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MPAA Fights Pirates with Gentle Threats
Gillious writes "Wow! It seems the MPAA has learned from the RIAA's mistakes. It seems we aren't going to get mass-lawsuits for grandmothers and 12-year-old kids. I find this quote most interesting: 'The movie industry, he said, has to ask itself what the music industry should have asked years ago: 'Why do they want to steal from us?' The answer, he said, is simple: 'Because you won't sell them what they want.' The technologists say that what went wrong with the music industry can easily go wrong for movie companies, too.'"
the cost of a DVD is several hours pay where I am. You can figure it out.
They need to come up with something like iTunes for movies that will let you buy movies, not just rent them and the file expires. And have just enough DRM to stop most people from copying. I think if the RIAA would have done this earlier in the game, they wouldn't be in the mess they are in now.
Am I the only one who was a little miffed at reading the offhand statement that it is now illegal to carry a camcorder in a movie theater? Is there any reason the movie distributors couldn't have just used their clout with the theaters to get them to crack down themselves on bootleggers? Why is a state law necessary? Seems to me policemen have much better things to do than try and help a private establishment such as a theater enforce its own house rules.
I'm reading this Slashdot article on movie piracy as I'm downloading the new LoTR movie using BitTorrent.
The movie industry, by comparison, estimates that it has at least 18 months before high-speed Internet access and high-capacity hard drives make grabbing a movie almost as quick and easy as grabbing a song.
Do they mean there will come a day when one can download a 700MB Linux iso in less than 5 minutes? If my math is correct that's a 2333.3 kbps download speed!
$cat
Gee, who'd'a' thunkit?? We're looking for music we can play on our pc's, our stereos, in our cars, on our little mp3 players. We're looking for movies that will play in similar devices, some more portable than others. Limiting access to a shitty little scratched up disc that only cost the companies $0.05 to make for $17 a pop is rape, plain and simple, especially when you consider there's one good song on an album and 12 other terrible songs. Sell me a song I like for $0.50 and I'm a happy camper! Let me use that song in any way I see fit (as long as I'm not trading it around like a joint at a frat party) and I'm certain the RIAA/MPAA can make a buck and keep their customers from thieving their works.
More important than being able to buy what is currently the hottest shit like LoTR, is in my opinion having access to a whole load of old and `out of print' movies, continental film, television archives, etc.
Im sure that such a thing could be implemented easily and would reflect very well on the industry from an academic and cultural point of view.
Dom
use Blunt::Instrument;
But Davis, the former song trader, has changed his habits. He dusted off his turntable, bought a new needle and started haunting the bargain vinyl bins in junk shops, where he has discovered some treasures for a dollar a record.
"I'm really very excited about it,'' he said, "because there isn't much new to buy out there, is there?"
Jeff's being a leech here. This is the sort of attitude of users that's bad for P2P networks and even the internet. If you download files off P2P networks, you should consider it your moral duty to give back to the network too. If you don't want to give back to the network, don't download either.
Davis, on the other hand, is on the right track. If you don't want to download music off P2P networks, and support the RIAA, go for old music/second hand CDs. IMHO, even if you buy from iTunes/etc in one breath and curse the RIAA and the shit it churns out in the next, you're being a hypocrite.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Offering free previews (perhaps in reduced quality, but watchable) and an easy option to follow up with a DVD purchase may be the way to go.
K
Lawsuits do. Lot's of them. Fear of financial ruin and possible incarceration are effective deterrents against copyright infringement and theft. The people I know who jack movies and music off the net will never, EVER pay unless it's convenient, or they're scared into doing so.
Sad but true.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
Maybe people wouldn't steal movies so much if cell phones, morons, etc didn't keep making noise in the theater, despite nearly 50 years of attempts to thwart their annoyance... there is nothing more annoying than paying $17 and being annoyed on a date.
stuff |
'Because you won't sell them what they want.' Would this be more nude gratuity in movies? I remember movies like Porky's, the slasher flicks (Friday the 13th/Halloween), where all I cared about was a cheap thrill, now I've just stooped as low as making Jenna and Chasey what Julia Roberts and Demi Moore are to most, my heavy hitters. On a personal opinion note though, all you have is toddler-filtered crap.
Porn industry makes billions on low budgets imagine if you had Carmen Electra running around losing her top every two minutes along with Angelina Jolie, and a slew of other hollyweird chix doing the same. Just ultra nude scenes for no reason other than to run around newd. (fear)
The technologists say that what went wrong with the music industry can easily go wrong for movie companies, too. What went wrong with the music industry is crappy music. Everyone rushing to throw out something for the sake of a quick buck. Hell new artists are releasing their greatest hits after their second album. How the hell can you have a greatest hits album when you're out like for 12-18 months?
Now for you bsharitt: I think if the RIAA would have done this earlier in the game, they wouldn't be in the mess they are in now. What mess do you think the RIAA is in? They're slowly making money, and although they are, through their cheap shot lawsuits, I'm sure it's going right back into their own pockets. What does this mean when it goes right back into their pockets? Means nothing more than they are going to whine more and claim loss loss loss to the artists (even though they recoup some loss), and stick it to more twelveteen year olds nationwide. It's a dirty game, but it's nothing more than business.
They need to come up with something like iTunes for movies that will let you buy movies, not just rent them and the file expires Let's get realistic about this for a minute, the second they do find a way to make expiry movies, even if it expires after 1,000 views, someone is going to come along and break it for the sake of geek coolness, or hacker-fu-ness (and I mean hacker-fu-ness on the respectable non scriptkiddiot sense), and that idea is as they say in Japan sayanora.
MoFscker
I don't download movies and (until mp3.com died) didn't download music from p2p netowkrs. TV shows on the other hand are usually filling my harddrives at massive rates. It isn't the movie studios that have to worry but pay per view channels and premium channels like Showtime that are in trouble. Of course TV shows are much easier to justify, I could have watched it, or already have seen it and thus could have recorded it and encoded it and editing out the commercials for myself.
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
Seriously. It's not that hard to work out a system where you can work out whether a film is worth your time.
What you're saying is that you want a system that allows you to watch a file for free and then lets you pay if you want to. Where do you set your bar? It seems to me you're ending up watching a whole load of films for free.
Copying is *NOT* stealing! It's "Copying". I've copied all my DVDs to computer to make it easier to watch them and keep the origial DVDs safe. Does that make me a thief? Nope. If I walked into a library or video store and stole a DVD or VHS then that is theft.
It's quite simple, you'd think they'd get it right more often.
I'm curious....about how long would it take to download the average movie on a good cable connection.
How about picking submissions that aren't so misleading?
The article reports that the MPAA sends hundreds of thousands of e-mails and letters to movie sharers, threatening to track them down and serve them with lawsuits. And that, by their own standards, has been 85% effective in scaring off the sharers.
They might not be launching high-publicity lawsuits yet, but the RIAA's actions have put the fear of God into many sharers, and the MPAA is taking advantage of this. Let the RIAA suffer the negative publicity while riding on the back of the credibility it lends to their own threats.
As for the "Because you won't sell them what they want." quote, it comes straight from some sharing-network monitoring company which, based on the information at their own website, hardly represents the views of the movie industry.
So where is the "wow" in this story?
'The movie industry, he said, has to ask itself what the music industry should have asked years ago: 'Why do they want to steal from us?' The answer, he said, is simple: 'Because you won't sell them what they want.'
It's not that we don't want what they sell, it's that they over-inflate the crap out of their products pricing and they're not fooling anybody. Anyway...
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Nice that the MPAA acknowledges the problem. Too bad that some members still don't do anything to remedy this situation. They still didn't give me what I wanted:
People say I'm crazy, I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes...
They tried to use the DCMA and found out the law is as bankrupt as anyone suspected. They also learned that US law stops at the US boarder and that people mad enough can sue in US court for violation of US laws that apply to them as a US business.
It should also be realised that unless you have some sort of Internet connection it can take days as opposed to a couple minutes to download a mpeg4 encoded CD of about 730MB. Even "less than" ADSL connections and cable connections can take several hours to days as opposed to minutes. For the time, the size of their product is on their side.
1. They're bigger, and with HDTV they're likely to become even bigger still. DVD players in general don't play DivX content, and full DVDs are many gb each. Of course, this reason is fading, but is still strong.
2. Errors/corrupt downloads are much more annoying. I.e. you'd likely only see the movie once or twice, while you might listen to a CD track 100 times. Checking it once takes a lot more time, relatively. Still, integrity checking is improving.
3. They're "one product". Unlike albums with single tracks, you don't get a bunch of crap you don't want thrown in.
4. Typically you have only one device where you like to play DVD movies. As for music, you'd like them on your computer, home stereo, portable player, car player etc etc. Which makes it fairly OK to have just one copy in form of the original disc.
5. They're relatively low priced. If you look at it cost-efficiently, it's smarter to download mp3s/warez/gamez and buy DVDs than the other way around.
6. You really don't mind spending one minute to put in a DVD to watch several hours of entertainment, but you do mind doing the same to listen to that 3 minute melody you suddenly *had* to hear.
Personally, the one thing I hate about DVDs is region coding. It's quite simply an abuse of copyright protection to enforce artifical market barriers and price gouging. Stuff like that is what can be their undoing, if they try to really enforce those (I think everywhere but the US multi-region players are common now).
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
"Current attempts to sell movies online, like the industry-sponsored Movielink, are still limited in selection and ease of use. But Valenti, the movie industry's powerful lobbyist in Washington, said the problems were temporary."
Put MOVIELINK up as an example? You mean the Windows-only site that even blames Apple as the reason there isn't a Mac Movielink, even though there would be no problem if Microsoft gave Mac users a version of WMP with DRM that was actually recent..
If this is the best of the industry's tries, they're doomed. I agree with other posters, there needs to be a site like iTunes for movie files.
I have downloaded full movies, but I also asked for all those movies on DVD for Christmas, and gotten several of them. I find viewing movies on my computer convienient, and I can do it anytime I want, instead of digging through my family's piles of VCR tapes to find a horribly-degraded copy.
I've even downloaded Two Towers during the period between the movie theatres showing it and the DVD--I wanted my TTT fix, so I downloaded it. Did I still buy both the theatrical and extended editions? Yes. Did I do the same for FoTR and will do the same for RoTK? Yes.
The movie industry (even though they're taking the first steps) needs to think of how to rectify the cause, rather then just responding to the effect.
Okay, I'll stop ranting now...
This shouldn't be compared with the RIAA as much. Downloading mp3's and burning them to a cd gives you a product that is hardly distinguishable from the real deal. But comparing a divx movie to a DVD is like comparing a hyundai to a lexus. You can say they both get the job done but we all know that the lexus is going to do it better. Divx movies are pretty bad quality compared to a DVD. MP3's are just a few megs which can be downloaded in a minute over a reletively fast connection. It can take hours on a fast cable modem to download a movie. Storage is another consideration. If you download a movie that will fit on one cd it will look like shit. Or you can break it into two cds and you have to change it halfway through the movie. Either way, it's a hassel. The movie industry knows it does not face the same problems as the music industry because it's product can't be recreated as easily.
Now I have some movies on my hard drive and I only have them on there until I decide I want to cough up the $20 for a DVD. I have thousands of MP3s and I can hardly distinguish them from the cds I have sitting in a pile to my right. But in both cases, they're not shared on the internet.
Downloading movies off kazaa is certainly no fun. I'd be lucky if I can find the movie I want and if I set it up when I go to sleep and I'll have it in the morning. I've had good luck with bit torrent for downloading large files (not movies) so I'll have to try that later.
Anyway, computers have become high tech stereos, but they're not high tech televisions and they won't be for at least a few more years. The movie industry has a few years to figure out how to "handle" the internet.
Why should the industry be able to push through nonsensical laws such as this? It is yet another defeat in the battle for the rights of the consumer.
For one, this won't help prevent movie piracy at all. TeleSync releases are not generally recorded in crowded movie theaters. Instead, they use empty theaters and plug the camera directly into the sound source. If they didn't, you would hear all kinds of weird noises and heads moving in front of the screen, etc.
This law is not only completely useless in that it won't help battle piracy at all, it proves that corporate interests are pushed with blatant disregard of consumer rights and basic knowledge about these things.
Clever signature text goes here.
I went to an art museum this summer, and they banned camcorders and digital cameras, but allowed regular film cameras. Why? All the paintings there were over 80 years old and the artists are dead, so none of it was copyrighted anymore. And you can use a scanner to digitize an analog picture.
What do they expect to gain by doing that?
---------
There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
Everybody reading the article needs to read between the lines pretty carefully on this one. While the MPAA is seemingly offering the olive branch with one hand, look at the following quotes from the article:
Along with the warning letters, the movie industry is paying for consumer education programs and technology research, and pushing for laws and regulations that executives hope will protect their wares.
The most important thing for Hollywood to do now, Johnson said, is to move faster to develop the kinds of licensing agreements and protective technology
The path to a successful service has to involve the kind of technology that protects copyright unobtrusively,
Hand in hand with developing legal digital services, he recommends the kind of tough security that is built into satellite television equipment,
This whole article reeks of DRM. They never mention it by name, but this is exactly what they have in mind, and some of the stuff highlighted above suggests DRM in hardware.
So I don't see where the MPAA has learned a damn thing, other than the blatant tactics of the RIAA don't work so they're going to try more underhanded ones. The agenda of the MPAA has NOT changed one iota.
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
...or rather, an attorney from a major music company (hint: one of the top 3). It's a larger group of friends, but of course, I'm the software engineer, and he/she's one of the IP lawyers who works "The List," so someone inevitably brings up the "who will win" question.
I hate that question. But it's true, I have an answer - my best guess is that ultimately the peer to peer networks will win, if the fight continues as it has, unless the Internet itself is radically changed (although "destroyed" would perhaps be a better word). And I've said as much many times. Keep in mind that I am not entirely unconcerned about the prospect of the Internet being radically changed to stop piracy, either.
Meanwhile, the attorney has remained confident that between "public education," lawsuits, and "governmental relations," they will prevail within a few years. So who is right?
I know they have very sharp techincal people. But those people are not the ones making decisions. This attorney has heard of Freenet, but doesn't actually understand how it works.
So I try my best to explain the evolution of the "threat" of being able to share information economically.
"You had your chance at the outset. Napster was centralized. They were the easiest to use. They were a ripe target - American, and sitting out in plain sight. You could have cut a deal with them, started slipping DRM and payment systems into the mix slowly enough and carefully enough that users wouldn't reject them en masse.
"But this is like fighting disease, in that when you come down hard on top of it, it might seem like you win, but you never quite kill it all. And what's left is what evolved.
"No one would have bothered with Fasttrack or Gnutella if Napster had lived - they are inferior from a user's point of view. But they are more decentralized. Their foreign. They're encrypted (at least, Fasttrack is). And they saw what you did to the first guy. So they're sitting in a bunker in Vanuatu.
"But of course, they're not completely beyond reach. Fasttrack is the best one, and it's commercial. So maybe, if you're very, very good, you can nab them. And then, you can always infiltrate their network, and go after their users. And that's exactly what you're doing. Trying to wipe it out again.
"Say you succeed and Fasttrack and Gnutella become a thing of the past - you shut down the networks, poison them, scare the users away by getting nastier and nastier with them. Maybe you finally lock someone in jail for sharing a song. What comes next? What's left over?
"Freenet, and its various workalikes, are almost entirely decentralized, and what's more, they not only use "real" encryption, but the developers understand traffic pattern analysis. They can build a model that will make it near impossible for you to even determine who got what with certainty.
"Oh, right now there's only a few of these guys. They toil in obscurity, their user interface is a joke, their network is slow... but when you kill Fasttrack, guess what is first in line for the attention and love of hundreds of millions of internet users, and hundreds of thousands of engineers, who until then had no reason to bother? The next step in our evolution.
"And it's a nasty one. You'll have made the 'disease' so resistant that the FBI won't be able to track child pornographers who use it, and the CIA won't be able to track terrorists who use it. And you guys, the RIAA, forget it. You'll be history. You'll go down in the history books for finally achieving copyright anarchy. Or rather, copyright voluntarism, which is what will really happen.
"Ian Clarke has pointed out that the choice between communication safe from anyone's observation and control is more important than the RIAA, the MPAA, and even the theoretical benefit of law enforcement's dream of eavesdropping on everything, everywhere.
"He is right. For saying this, many will damn me. But why is that a controvertial statement: that I should
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
Here is one answer that the mpaa needs to get to work on immediately - internet distribution of movies and tv shows. Offer the people what we want - low cost entertainment. Strike while the iron is somewhat hot, even if the net speed isn't quite there yet. Offer content at lowest and highest quality initially, then fill in mid-range qualities as demand warrants. Have movies available as they hit retail dvd markets, and have a show suggestion/voting system setup so people can suggest what they want and others can vote for the show (this could dictate priority internally).
Offer the content at different price-points for quality - a movie available in divx at two or three qualities (or simply VCD and SVCD qualities) with pricing relative to quality and available at one or two bit-rates able to burn onto dvd. Like with iTunes, the content would be protected by licensing and drm. Also like iTunes, the drm and licensing should be as invisible as possible. A cd/dvd burning app would be integrated to support licensed burns of cd/dvd downloads (allowing maybe five burns as dvd burning is still kind of 'iffy').Streaming content would be available only in addition to downloadable versions, and at a significant price drop.
The drm should be as invisible as possible, while still protecting content. A burned dvd bought from the service might have the purchaser id mixed into the data (not impossible to defeat (recode), but the casual copier might not know-how/want to defeat). Same idea with s/vcd content. A divx content might also include this, but with one additional twist - low cost distribution. People (clients) could share the content amongst themselves. A client acquiring the content from another source could enable it to play at maybe 60% the cost of a download. The drm should be dynamic/random format/encryption so even if one form is cracked you don't lose everything. Anyone cracking the drm and/or illegally distributing the content would be punished harshly.
Or perhaps he's a college-educated, 60-hour-a-week working South American in a country like Uruguay, Peru or Argentina. My own (Peruvian) relatives earn about $800 a month doing work that would get paid about 10 times that in the US (lawyers, doctors, financial professionals). For paying for housing and food and even internet access, that's all well and good, because the costs are relative. For things like consumer electronics, DVD's and CD's, videogames and the like, those are even more expensive in real terms than in the US, and are essentially true luxury items. If I were them, I would be almost exclusively watching movies I downloaded online. Those goods were priced for US markets.
In Korea, there are several subscription services where you can download and watch full movies (ex. www.cineko.com). I guess it helps that nearly every household in Korea as a T1.
God, it sucks to be in a backwards country ruled by the obsolescence curve. In Japan, the free cell phones that come with plans are better than the phones we pay $299 for with a 2-year plan.
Can you hear me now?
If NetFlix can ship me 2-3movies per week via the post office, why couldn't a company like that offer a method of allowing me to download the movie via the net? I'd gladly pay the $20/month to do this and then burn the movie at home. H*ll, they could even sell you a service/product/tv tuner to allow you to hook up your computer to your tv/stereo.
If you offer me something that I'm interested in before I start "copying" then you've got a long time customer. If you keep forcing bad music/movies to me, I'll go somewhere else. Don't waste my time.
My brother in law always gets me BestBuy gift cards for the holidays. So since my bd is around this time of year to I normally end up with a couple of them. While shopping around I was going though the DVD section and saw all sorts of great deals. DVDs for ~15 USD and many even closer to ~11 USD. While some did get a little more costly they were all very reasonable for what they gave. A movie, which was produced at a rather high cost on average, some bonus material that is always fun to have, and lastly the knowladge that even though the silly DSS is there the quality of both the sound and picture will be quite good.
Then I was looking around in the music area and the prices were at least +5 to +10 dollars on average higher than the DVDs! And some of the albums that they were selling for clost to 20 USD were quite old. Many had to actually come on 2 CDs due to the size. Also, while for the majority of the CDs I saw there was no real protection on them, the quality could be kind of iffy depending on the metholigy they used to make it. (AAD, ADD, DDD. Thanks for not telling us anymore!)
So, after a bit of thought I game up with a few generalizations. I can buy a DVD with more content, the knowladge that this movie at some point had a lot of cash sunk into it (At least as much as it would take to record an album.), more than likely some extra stuff, and on average a better price. The only bad part is the DSS and the region but whatever. They are pretty trival to overcome if you care that much.
On the other hand I can buy a CD that is old tech, for typically more money, of questionable quality sometimes, but with no real protection to speak of.
Now maybe each respective orgnization can do a survay of what is right and wrong about each diffrent model and figure out how exist without continueally pissing people off but of the two I choose the lesser evil, the MPAA, as being able to survive. The RIAA is wayyyyy to far behind in the game to even come close to pulling their heads out of the sand.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
In the US, DVDs were made relatively inexpensive by sony and other companies to gain market share. Thats what is responsible for the VHS being pretty much extinct within the span of a couple of years.
I'd wager that in other countries, DVDs are still a relative luxury. So even if you earn a respectable living, you might opt for a download.
In 1992 in Poland, I did now know anyone who actually owned music CDs, though I did see them on store shelves. In the states, they were probably a commodity by then.
Fearless, you have summed things up very well.
For the last couple of decades a culture has been nurtured which is founded on the idea that those with money will win over those who don't. And it can be argued today that those with the most money are also the ones that make the rules (like the DMCA, like the stupid camcorder ban).
What the RIAA, MPAA and their ilk have been assuming is that their considerable wealth will still allow them to bully anyone who doesn't follow their rules.
If they were battling some monolithic entity - say a company churning out thousands of bootleg copies of LOTR each month - they might be right. They could sue them and shut them down.
The problem is that they instead are battling hundreds of thousands of tiny operators in dozens of countries. They are battling hundreds of clever programmers who don't really care about the money, preferring instead to be one more nail in the coffin of the multinationals.
As Napster begat Gnutella begat Freenet, we can reasonably expect a fast, easy to use and totally secure P2P network to evolve very soon. And if that is defeated, we can expect a successor.
What could have been a simple marketing challenge has evolved into a near guerilla war.
What the music companies have not understood is that it is very, very hard to defeat a guerilla force, especially one that has widespread popular support.
Of course the ultimate absurdity is that they could have stopped this dead in its tracks. Maybe three in five MP3s that I have downloaded were of decent quality, or complete, or even the song they were titled.
A buck a tune is still too much to pay for a file that comes hindered with all the current DRM restrictions. If I could buy an un-crippled copy of a tune for 25 or 50 cents I would never waste my time messing with Kazaa or any other P2P client.
Three Squirrels
How is a movie on your computer "easier to watch"?
I have a pair of 21" displays, a nice chair and a fast computer, but its not easier than watching DVDs sitting in a *better* chair or couch, watching on a 42" screen *designed* for DVDs, with a superior sound system.
Keeping the DVDs safe makes sense, but why not just make dupes and watch the dupes?
The MPAA is smart enough not to kill the goose that layed the golden egg. Still a threat is a threat, and it must be backed up by the use of force. I have no doubt the MPAA is capable and willing.
What's the difference between a murderer who said "Well I only used soft shoes when I stomped him to death." and a murderer who used an axe and chopped them to little bits.
Cartels are evil and that is what the MPAA and RIAA are. Both can reduce piracy by not making it worthwhile to pirate. Reduced DVD & CD prices = reduced piracy. It's that simple. The MPAA is doing a better job in that respect.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
I don't mind previews. I actually like watching movie trailer at the theater. I enjoy seeing what new movies are coming out. I however do not enjoy paying 10$ to watch the same commercials I regularly see for free on TV.
On my dvd's I can skip commercials, on tv I can skip commercial, on tivo I can skip commercials, at the movie I am forced to endure these advertisements. On downloaded copies I get no trailers or commercials, however I have a reduced quality movie for free.
How about they add some commercials and let me watch for free? How about they lower the cost to 4$ and leave the commercials? Better yet, free soda and popcorn..well soda and popcorn is how the actual theater makes money. How about instead of trying to prevent something make the actual experience worth it again.
Karma's over rated. Speak your mind.
Amazon.com has Blade Runner Director's Cut for $14.99. They also have Basic Instinct Collector's Edition (though it's out of stock at the moment). Hell, my Best Buy has these DVDs. So what is your situation that prevents you from obtaining these movies, if you don't mind my asking? You must either live somewhere that these online stores are unwilling to ship to, have neither a credit card nor checking account (nearly impossible), or something that I've not thought of. I'm so curious!
I agree with you on out of print or unavailable region encodings for movies. I also agree with you on forced previews. I myself have never come across them, but I have heard of people who have. I can live through the 5 second FBI warning, though.
And this is one of the big issues region encoding was *supposed* to address. If it worked, your relatives could buy DVDs for 1/10th the US price, as the studio still makes a profit at that level. Region encoding would prevent people from importing cheap copies to the US, and everyone's happy. Sort of, anyway.
With the proliferation of region-free and region-changable players, I think we're going to see the end of region encoding. Which is a good thing, for so many other reasons.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
"it's obviously theft.."
No, its not "obviously" anything besides carrying a camcorder.
Ironically, it would be legal to bring a gun into the theater in many places, but a camcorder.... why that could lead to "copyright infringement".
Oh the horror.
(rolling eyes)
I think people lack a sense of perspective.
Back in the heyday of Napster, most people were on 28.8 modems, some on 56. An album of music encoded to a decent quality is at least 60mb. So what you're saying is, you find it unlikely that someone can get an internet connection at 11x the speed of a dial-up account (700/60).
:)
Oh, you're being pedantic about the word "song"? Fine. I've had 4mbit cable internet access since 1998. Canada rules
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
I think the porn industry could learn from the parent poster:
"Limiting access to a shitty little scratched up disc that only cost the companies $0.05 to make for $17 a pop is rape, plain and simple, especially when you consider there's one good scene in the movie and 60 minutes of wasteful plot. Sell me the 5 minutes that I need for $0.50 and I'm a happy camper!"
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
And this is one of the big issues region encoding was *supposed* to address. If it worked, your relatives could buy DVDs for 1/10th the US price, as the studio still makes a profit at that level. Region encoding would prevent people from importing cheap copies to the US, and everyone's happy. Sort of, anyway.
Well, sort of. The intent was to segment the market so that the studios could sell at multiple pricepoints, because they wouldn't otherwise sell to the third world at all. This isn't the whole reason, else USA, Europe, and Japan would be one region. The additional thing they can do is segment release dates, so they sell the DVD here while showing the movie there, then gouge the Japanese for $50 to buy it.
The problem is that, should you have a DVD that the owner only wishes to sell in one region, then you have to get a second or a third player, rather than just paying for the disc. Thankfully, most DVD players in the civilised world are region switchable, so all you need to worry about is PAL-NTSC conversion.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
If there are no logs the RIAA can subpoena, there are no logs the police can use. You can't have that both ways, either you are anonymous, or not. Black and white.
The second thing is that online, all is 0s and 1s. You can not separate between protected speech, libel, slander or kiddie porn until after a program has interpreted those data. Black or white.
The core issue is that pretty much everything you do online is not anonymous today, in the form of various logs. It is only anonymous because there are legal protections providing checks and balances, lifting anonymity with warrants as the court sees fit *after the fact*.
That is the final black & white, and the RIAA doesn't see it coming. The moment that changes, that what you do is anonymous to begin with, there can be no "checks and balances". It ends up with only two scenarios:
White: True anonymity is allowed. Since you can't tell in advance what a message contains, everything from protected speech to mp3s and kiddie porn flows freely through the anonymous network. The only way you can not contribute to it is to not take part at all.
It's basicly anarchy because noone can control anyone else's actions, or control any specific piece of information, like a copyrighted work. Nor libel, slander, racism, nazism, anti-semittism, terrorism (yes, Al-Quaida could put up a damn homepage and not get shut down).
Black: There is no anonymity, no privacy. Everything is automatically monitored, controlled and logged to ensure that anonymity can be revoked, making 1984 look pale by comparison. Freenet, mixmasters, probably encryption itself is outlawed except for "trusted" programs with backdoors, less they would cloud the all-seeing Big Brother.
Which would of course be ready to lift any anonymity whenever, for whomever it sees fit, without anyone knowing about it. After all, it's already sitting on the information. No need to subpoena it from anywhere. Total power.
Pick the lesser evil. Usable anonymous networks are coming, it's simply a matter of time. RIAA may speed up the process, increase the user base, but it would none the less happen. At which point, we will have to make the choice. There is no third option to freeze time. I think many will actually look back on the time when the Internet was fairly civilized and call it the "good, old days".
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
How do you know if the meal will be crap or not? Do you just walk in, eat whatever you feel like, and then pay if you decide you like it? Last I checked, most places don't make free meals for you to "test", unless you're a food critic. The closest I see is free bites of something in the food court, but that's not exactly fine dining...
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
There are certian levels of threat that i would respond to, but in the end, if i couldnt share online i would just do it the 100% untraceable way (with much faster data flow) i.e CD swapping with friends. DVDs can be ripped and swapped easily so can CDs and obviously there is nothing they can do about it (if i can see it i can copy it theory). People will continue to pirate/share whatever you want to call it - look at drugs, they have a much higher criminal risk yet they are practically as availiable as if they were on the shop shelves around the world.
I admire the MPAA in a very small way for taking this view but on the other hand i hate the fuckers and think its just a publicity stunt. Most film trailers i see i think "wow thats shit, but i wouldnt mind seeing that big explosion bit, i think ill download it - its not good enough to pay for" Make films that are good enough that i am willing to pay for them and i probably will. Make the same old shit and ill just watch it for free.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Off of usenet or another machine on my ISP, less than 30 minutes. Less time, in fact, than most people spent downloading an album during the Napster years. And we all know how unsuccessful that was, because people only want "instant gratification" :)
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Why do you need a bunch a copies of a movie?
What because you want to watch it on your Family room DVD player, Living room DVD player, Rumpus room DVD player, Playstation 2, your 3 computers, and in your car, simultaneously?
Movies are very different to music, music you can listen to one many things, without it being any worse (i.e Your home theater, computer, stereo, car). A movie on the other hand, why would you want to watch it on your computer instead of your home theater?
Only reason I can think of it laptop or in-car, and in both of these circumstances you don't need the disc in two locations.
Being able to copy it three times, or even twice sounds reasonable, then you get the original disc and 3 extra's incase of scratching.
I have a stills camera. Being a quite keen photographer I carry it almost everywhere because you never know when a situation presents itself. However, like most modern digital cameras it can shoot short movies too. It can't be used to record a film but it sounds like it too would be outlawed. I wouldn't dream of using a camera in a theatre, but it would still be banned by this rule.
See my journal, I write things there
My main reason for downloading is simple: I often want to watch some movie in its original (read english) language.
I could either try and order it from some US webstore, pay almost the double price because of delivery costs and customs and crack my DVD to view it.
Or I could download it over night.
Hm. What to do?
Just get rid of that region code bullshit and make US dvds easier available in good old europe. I promise I'll buy a lot of them then legally...
The internet has and will kill many many markets and businesses down the road. Is this good or bad? Hard to say.
All I know is, the movie industry is next to be slaughtered, once a critical mass of people get broadband and learns about using P2P to download movies.
eTrade SUCKS
Paragon, I had a conversation once with one person who believed your solution was the answer, and one who did not. The person who did not had the perfect rebuttal, and I agree with it, so I'll share it here. "That solution, a world without privacy, was what we had millions of years ago. It ceased being an option socially the moment that humans (or proto-humans) figured out that sex is what led to having babies." You're coming up against millions of years of social hard-wiring, Paragon. It just won't happen. Even chimps have sex in secret sometimes, so the alpha-male doesn't drive the female from the troop.
To try and justify why it's "okay" to download movies. If you want a copy for backup purposes, do it yourself with dvd::rip. Dvd::rip is the fastest and easiest way to burn DVDs to CD-ROM on Linux anyways. Don't remember what I used in Windows, but it wasn't as easy as dvd::rip.
*twitch*
especially when you consider there's one good song on an album and 12 other terrible songs.
Have you ever considering listening to music that you didn't hear on a Clear Channel radio station? When I hear people say, "one good song on a CD", I instantly think some pop shit that has one song with a catchy tune. If you buy an artists's CD and most of it sucks, then maybe you're not listening to the right music.
How much of this has to do with the MPAA "learning" from the RIAA's mistakes...
And how much has to do with the fact that a federal appeals court just ruled in the last few days that it is illegal for the RIAA to subpoena ISPs for customer information, thereby putting a quick end to any RIAA-styled tactics the MPAA might have employed?
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
I've gone from seeing maybe fifty feature films a year (in the mid-to-late 1990's) in theatres to seeing maybe three features in theatres this year.
There have been two main causes of this shift:
1) the ever-increasing admission price for the theatre that is much greater than the inflation rate.
2) the explosion in availablity of DVDs. They have great sound, sharp images, multiple languages and subtitles, and production commentary.
Two forces - one pulling me out of the theatres and the other drawing me into watching movies on my computer.
Ten years ago you could go see double features of second-run Hollywood films (an average of two to three months after their original theatrical first-run release) for $2 to $3 dollars. First run matinees were $3. Five years ago all second-run double features stopped effectively doubling the admission price instantly when the inflation rate was only 2% a year. First-run matinee admission rose a dollar a year in quarterly increments every year since 1997 in the monopoly Regal Cinema chain. (which owns roughly 80% of the movie theatres in the USA).
About 2001 DVDs start appearing in the Blockbuster and supermarket rental outlets. These were basically the 'junk' titles released to DVD after playing first-run and not even going to second-run theatres. In 2002, classic Hollywood and European art films start appearing in large
numbers in the local public libraries, available for free checkout for a few days to a week. DVD stand-alone players (that play MP3 CD-R and CD-RWs) along with DVD-ROM drives for PCs appear for less than $60 at Fry's and PriceWatch.com.
In 2003, local suburban public libraries in Portland Oregon have nearly every title available on DVD that was previously only on video cassette along with hundreds of 'new' features that were in first-run theatres the previous year. Many were donated from the local Hollywood Video world-corporate headquarters (located nearby) or the local Blockbuster Video (to clear surplus
product from their limited shelf space). Other titles were donated to the local library by ordinary people who had purchased a DVD at retail and had already seen it a few times.
The result is that thousands of people who used to go to the movies a few years ago are now just staying home and watching DVDs from the public library or supermarket rental outlet. This shift is beginning to influence the type of films that are produced for the theatres: fewer mid-budget films directed at mature audiences (mature meaning over 25 years old) and more comic-book megabudget productions for the date-night younger audience that are increasingly the only people who still go to theatres.
Personally, I don't see how downloaded versions of feature films are going to make any difference to anyone. The film files are too large and too
low-resolution (thinking of DivX) to be widely traded on the net. The wide availablity of DVD titles and their low prices (plus small physical size) make downloading movies absurd for the vast majority of people.
The people who are seriously interested in seeing a particular movie (to the point of actually spending hours to download it) are in all likelihood going to pay to see it in a nice theatrical setting anyway; with bright large crisp film images and blasting surround-sound.
Who's losing money? Where is the evidence that film downloading off the web is really an issue that is affecting the bottom line of anyone? This whole thing seems to be a hysterical over-reaction to a problem that doesn't really even exist.
Hollywood's real problem is their inability to control production budgets coupled with a box-office audience that is no longer growing. If present trends continue, then within five years most major big-budget films will not return their production costs through box-office receipts. When that happens, Hollywood will be forced to go back to making $10-$20 million dollar movies and, frankly, they've forgotten how to make profitable movies in this price range.
Seriously, take advantage of the situation to have some fun. If someone is talking on a cell phone during a movie, I guarantee that if you throw some at them, everyone else in the theater will cheer. Even other people who forgot to turn off their own cell phones.
Or even better, kindly walk over to them and ask if they'd stop talking. If they apologise, your date will be impressed that you took charge of the situation. If they get rowdy, you'll have the rest of the theater to back you up, and your date'll be impressed that you have a pair.
c-hack.com |
Sorry it wasn't clear. I was simply refering to a backbone connection often called a "network connection". If you are a university or provider in a major city, you can have 100M, 1G or 10G connectivity or more. At 100M, you should be able to download a CD in less than 90 seconds but it is conservative to say "two minutes". At 1G with good equipment about 10s. (non-PC and U320 SCSI RAID) The record is a bit faster and it was between our backbone (AMS) and Alaska. AFAIK, no system will handle 10G or more, except routers.
At a mere 10Mb/s 15 to 20 minutes is quite possible. At what point the RIAA gets upset is hard to tell, but this is probably the point. Also at this point, the video rental business is probably shot. They should be thinking about that right now! DRM will provably not work and closed source systems are not usually not allowed to run directly on symetrical high-speed connections.
Maybe he is (I, myself, have relatives in this situation) HOWEVER... the RIAA hasn't sued foreign nationals, nor is it likely the MPAA could. The lawsuits in Canada were initiated by the Canadian equivalent of the RIAA. Any threat of direct lawsuit is a threat only to US residents. Oh, and let's not forget that the price of a DVD can be anywhere from $7-$25, depending on the title.
Oh please, I doubt many people factor in health concerns when deciding if to go to a movie. This flu isn't that big of a threat. Somebody saw the movie Outbreak a few too many times...
The reason people aren't going to theaters is because theaters no longer give a showing that's worth the cost. Don't kid yourself, the big cinemas are just as bad, worse in some ways because they care more about their bottom line then the little guys.
Movie piracy is up because nobody wants to spend $50 to take their family to a film (yes, that is how much an average family of 4 spends to see an evening movie). As you say, the quality of presentation has dropped dramatically. It's pathetic how poor theaters are these days. The food has gotten worse, the costs have gone up, and the playback of the film has become atrocious. It's been 3 years since I saw a movie where something wasn't wrong with the presentation. If the projector didn't just stop working entirely, then the movie was out of focus. Granted, we don't have any landmark theaters around here...
Again, that gets down to bottom line. Why pay a good salary to a career projectionist with 10 years experience under his belt when you can teach some kid how to thread and start a movie for minimal wage.
"Cox on Demand"
... "Cox on Demand. It's what every girl wants..."?
So how do they advertise this service? Do they run commercials with a bunch rowdy drunken guys in a tavern pumping their fists in the air yelling "We love our Cox!".
Or do they the sultry female Aryan with the major league yaboos purring
the porn industry isnt complaining. the movies they sell are of low production value and are sold at an exhorbitant markup. what you can download are usually just little promotional movies from a site, so its just free publicity for them. /fap fap
so does this mean that we're actually going to be seeing more than one or two GOOD movies every year?
BZZZZT! Wrong! This guys been listening to the MPAA for too long. Online movies don't come from award show screeners. If that were the case then it would take months for a movie to show up online.
Screener divx rips come from the tapes they sound out to movie reviewers for newspapers and trade magazines... People like Ebert and Roeper.
This is why MPAA's banning of award show screeners is just stupid. Those tapes aren't likely to show up online.
Now, where can I buy divx or mpeg films, uncrippled, just the films, with no piracy warning bullshit or added garbage, right now, online? Oh, and available in the UK.
What's that? I can't. But they just said! Honestly, if we can't trust PR spin doctors to match saying with doing, then who can we trust?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
then gouge the Japanese for $50 to buy it.
Hehe... interesting how this got chosen for the insightful mod rather than the parent. That's the whole point. $50 might sound like gouging to us, but in Japan everything is 3 times as expensive. They make higher salaries too.
-a
Movies will never entirely have the same problem as music. Because at the very least, people will always go to the movies. Because if you say, 'hey baby, you want to come watch lotr on my 'home theater'? i downloaded it this morning' - well, that's just not going to get you what you want now is it? Going to the movies is never going to stop so at least they'll always make money. And maybe this mass downloading will inspire them to make better movies. Because I'll go see something in a theater if it's good. I only download stuff I don't want to pay for but I want to see.
Further, when it comes to DVD, it's not a huge problem for the MPAA yet. yet. Because at least in my experience I can't download high resolution dolby 5.1 movies on the internet. And that's what my 40inch tv (which i spent an entire summer saving up for) and sound system deserve. And as others have mentioned, the availability of movies on the internet I think has boosted the extras on dvd. Because there's more to most dvds than the movie. One day, the internet will be fast enough that I can download dvd quality movies and extras but right now I can't.
Further, if poor college students want to download movies because they are poor, I say more power to them. Because I believe they'll give you the money when they have it. When they grow up and get a job and have children are they going to bother to find and download movies. I think it's easier to buy stuff if you're out anyway.
And lastly, DVDs have become collectables. DVDs go out of print. You have that Criterion Hard Boiled? That's worth like $200. Awesome. I know people who literally collect DVDs.
So I don't think they'll ever have the problem music does. A bought cd has nothing to offer us. Cover art? Liner notes which you can read and print out from the internet if you want to. And they take very little time to download at high quality. They're not mixed in 5.1 and cds don't premiere like movies. There are concerts but that's not the same as going to the movies.
Although I don't count out centralized or corporate solutions purely on principle, I tend to agree. And I certainly agree that all of these decentralized P2P technologies would have been developed to some extent, eventually, regardless of what the RIAA/MPAA did.
I would only suggest that you are by far the exception, and without the RIAA's impetus, such systems would be a long, long time in coming, and would perhaps never reach the level of sophistication that they are now approaching.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
>>but it doesn't cost money (only time) and it doesn't take up physical space
Sure it does. It takes up physical space on the disk it's stored on. Though you probably mean it doesn't take up physical space outside the computer.
wbs.
Huh?
"If I borrow a Video Cassette Tape or DVD disc to watch, its legal for me to make a copy for personal use."
In the USA this is sometimes true and sometimes not.
It is true for most educational TV rebroadcasts from PBS - it is not currently true for The Matrix DVDs.
(fair use != freely copy) if fair use meant freely copy we all would have heard about it a long time ago.
Judgment must be used but recent popular blockbusters not yet available on TV can probably not be copied in their entirety under fair use rules (note that about the only person that can make a full copy is the owner of the item for their own use as a backup under fair use).
In terms of copying your buddy's DVD I'm not sure that I or anyone else cares about that.
It is when the definition of your buddy turns in to whoever has access to your website/PC or whoever appears on a street corner with five extra bucks that people are worried about. (i.e. The Judge may not believe the buddy story if he/she was able to get a copy.)
in Japan everything is 3 times as expensive. They make higher salaries too.
compare New York and Tokyo, then tell me the same thing.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Who mentioned anything about stealing? Or are you one of the uninformed group who still consider copyright infringment to be theft?
In my post I gave *reasons* why people choose to download movies, and constructive critism of what is wrong with the way media is marketed - artificially inflated prices and no means for consumers to actually get what they want.
Of course I could either stop watching movies regularly and as you suggested "get a cheaper hobby", but this wouldn't be beneficial for the movie studios, and it wouldn't be beneficial to myself.
If copyright infringement is worse than just "copyright infringement", why stop there?
Copyright infringers are not just thieves of creative meterial, they are also murderers of creativity and the incentive to create. They're also robbing bastards that kidnap the income from poor authors who got into the business thinking they're going to get paid big.
Oh - that's why its called "pirating".
Give me a break - copyright infringement is unauthorized copying. Nothing is being stolen, nothing is being murdered, the term "theft" and "piracy" are misleading propoganda. There is nothing that can justify copyright in its current form and violation of copyright restrictions is the natural consequence.
If I am to rent these DVDs, it would cost me 20/month + inconvenience.
What inconvenience? Is a local equivalent of the USA's Netflix not available in your area?
Who says I'm stealing? How do you know I'm not downloading a DiVX copy of a movie I already own? Who's to say I'm not downloading a movie that was stolen or damaged? Who's to say I'm not downloading a movie that I'd never ever ever buy in my life, thus giving it an extra chance it wouldn't normally have had? (Okay, not so ethical in some respects. But it's not like theaters all around are saying "if it sucks, you get your money back!")
Why am I 'stealing' from you? Prove I'm stealing. Prove anybody is. Tell me WHY somebody would spend >24 hours trying to get a movie off of Kazaa. At that point, just go pay the ever increasing ticket price that easily climbs to the cost of a DVD.
"Derp de derp."
Power to the Peaceful
I know quite a few people who, when they want a particular DVD title, simply rent it and rip it for their home collection.
Clearly this means that the price-point that these pirates are willing to pay is the price others pay for rental.
And, when you look at the fact that even the best movie isn't something you'll watch once a day, or even once a month for that matter, I don't see why there should be so much difference between the rental and retail price.
Personally I tend to buy my DVDs -- even though some of my favourites (Harold and Maude, A Clockwork Orange, etc) gain nothing from the DVD treatment (no special features, crappy grainy quality).
What I have done however, is capture a lot of movies from free-to-air TV broadcasts, edited out the ads, and burnt them to disk. This has given me a great collection of movie titles and I don't feel as if I've stolen anything -- any more than recording pop music from FM radio represents stealing music from the RIAA.
With a good clean signal, a movie recorded from a TV broadcast is "broadcast quality", and that's good enough for me.
That's easy: bottup-up anarchy. But even with totally anonymous nets you have pseudo identities and self-moderating systems like slashdot. Much better than the top-down control-freak alternative (unless you ARE a control-freak that is).
--
Power to the Peaceful
"The movie industry, he said, has to ask itself what the music industry should have asked years ago: 'Why do they want to steal from us?' The answer, he said, is simple: 'Because you won't sell them what they want.'"
An interesting statement that is true for the music industry but doesn't seem to apply to the movie industry. In the case of the music industry, they sell albums with one or two good songs and force the consumer to buy eight or more songs that they wouldn't buy if they were not bundled with the songs they do want. So rather than paying three or four bucks for two songs that they want, they pay fifteen to twenty. Is it any wonder that a lot of consumers feel ripped off?
In the case of the movie industry nothing is bundled. The consumer pays for a single movie that he wants.
I guess maybe he's talking about consumers wanting to get content on-line. For small files that don't take hours to download this is true but again not so much for movies that can take hours because of the size of the download. This is especially true if we're talking about DVD quality downloads.
As the downloads become faster and the quality higher I believe that the movie industry will be facing the same problem. I don't believe that most of the downloads are motivated by noble reasons. Most people that I know want to pay for the content once and only once and they don't want to pay much either.
I have several albums that I have paid for more than once. I don't know how many tapes have been eaten by my player before I got a CD player. Now that I do have a CD player I like to rip my music and store the content as ogg files on my family server. That way I can play my music from any computer in the house. It really pisses me off when I pay money for a CD and find it "copy protected." And with the DMCA I'm afraid to even ask for help in exercising my right to backup the music that I've paid for.
So to sum it up, if either industry wants to give me what I want then they need to figure out how to give me content that I can store on my home server so that I will NEVER lose it and so that I can EASILY play the content from multiple players through out my home.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
You don't expect to be given a new car for free when your old one crashes or breaks down; why should DVDs be different?
Because the ratio of the material cost to the sticker price for a car is huge, while for a DVD it almost nothing. What he should suggest is being able to get new copies of damaged media for the cost of shipping and materials - rather than having to pay for the content again as well.
Copying can be theft.
Its not theft. Never was, never will be, for the simple reason that you must remove something to steal it. If you're copying, you aren't removing so there is no theft. Is copyright infringment illegal? Sure. Do the creators of content deserve some kind of compensation? Sure. But that doens't make it theft.
Of course parallel with this, bandwidth will be increasing. At the moment, it takes me about 10 minutes to download a CD image at work, or a couple of hours at home. Given enough sources, I could quite easily download a DVD image overnight at home, and burn it in the morning. Actually, I'm surprised Apple aren't doing this through iTMS. Most new Macs have DVD burners, and it seems a logical use for them...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
voted for the Nazis?!?
. SLASHDOT: Home of the vicious nerd.
I hate to be the one to point this out but if anyone starts doing that the first client will be windows, then a mac one one. There probably will never be a linux/BSD/SunOS/etc because of the fact the about the only way it would ever work on every linux box would be provide the source, which would document the protocal, and i'm sure it would be a short amount of time before a hacked version would allow you to get movies for free.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
It's convenient. That has justified it in your mind. You are so accustomed to the convenience that you can't imagine not having it, and instead of you being guilty of illegally downloading movies without paying for them, it's somehow their fault because you don't want to see movies that "may or may not be crap."
Never mind the fact that something may or may not be good doesn't give you the reason not to pay for it (ever heard of movie reviews? Word-of-mouth? Hell, the Internet?).
Meanwhile, Slashdot continues to latch onto two examples--a grandfather and a little girl--getting sued by the RIAA, which is a typical tactic of propaganda. They sent out hundreds of thousands of letters. Chances are, a couple of the usernames they target will be old men or little girls. The horror! But Slashdot latches onto it and blows it out of proportion to somehow paint the RIAA as the evil bad guy, when all they are doing is EXACTLY WHAT YOU GUYS WANTED WHEN THEY SUED NAPSTER--going after individual downloaders.
To sum it up, people download because it is so convenient to them that they've justified it in their minds to shed any guilt. It's ridiculous, and it will never stop being wrong, no matter how much Slashdot tries to push it as some inane, anti-corporate revolution. It's not a revolution. It's not a culture movement. It's just people with high-speed connections downloading things they would normally have to pay for. It's just become widespread enough that you guys are justifying it to absolve yourselves of guilt.
"Sufferin' succotash."
These and other things make purchasing DVDs less enjoyable and worthwhile. There are ways to work around these things; what's the end result of all the restrictions? People buy DVD players that let them view DVDs from whatever region they like. People create software to defeat the security features. People rip out all the scenes, paste them together, then offer them up for free download where they're voraciously devoured by the public before they're even released.
We don't want lame-ass restrictions. Legally we may only have a license to view the movie and not own a copy of it, but that's not how people think or what they want.
DVD opened up with the silly restrictions removed offers a quality copy of a movie that is a pleasure to own and operate, which is What We Want. Give us what we want and we'll eat it up.
Every single time some pedantic moron brings up that "copying is *NOT* stealing!", I shake my head, for several reasons.
1.) It doesn't matter. Your trying to remove the connotation of the word "theft" from it is just a laughable attempt at trying to reduce the negative image of someone downloading things they didn't pay for.
2.) It IS theft, every way you look at it. If you look at it as intellectual property...if you look at it as lost revenue which you owe and don't pay when you obtain the product...and so on and so on.
If cable theft is stealing, so is downloading without paying for it. Of course, pedantic Slashbots will jump in and try to say that cable theft is theft of service. Theft of service? Are you somehow removing a tangible copy of service from them that they no longer have? That's right, your counterarguments don't fly in the face of the very logic you use to justify that downloading somehow isn't stealing. Sorry.
The whole point of your argument is visible when you said this:
Does that make me a thief? Nope.
This tells me you're just trying to shake the image of being a thief. You're trying to justify it in your mind to absolve yourself of guilt. Guess what? You ARE a thief. Sorry.
"Sufferin' succotash."
"Those goods were priced for US markets"
That's what happens when you have a global market -- something that you could grow in your backyard and buy with your current paycheck -- is not possible when the 'global modifier' is added and the good is sold across the globe. Plus if goods are imported, tariffs are added, increasing the cost of goods consumed.
Many third-world countries got fucked when domestic-made products(i.e. agriculture) went from local market to global markets. For example, gasoline in Pakistan is not a magnitude cheaper than gasoline in North America. Why? Because if that was possible all the "Big Guys" would buy gasoline from Pakistan.
Tieing this to the main topic, when a video is pirated in China it's 'good enough' for the right price. When ppl don't give a rats ass about DVD quality, and price is the main factor, then MPAA will have lots to worry about.
great.
ive always wondered why people bother buying dvds. i mean thats like 20$ for something that you will probably only watch once. for really great movies, i cant think of more than 5 myself, then i would buy the dvd. the rest, people just like buying things.
i have never figured that one out. but your the reason that the industry isnt suing me so thanks!!!
oh and i recently downloaded the league of extrodinary gentlemen which sucked. i figure for every movie i watch that sucks the industry owes me one movie that is at least passible. even LOTR 3 wasnt that great and i saved 15$ goign to see it (plus cost of gas).
its not like im bankrupting the industry at all and even when i show my non tech friends vcds, most of them complain about quality anyways. the only reason people cared about mp3s is that the media latched on to it and basically challeneged the industry to do somethign about it.
to each their own.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
Due to the open source aspect of linux/BSD/etc, there will probably never be commercial services on those OSes that need to protect content. With wide open sources it would be very difficult to implement anything like drm. I can only think of a scheme that would d/l a random memory-resident 'driver' (written in something akin to java) from a service and use that to secure communications for streaming content delivery (and d/l new secure comm format/protocols at the same time). A memory-resident driver would be requested on each attempt to play previously d/led content. Yeah, I'm using the word secure very loosely. Plan for everything to get cracked and what to do after.
Another way I think this would work is to get something like wine involved. Find a way for the windows version to work on an open OS.
Then again, from a commercial service standpoint I think the bigwigs in their golden towers view the open OS movement as a bunch of hippies sitting around taking hits off the linux bong. Commercial interests don't care that much about OSes that don't generate income and cannot protect content.
Everything isn't three times as expensive in Japan. I lived there for nine years and I paid less for my rent (roughly the same amount of space), less for some of my groceries, notably fish and chicken, did not need to own a car thanks to the great public transportation system, and my transportation costs to and from work were 100% paid by my employer (normal in Japan) in the form of a train pass (which I could use anytime for my own personal use as well; a train pass is good for unlimited use anywhere along your points of travel, so it saved me quite a bit).
I did make more money than I do here, that's true, but only about 20 per cent.
It's possible to make everything cost three times as much there, but you don't have to. On average, things cost more than here, but careful shopping can offset most of that. If you live in a part of the USA that has cheap housing, the relative cost might make it seem like the cost of living is double or more, from your point of view. However, I live in California, and LA, San Diego, and San Francisco would all look that way from such a viewpoint, too.
That doesn't work for the same reason anarchy doesn't work. Because it's what we started with. Without spoken or unspoken rules, we have anarchy and total lack of privacy.
Then some or many people decide they'd rather not have it that way, tell people to piss off and mind their own business; and that's where absolute anarchy and unprivacy end and structured living begins.
"It's easier to sell 100 items for $1 each, than 1 item for $100"
While true, many of the people buy the $1 item when they don't need / use it much and the overall use of finite (albeit currently abundant) resources increases. (Fresh water, landfill, electricity, transport, etc)
This approach increases the profit of the company but at a significantly larger burden on society as a whole. See "tragedy of the commons".
including at least the currency symbol would generally be a good thing.
For anti-spoofing purposes, Slashdot currently allows only ASCII characters in comments. The British pound sign (U+00A3, which looks like a curly L for libra) isn't in ASCII, except as the approximation "GBP". This makes it harder to distinguish, purely based on currency symbols in comments, whether a user is in the MPAA's market (the USA) or the MPA's market (elsewhere; the MPA is the MPAA's export arm).
We The People Have Seen...
We the people have enthrone the Jester, to become serial lobbyists to circumvent, hack, pirate and kill Americans rights away along with our international allies rights. This year we the people have seen children and the elderly being sued for sharing intellectual property over a computer network even if they did not own a computer or know how to use one.
We the people have seen university networks threatened to be shut down by serial lobbyists for just having a song singing about satellites.
We the people have seen children sued by serial lobbyists in other countries for copying their own DVD's even though it is their right too. We the people have seen InternetMovies.com forced to shut down because serial lobbyists swore under penalty of perjury that they had movies from the future.
We the people have seen serial lobbyists push new laws into power that will make your DVD player not be compatible with future intellectual property content, forcing you to waste money on a new one.
We the people have seen serial lobbyists trying to push the Indie movies back into the dark ages with a screener ban, violating antitrust laws.
We the people have seen serial lobbyists violating antitrust laws to put good movie sites out of business like Intertainer.com.
We the people have seen enough of our constitutional rights and our neighbors rights being circumvented, hacked, pirated and dying away. Now we the people see the serial lobbyists losing law suit after suit.
We the people are now being heard by the higher courts that are now starting to dethrone the Jester, returning the throne to we the people.
We the people are Kings. Jester you are now ordered back to serve and entertain us Kings or prepared to be beheaded you Jokers.
Happy New Year!
Michael Jay Rossi
President
InternetMovies.com Inc.
as long as you live in a democracy the people can easily take back the power.
Not in a "democracy" where a significant chunk of people tend to vote for the candidate that the TV tells them to vote for. All major broadcast TV and cable news networks in the United States are owned by parent companies of major movie studios: CBS and UPN, ABC, NBC and MSNBC, Fox and Fox News, The WB, CNN, and Headline News, all MPAA members. Campaign contributions by five out of seven MPAA member studios are in effect offers of free advertising time, circumventing the FCC's "equal time" rule.
i find the [bottleneck] is ... the server being able to push more bits my way
Already solved. Try downloading through BitTorrent, which downloads from dozens of servers at once, using the upstream bandwidth of other people who are downloading or have just downloaded the same file.
I don't think the home theater thing works for everyone. Going on dates with people who you are just not ready to go to their house nor close enough to hang out with their friends. Or being able to go out and dress like a hobbit. Or just getting out of the house. It's too culturally relavant. Seeing a movie with an audience is an experience. What you do sounds cool, but I don't want to spend anymore time in work or with the people I work with than I have to. Also, downloading, at least in my experience, is a pain. Anyone you would download from is never on all night and so you get like 1/3 of the movie while your sleeping and then you have to find the same version of the movie to complete downloading and its just a pain. Plus they often come in two parts and for some reason no one ever has the second part and whatever. I'd rather just go. But clearly I'm missing out on the nice download places where one file will completely download when I sleep. And that file doesn't have annoying digital glitches or sound drop outs or whatever that are so annoying on my big screen with my sound system. A lot of people prefer perfection, if they can get it. I'm telling you, moviegoing and dvds will never go out of style.
Canadians call us "Mercans"
If I bring in my own candy, (and it was candy not offereed in the theater) will the RIAA issue me a subpeona? They had manufacturing costs and production costs to recoup on the stuff they do offer, so I should be forced to eat that crap?
My ex-wife buys my son Pirates of the Caribean, I make a copy of it, so he can watch it at both of our houses on visiting day. Is that fair use for him?
Unless you hate democracy laws were put in place by the majority.
So why do so many members of the "majority" tend to choose the candidate they see on MPAA-controlled broadcast networks and MPAA-controlled cable news networks?
i mean thats like 20$ for something that you will probably only watch once.
Tell that to any family with children under 10. How many times are they going to want to be babysat with The Care Bears Movie, Cats Don't Dance, All Dogs Go to Heaven, Pinocchio in Outer Space, Shrek, or a Barney and Friends disc? And what about titles that no video rental store in town carries?
oh and i recently downloaded the league of extrodinary gentlemen which sucked.
There are good reasons why LXG the movie didn't live up to the original comic, largely related to difficulties in licensing the trademarks on the names and likenesses of the various characters involved from the current holders of the movie rights. Brad Stone wrote an article in Newsweek giving full details, but it's no longer available for free; a single web copy costs $2.95, and rights to republish the article online are priced "by request" (that is, if you have to ask, you can't afford it).
for every movie i watch that sucks the industry owes me
there would be no problem if Microsoft gave Mac users a version of WMP with DRM
Here's one reason why it won't happen: Because Microsoft does not control the Mac OS graphics architecture, it has no way to ensure that the owner of a machine hasn't inserted a capture shim between Quartz and the video driver.
your point about the annoyance of switching a SVCD movie half-way thru is null & void.
Pressed DVD-ROM discs often have two layers. DVD-R and DVD+R have only one. The only way to put a dual-layer movie onto one disc without transcoding is to split it into two, as in VCD, or to transcode it down, which brings up the Hyundai/Lexus issue again.
And did not make yourself
Then explain how writing your own song is stealing, even if you don't recognize that you are using a few notes from an existing song.
I believe Linux already has some pretty sophisticated "traffic shaping" features, where you can set priorities for different streams based on source, destination, and a handful of other properties of the TCP stream. See the Linux Advanced Routing and Traffic Control website.
people just like buying things.
;)
I'm with you man. I dont fucking get it. When VHS first came out did you see them selling tapes everywhere you turn, even fricken 7-11 sells "hot releases". I dont get why with the DVD player (ok, wow, biggest new home electronic adoption ever) came the "DVD Collection". I've got a friend whos parents have an entertainment center full of DVD's that they likely only watched once, if ever at all, and when asked why mom came home with yet another "gotta have" movie its because "it was cheap ($14.99) and was at the register. My god WTF happened to society. This is crazy. I'm not saying everyone go out and download divx rips instead, but this seems to me like a fad that will hopefully die out as soon as the masses realize that they're $15/week movie habbit is really costing them.
what we really need are online alternatives ala ITMS & Co, or mass adoption of movies on demand (with the analog RCA out lines running to the unDRMd TiVo in jack. well, at least me personally
PLEASE, for the love of God, someone tell me I'm not the only one that thinks this way.
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
In a way, that's nice to hear. So long as American cultural products are too expensive for members of the Argentinian middle class, it encourages the growth of local culture -- homegrown music, theater, and film. I don't know if I have a rational reason for being heartened to hear that, it just strikes me as a good thing.
They would have to be extremely subtle about it.
Just to come up with one example, they might have considered violating users' privacy rather than their fair use rights, by watermarking or at least fingerprinting the files, to raise the specter that violation of the terms of use, while possible, is more likely to get you caught than before.
There are many gradual, careful approaches that consumers might not resist in sufficient numbers.
Right now the industry approach to DRM is laughable. It is good, too, because if they were more sophisticated about it they might have a chance of success. The problem is the full-court press that is apparently coming from Microsoft, even though I believe they are bigger than (for instance) the entire music industry in size, and stand to lose billions and indeed threaten their dominant position with such a move. They are apparently embracing DRM for other reasons - to use the DMCA to shut out open source software that attempts to interoperate with their new, "secure" platform, and perhaps to create a new revenue stream as an electronic commerce middleman.
I am praying that they be their old selves and fuck it up, thereby driving another nail in the DRM coffin and really helping out Apple and Linux - but these days they can't always be counted on to fuck things up.
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Some people just don't feel like paying for movies. *shrug*
I know some people try to make legitimate excuses why they actually "steal" movies. This will probably be marked flamebait, but I'm just telling the truth.
It's really no one's concern but my own why I don't want to pay for movies. Maybe I'm just sick of the studios ripping people off! The last DVD I bought was Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring. The thing that really pissed me off about that was inside the DVD was a coupon for $10 off the special edition that was to come out that following November. Right. $10? Should've been more like 90% off since I had already purchased it.
I bought Apoocalype Now seriously like a week before the Redux came out. I didn't even know wtf a "redux" was. Needless to say, I couldn't return/exchange the movie a week later for the Redux since they're technically two different movies. Yeah, I'm gonna copy the original Apocalypse Now and exchange it for the Redux that has MORE features and footage. I'm really screwing the system on that one, I guess!
It's okay for them to pull this crap with consumers, but when consumers start doing it to them, they get all pissy just like the RIAA.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
Complete and utter fallacy!
/. with your wits about you from now on.
Disney: BILLIONS AND BILLIONS
Me: Thousands and Thousands
--> Copy DVD from Buddy Instead of Paying $20
At the end of the transaction
Disney: BILLIONS AND BILLIONS but not $20 you owe them
Me: Thousands and Thousands and you still have the $20 you owe them
When a hundreds of thousands of people do this release after release your talking about a real dent in the Disney stock price which hurts regular people.
OR you could use your argument like this
IRS/US Government: MANY BILLIONS AND BILLIONS
Me: Thousands and Thousands
--> I skip paying taxes
At the end of the transaction
IRS/US Government: MANY BILLIONS AND BILLIONs
Me: Thousands and Thousands
I bet less people agree with this method of argument stated this way.
Please
Last I checked, you got 40 songs per month for $10. That's your 25 cents per song. VBR MP3, no DRM. Download clients for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux.
Of course, your tastes might be more mainstream. But the artists that emusic carries, at least in the "Punk/Alternative" section, are largely on labels that are not affiliated with the RIAA. You might not have heard of them before, but chances are you'll find something you like, and you get to dodge the whole sordid mess and support labels who support their artists. They also carry RIAA-backed label artists too, so check before you buy.
No, I don't work for emusic; I work for a state university and freshmeat.net. But that state university also has a radio station (see the sig) that plays much of the stuff available on emusic. So I'm an advocate of that sort of music, and emusic seems like a great way to get it. You can often see 3 good bands for $5, but to the uninitiated, that can be hard to do.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
It costs about 5.99$ to rent a movie anywhere [a new release].
Even though renting the newest releases at Video Stop in Fort Wayne, Indiana, costs only $3 a night, I seldom rent new releases. How much of $1 does the studio get when I rent an older title?
How much do you think Blockbuster pays for each DVD they buy from their suppliers? [or distribution rights or whatever they need].
In the United States at least, I'm guessing the video rental stores pay wholesale prices, just like any other firm that wants to buy a truckload of discs. Once the copyright owner has sold a copy to a wholesaler, the first sale doctrine (codified as 17 USC 109) ensures that the copyright owner can't prevent the wholesaler or any subsequent purchaser (such as Video Stop) from disposing of the copy however it wishes (such as rental).
> With the proliferation of region-free and region-changable players, I think we're going to see the end of region encoding. Which is a good thing, for so many other reasons.
Incidently, are there any "global" players that Do Not Suck (TM) and can be purchased in North America?
"And it's a nasty one. You'll have made the 'disease' so resistant that the FBI won't be able to track child pornographers who use it, and the CIA won't be able to track terrorists who use it. And you guys, the RIAA, forget it. You'll be history. You'll go down in the history books for finally achieving copyright anarchy. Or rather, copyright voluntarism, which is what will really happen.
And will the RIAA, Disney, FBI, CIA, NSA, Democrats and Republicans let this happen?
"Ian Clarke has pointed out that the choice between communication safe from anyone's observation and control is more important than the RIAA, the MPAA, and even the theoretical benefit of law enforcement's dream of eavesdropping on everything, everywhere.
Important to who? Not to those who make the rules or pay for them.
"He is right. For saying this, many will damn me. But why is that a controvertial statement: that I should be allowed to talk with my neighbor, and with his neighbor, without the government and its many clients judging every word?
Because it lessens the goverment's power and control.
"Yes, communication is powerful. Yes it is dangerous. That's exactly why we wrote our Bill of Rights the way we did - to protect our expressions and our privacy from cowards, who don't understand how important these basic human rights are.
1. The bill of rights did not save you from the DMCA and PATRIOT acts. I believe it will prove to be equaly ineffective when the rest of your rights will be found to infringe on corporate and political interests.
2. The issue is not "cowards who don't understand" but rather "tyrants who don't agree".
"There are two worlds we can live in. One where, in the end, we have no privacy, and one where, in the end, we do.
"I know which world is better, and so do you."
"Better" is such a subjective word. A better world for you is not neccessary a better world for GWB, Ashcroft, Valenti or, possibly, your lady friend. In fact, she will probably be better off financially in the kind of world that you would not like. Please forgive me for being a cynical old fart, but isn't that the main reason for people who work as IP lawyers for major music corporations?
I save her my story about the evolution of wireless technology.
That technology can be "regulated" too, you know.
They run their business like the mafia.
and they will continue doing so.
As far as I'm concerned, they dug their own grave.
or yours.
I totally agree. I'm not amazed that people are downloading free movies, I'm amazed that people are buying them.
Look through a Best Buy ad for the selection of DVDs. Exactly how many times could someone watch "Legally Blonde" or "Bringing Down the House"?! Who is buying those DVDs and why?!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Also. movie DO have another revenue stream before they come to the home market. Finding Nemo has mad 700 million worldwide without its record dvd sales. With CD's that's the only chance for the record company to screw the artist - I mean make money. Then again, from my perspective, I also have no problem paying 20 bucks for a DVD. But 15 for a CD is way too high.
-------- In Soviet Russia, "Soviet Russia" sigs hate Slashdot.
by what he said anyway. if he downloads from the internet yes he's stealing, but he stated that he merely copies the dvd movies to his computer. that isn't stealing, at least in canada here you are allowed to make copies from one medium to another for back-up purposes. copying is not stealing. now, if he rents the movie, copies it to his computer and returns the dvd, thats stealing. but just buying the dvd, copying the dvd to his computer, isn't stealing. Did you read his post? no. who looks like the moron? You... Read what he's saying before you attack him for what he said. making a personal copy is fair use, and not illegal, and definately not theft. HE OWNS A COPY OF THE MOVIE. If he shares that copy to the world, that's illegal, but simply having the copy for his personal use isn't theft, isn't illegal.
I'm actually pleased to read your response, and I think your cynicism is well warranted. I have these discussions with other friends and often it is I who have to play the devil's advocate.
I don't know if the DMCA and PATRIOT comparison is valid. The vanishing point of encryption and obfuscation techniques, and thus secure peer to peer networks, is that a choice is forced about whether or not encryption and/or privacy in general is allowed. DMCA and PATRIOT each had qualifying themes, but ultimately, good engineering can force the rulemakers to eliminate the qualifiers and choose between either:
*) outlawing encryption and/or privacy in general
*) making data communications prohibitively expensive, and/or illegal
The former will be more politically difficult than DMCA or PATRIOT - not that it hasn't been done in other nations! The latter will have economic consequences that may be too difficult even for our sad little government to ignore.
I often raise the same point about wireless - that it is under the stifling control of one of the most pandering of federal agencies. Others have argued to me that there will be ways to deal even with hostile regulatory regimes, but this is outside my area of expertise, and I believe we should confront our present threats as though, in losing, we would lose everything.
Even outside the analgesic dream of democracy, tyrants derive their power from cowardice. I wonder what you would have predicted as the future of our nation 150 or 100 or 50 years ago, as blights many times more menacing must have seemed far more impenetrable to the generations that eventually overcame them... I say this not out of complacency, but to point out that resignation seems silly.
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Even outside the analgesic dream of democracy, tyrants derive their power from cowardice.
Not if they're smart. Complacency and ignorance are safer alternatives.
I wonder what you would have predicted as the future of our nation 150 or 100 or 50 years ago,
I am sorry to say that I am not sufficiently familiar with the history of your nation. I am also not very good at predictions (especially pertaining to stock markets, but I digress).
However, I think that the modus operandi of your current regime is somewhat different in this era.
as blights many times more menacing must have seemed far more impenetrable to the generations that eventually overcame them...
And here lies the key difference. Your population does not feel threatened, in fact they are either content of have other things to worry about.
Now, let's get philosophical for a moment and consider a hypothetical regime that wants to keep maximum control and stability. Here is a possible scenario:
Make sure the citizenry is docile. Encourage obedience, discourage critical thinking ("zero tolerance" policies at school). Capitalize on patriotic and nationalistic feelings. Provide enough distractions (entertainment) and spin ("infotainment"). Create a "consumer" culture where instant gratification is much more important than long term issues. Play on fears (terrorism) and encourage an "us vs. them" mentality. Find or create an outside threat (WMD)and declare a war on it. Also declare a war on several internal "threats" (drugs). Make the people feel that they are in control and can change things (democracy) but ensure that all of their choices are false ones (two party system with no meaningful differences between them).
Now, start limiting those freedoms that most of the sheeple have been conditioned not to miss. Do so in the name of security, comfort and convenience. Deal with the malcontents in ways that won't make them into symbols for the bulk of the population.
Nah... Won't ever happen.
I say this not out of complacency, but to point out that resignation seems silly.
So is inaction.
It is still theoretically possible to beat the system.
Complacency and ignorance are safer alternatives.
Good point. Complacency and ignorance, however, are not particularly novel qualities at our present point in human history. Society has catalysts. They're always popping up; maybe press or politicians, or ordinary people who have thought of a better way. So perhaps it comes down to how a regime suppresses the natural impetus for change. That is why I paint fear as a big part of this - fear on the part of the press, of rival politicians, and even ordinary citizens to speak their mind.
Political movements are organic. Ordinary Germans who opposed parts of the national socialist platform (such as genocide) found themselves mute out of fear, not even because of an elaborate political police apparatus, but because the ideology itself had something of a life of its own in its "hosts." Expressing sympathy for a lower caste could provoke terrible reprisals from "ordinary people." And we certainly have that in America today, where (largely absent a classical, centralized method of control) more and more people perceive a threat (physical, economic, and of course emotional) for too vocally questioning a variety of our prejudices and policies. And that is how a minority begins to dominate a majority.
The history of our country, mirroring the history of most of the world, is bleak. Stratified, monopoly-based, laissez faire "oligarchal capitalism", perfected to the point of feudalism, following on actual, brutal slavery, highly institutionalized mysogyny, the utter dominance of a highly specific subset of a major religion, militant xenophobia... The McCarthy period is particularly instructive today, especially since modern American Neoconservatives are attempting to rehabilitate McCarthy. If you are not familiar with it, simply put, they blacklisted, and often locked up, their political opponents, clearly closing in on the dream of exercising the same free hand with dissidents that the Soviets did. In short, although we are in many respects regressing, we are far, far better off than we have been in the recent past, and we go into the present days of struggle with ignorance and fear armed with new and exceptional tools, and from what is basically a position of extraordinary success.
Complacency is the dingy Lay-Z-Boy of evil, placed too close to the TV set of Ignorance, but Fear is what keeps you from climbing out of it. Although there is a fourth problem, just as effective at keeping people down, which you should especially be careful of: Despair, or Futility. That is, a sense that the world is inherently broken, and attempts to improve it are wasted energy. Accepting witty overgeneralizations about the entire population of a country is a far step in that direction. I find it hard to look at any part of recent history and believe it for a minute.
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