. Candhi condemned himself, declaring, "This has been the most humiliating day of my life." Factionalization of Hindu and Muslim Indians was the source of the problem (and still remains a problem today).
During the war however England could not retain its control of India and by the end of the war it was just a matter of time before India gained its independence.
In any case, before Gandhi references get too far out of hand there is some interesting info.
(a) Criminal Infringement. -
Any person who infringes a copyright willfully either -
(1)
for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain, or
(2)
by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000,
Under (1), IANAL, but if you ask me, avoiding paying for movies or music when it is justly called for is getting "private financial gain," as in, your pocketbook is a little thicker because YOU DIDN'T PAY FOR IT.
Let me spell it out in big, bold letters: THE LAW SAYS THAT ARTISTS AND PUBLISHERS HAVE A RIGHT TO BE PAID FOR EVERY COPY... EVERY SINGLE ONE!!! You are violating someones law-given rights when you make illegal copies.
File sharing on p2p networks cannot and will not get you in jail under current law.
Under (2) most movie and music pirates I know have exceeded the $1000 mark many times over. That IS a criminal offense.
Sharing 66 CDs worth of music or 40-50 movies in six months will most certainly fall under that statute. Personally, I've met someone with over 150 GIGABYTES of illegally copied music and movies. If he can do it, there are a lot more people out there who can do it.
Note that sharing a mere 11 copies of Windows XP Home violates this law, and just a few copies XP Professional.
When I was in high school, I watched someone violate this statute when they made a copy of 3D Studio 4.0. The retail price was several thousand dollars. In addition, I've seen more copies of pirated AutoCAD than you'd ever imagine.
Don't worry, though, I don't ever expect you to admit you are wrong. You'd need a conscious for that.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
Imagine building a massive Ringworld-type habitat with a surface area of, say, 10^13 square kilometers. Every individual that chooses to could have a half-dozen secluded islands all to themselves.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
You are correct that "one is left with the problem of incentive." Even if I were given free access to all the world's IP, I still wouldn't have the physical resources necessary to create a work like the Lord of the Rings trilogy. If I were Bill Gates, I would have enough resources, but no incentive to spend them on such a project knowing there would be no return on the investment.
So for the forseeable future, we still need IP laws to protect the incentive for creating works on this grand scale.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
P2P networks have significant non-infringing uses, regardless of whether some users choose to pirate movies. For that reason alone they should be allowed to exist.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
While I appreciate some intelligent thinking on this matter, might I suggest another, part complementary, part conflicitng perspective. You said:
If the resources aren't intrinsically scarce, introducing artificial scarcity [through IP laws] might not be the best option. However, in post scarcity society, one would function in a gift economy anyway.
Modern economies are most broadly divided into three sectors: manufactured goods, services, and agriculture. You (much like most of the business community) are attempting to fit the round peg of intellectual property creation, which is a service , into the square hole of the digital manifestation (bits) of intellectual property, which is a good .
Currently we treat such services as goods because we haven't determine a better way of distributing economic resources than the license-for-access model.
Certainly there is no scarcity of bits out there, the scarcity in that regard traditionally has been the costs of the transportation medium, whether it be disks, tape, etc., which the Internet now theoretically makes negligible (though practically isn't the case due to limited bandwidth, and consequential opportunity costs incurred by waiting for a download over a 56/kb modem link, or for larger items over a hi-speed internet link).
But anyway, let's assume that theoretically transportation costs are negligable. Your added stuff about nanotech really is irrelevant to the discussion because it just places physical goods on par with the theoretical reality of bits today.
Let's divide the two kinds of work into manual work and knowledge work -- some jobs are a significant combination of both (surgeons, for example).
My argument is that it is not information that is the world's economic driver, but it is the value of knowledge work. Bits aren't scarce, the people that know what bits to use are scarce. This isn't a new idea, Peter Drucker has been knowledge work for over 40 years, and a post-capitalist society significantly driven by knowledge for over 10 years. Alivn Toffler has also referred to knowledge being the new form of power in the future, the prior forms being violence and money.
When you use a service: a hairdresser, a plumber, an accountant, etc., you are gaining value from act of work they provide. You pay them money for their services. Similarily, when you licence a piece of intellectual property, you are gaining access to the manifestation of a service that is valuable to you.
Services are intrinsically scarce. They involve a universal scarcity: time, and more intangible scarcities that certainly warrent further study: talent, creativity, and knowledge. Hence there is a need for law to regulate access to such services to ensure the distribution of economic resources.
Having said that, current U.S. IP laws are flawed, and overstep their bounds. The DMCA does this by preventing people from "figuring out how things work", which probably should always be an intrinsic fair use. Patent time limits are probably too long, and need to be narrower in scope.
However, there is a continued need for some form of IP law -- which may look very different from today's copyright and pattents -- to correctly distribute economic resources to service providers. This probably will require a lot more thought and experimentation. The world of the future may transcend capitalism, but it won't likely be non-capitalist, as supply for certain services will remain scarce.
-Stu
The poster for Two Towers. You have to scroll to the bottom of the page.
What I meant was this: Out of the pirates *who were going to see the movie in the first place* (I suspect that your dorm buddies are not in that group), how many will see it regardless of whether they downloaded it first?
If it is a good movie, the number will be very close to 100%
If it is a bad movie that looked good in the previews the number will be more like 0%
If it was a bad movie that looked bad in the previews, I suspect that people wouldn't bother downloading it *or* seeing it in theatres.
The point was that this might force the movie industry to make the quality of their films better or have some value added to the theatre experience.
The truth is that people watch movies over and over and actually *like* to see them on the big screen with big sound and are willing to pay for it.
When VCRs were first introduced, the movie and TV industry had the same negative reaction to it that they are having to the internet and p2p filesharing. But now, video sales are their greatest revenue eventhough there is nothing stopping you from from taping a retail video on a second VCR and passing it on. There used to be a time where companies eventually learned to capitalize on new technology rather then legislate it out of exisitance.
And those $ that I was talking about were not US$.