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Investigating Online Movie Piracy?
kewsh writes "There's an excellent piece from the LA Times via Yahoo! News which explains the interworkings of the movie, music, and software piracy scene, including quotes from former and current scene members: 'Common to most groups is a disdain for selling pirated goods in favor of giving free access to anything and everything'." The article also notes: "Not everyone in the scene is so pure. Some players... are suspected of selling pirated movies and music to commercial bootleggers."
Why would they have to pay if the pirates are into giving the milk away for free?
I have been pwned because my
is increasing (slowly but surely). what...10 mbits common place by 2007? say hello to zooming movie downloads :)
Disclaimer: I don't know what I'm talking about.
...an article that tells me that the Internet is used for distributing pirated warez and movies...
The phrase "No shit, Sherlock" springs rapidly to mind.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I suppose next we'll see some report from a country like Australia showing how sales of ripped media are not hurting the industry.
Or has that already happened?... I get a little confused as to which counter-argument is the most recent.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
"The scene is closed to much of the world; would-be participants have to gain the trust of insiders and prove their worth before gaining entry. And the lifespan of groups tends to be short, at least on the Net, where players come and go."
It's only closed to those who don't know about P2P apps, IRC, FTP, WWW, E-mail, CDR/DVDR, and any other method of transferring data... and the easiest way to gain entry is to type something like "/join #warez950". As far as the players, they don't come and go, they just change their names and keep doing what they're doing. I'm sorry, but how silly is this article?
I've got Star Wars Ep. 4-6 as theatrical release ripped from Laserdisc in the best possible DiVX quality.
It's not my fault that I had to get a pirated version.
George Lucas with that "CG" labeled crackpipe in his hand is to blame.
Another point of disgust is MiramAXE with their sabotage of asian cinema. Has "Hero" (Jet Li) been released in the US already? I don't think so. MiramAXE likes to shelf things for a long time. After that they like to AXE movies into little ugly pieces, too.
Piracy is competition and the only chance to stop this re-release and censorship nightmare.
People who hate cinema may mod this down.
Damn, I want to be able to mod comments as Unfunny.
...the more they stay the same. I find it kind of funny that you can replace the word "Movie" with "Software" and voila! You have an article about the warez scene in the 80s.
Granted, we didn't have FTP sites or Broadband. You young punks don't know how lucky you have it! Why, back in my day we had to courier stuff at 24oo baud! (Ranting fades...)
Still, I miss those days. I'm glad I gave it up though. I'd hate to be caught now, in my 30s, and have my life ruined.
Anyone notice its all SVCD or VCD dvdrips? I know the ease of playing on the DVD player is attractive, but for the same size you can have a nice Divx release with AC3 sound. Or even a nice dual Divx CD set.
How many people here went and downloaded GordianKnot and tried to rip some DVDs? Takes dayd, hard as hell.
I'd rather download a rip off the net for a DVD I own that try to rip a DVD with the current set of utilities. SVCD is a different story, being mpeg2. (Sounds like fair use to me)
Bring out the stromtroopers!
Christian Engström, Former Member of the European Parliament 2009-2014 for The Pirate Party, Sweden
People went to all that effort just to see Elf ffs?
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
People who are stealing the movie and then selling it on to other illegal parties. And this is meant to surprise us how? Rus
CPanel + Root from $35/mo - 10% off with discount code SLASHDOT
Sometimes group members will send files to other sites themselves, using a technique called File Transfer Protocol instead of e-mail.
Ah yes.. those sneaky hi-tech pirates thinking of a clever and novel way to avoid clogging up their inbox with 700 meg email attachments.
Ah, *THAT'S* what "FTP" stands for!!! I always thought it meant "Films To Pirate"...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Posting to slashdot, explaining the internet piracy schene?
Next thing you know, the preacher will be sermonizing the choir.
Oh wait. Did I miss something?
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
For a second, i was like "Is today a Sunday?" Then i saw my crystal ball and it had a date 8th Jan on the lower right corner. Shame you for misleading me with this kind of news. Thursdays aren't slow days are they?
Hello! Thank you for chosing [online service/ISP]. We are proud to have you as our customer!
As a new citizen of the Internet, it is important that you are made aware of the many important and dangerous aspects of the Internet.
First off, there are search engines. Search engines are your gateway to all of the content that is available on the World Wide Web and beyond.
While there is a vast array of information of interest online, we do not give a damn about any of it. The main kinds of material you will find online are actually just porn, smut, erotica, MP3s, pirated software, movies, and various other good things that every family can enjoy.
The dander lies in how you get this data from your Internet connection. There are a couple simple guidelines to keep you and your family safe.
1) DO NOT use shitty P2P clients with "fuck my upload cap, yo" enabled. That's just asking for the same treatment in return. Instead, set up a password-protected FTP server and share it with all your friends!
2) DO NOT listen to flacid music, look at flacid porn, or watch flacid movies! These things only provoke the evil empires. Instead, have a sense of taste!
3) DO NOT assume you know what you're doing! Instead, go read the fucking documentation, you bastard!
By following these simple steps, you can help us provide better service for you, while also improving your own online experience. Thank you for chosing [online server/ISP]!
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
"MysticVCD is one of dozens of "ripping" or "release" groups that obtain, prepare, package and feed movies, songs and games into a secretive and complex distribution scheme that functions a bit like the illegal drug trade -- minus the bloodletting."
jesus christ next thing you know hill tell me about "computers" and "high speed internet thingies"... who wrote this shit? it sounds like the starting of a romance novel you read in a supermarket checkout lane.
wholly god
"The scene is closed to much of the world; would-be participants have to gain the trust of insiders and prove their worth before gaining entry. And the lifespan of groups tends to be short, at least on the Net, where players come and go."
and here we see a "nerd" or "computer insider" as they perfer to be called. see how it looks at us with quiet distain.
do the people at this paper pick technical editors based on who can send a midi file in an email?
on the plus side, im a player in an international world of intrigue and mystery
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
If I had a quarter for every time...
Of course we are going to use FTP to get stuff onto servers initially, but dont forget once its on the FTP server we use FXP to move the file from server to server (courier'ing)
This shit is way off base - Kazaa? That virus-laden piece of trash? "Topsites"? Aren't those the fake sites that promise me LORD OF THE RINGS NEW GREAT QUALITY - JUST VOTE FOR US IN ORDER 1 2 3! Please. Bit Torrent, Win MX, and DC++ are the future. The fact that these people still quote Kazaa as the file sharing service of choice when there is far more material on DC++ alone is very indicative of how little of a clue these so-called "experts" and "tech editors" really have.
... the BBS scene.
This is certaintly not news. But the article does remind us that the BBS scene is still alive and well. The file sizes have gotten bigger (vs. 340K Apple //e floppies.) But the transmission speeds have also increased. The only difference I see know is that, thanks to P2P, the end-user/downloader gets the goods directly. In the old days, the final user was never granted access to the releaser's or the courier's site. It arrived via the "sneaker net" from a friend of a friend.
You have 5 Moderator Points! Use 'em or lose 'em! They will expire before any good stories are posted.
You would have 7 quarters.
fraudulent larcens & thugs. nothing new/interesting about that.
Except that Miramax consider importing a copy of Hero a violation of their distribution rights and a violation of copyright and you're *stealing* yadda yadda yadda. Read the Wired article from the guy who was recently sent a Cease & Desist letter by them for linking to a Hong Kong site that sold legit copies of the DVD>
"Dre don't get as high as me.... I'm Cheech and Chong" - Snoop Dogg
Is actually usable as a dvd ripper in linux.
tom-george.comBecause geeks rate higher t
> Buy a multi-region DVD
Which may be a 'piracy tool' and as such illegal in the USA under the DMCA.
If it were upto the movie industry, you would not have a multi region player to begin with (read up on the DVD licencing)
I actually bought a perfectly legitimate DVD copy of Hero (for the imdb people, look for "Ying Xiong") in Chinatown (San Francisco) in September.
I do not see how it is forbidden ???
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Dude, you don't ask people to mod people down because you disagree with them. The right and the wrongs or the arguments aside, the grandparent is a reasonable comment that is 'Interesting'; If you disagree with someone, argue your case, not ask for people to abuse the mod system.
-- Sorry, I can't think of anything funny to say here.
Of course they're not going to use e-mail, with the Internet Protocol Address Verifier around.
I watched in wonder a few weeks ago as an aquaintance logged into an FTP site he owns with some friends, populated with something like a thousand ripped movies, and downloaded a movie, burnt it to CD, and handed it to me, saying 'try this'. (I did not like the movie).
We're only a year or two away from seeing *massive* movie trading on p2p networks.
Anyone who claims this is about fair use is obviously trolling. It's about cheating, getting something for nothing.
But that does not mean it's necessarily going to be bad for the movie business. There is still a world of difference between watching a movie on the big screen and watching a movie at home. The video/DVD rental industry, however, is definitely going to die, I think.
The key to "anti-piracy" is to understand that the warez kids never pay anyhow. Whatever they're ripping/cracking/hoarding, it's always stolen and it's always for kicks, not because they want a quiet evening at home with the wife.
The only significant market for media sales (music, movies, and probably software too) is the bulk of non-technical people who look for the easy solution, for decent quality, and are willing to pay for it.
The music industry lost this market when it dropped the Napster ball. The movie industry still has a chance...
The film industry has perhaps 2 years to make a paid service for downloading / burning movies to protected DVD, if they miss this window of opportunity, they will find that their main market is already getting their stuff for free.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Thank goodness they said computer games else I would have to question the authenticity of the Scrabble and Twister sets I bought last week from some guy in a big rig behind Wal-Mart.
without the itunes.
if you can read this, good, because i sure cant
When I was a warez kiddie in the 80s, the "state of the art" for Apple ][ computers was an Apple-Cat modem, which in addition to 45.5 Baudot encoding (the TDD standard), also would do asynchronous 1200 baud, and "normal" 1200 baud if you bought an upgrade daughter card.
Nobody I knew had the upgrade card, and virtually no BBS in the early 80s supported 1200 baud anyway (I think a Hayes or Racal 1200 baud modem was like $600 at the time).
The Bell 202 asynchronous 1200 baud mode seemed largely moot until someone figured out how to use it to send entire Apple ][ disks (a whopping 120k)! A program called "DiskFer" or something similar would send an entire floppy disk (sector-copied, useful for full-disk games) over the phone.
Anyway, you kids and your 2400 baud modems sure had it good. Before diskfer or whatever it was called, the only other thing was to go to peoples houses and bring your floppy drive for faster copying action, which seems kind of queer now.
n/t =)
...is to let it go...
/. account. All these free journalism sites are boring).
I used to crack/distribute Apple ][ games when I was a kid. I stopped playing them because the primary goal was the crack. The games got boring. Having hundreds of them that I'd never played eventually seemed pointless. Years later, I got into the movie distribution scene. Burning movies to VCD/SVCD soon seemed pointless since I eventually stopped watching them. Now I pirate satellite in addition to paying for the part of the service that I find value in. I pirate out of curiosity but when free PPV's are all yours, you find yourself unable to devote the time to watch them. I haven't watched a free PPV for months.
I do go to movies because it's a social event; certainly not because I want to sit in an uncomfortable chair, with my feet on a sticky floor, some couple talking loudly in front of me and a coughing/hacking fat guy behind me. If watching the movie was my goal, I'd do it at home, in comfort.
So give the stuff away for free and people will discover how amazingly boring the movies/games/software really are and probably end up spending more time with their kids.
Remember, when you get a movie for free, you don't feel obligated to sit through the whole thing after the first 10 minutes prove that it sucks.
(yes, one of these days I'll get a real
First time I've seen anyone in the mainstream media describe the process of movie piracy, who plays, what motivates them, and how the end product trickles out into the "mainstream" to wind up offered via services like Kazaa.
Disclaimer: I know the story's author, Jon Healey, and I happen to think he's one of few people left at the LA Times who's even interested in writing about technology or intellectual property issues on anything other than a "here's how *you* can money with this stock" level.
I think it's interesting that the term "pirates" are being appied to intellectual property robinhoods (BTW - governments and rich people hate robinhoods)
The term "pirates" does not fit - pirates steal, rape and pillage. They commit more than one crime when "pirating". That term may apply to those that hijack media and resell it for profit, but it doesn't fit where someone buys, then shares or gives away a product for free.
-- $G
Not a bad read, kinda common knowledge, doesnt really break new ground...Found myself skimming the article a lot...a bit too long
But interesting non the less
...buying a cracked DVD in China and getting the MPAA anti-piracy notice on the screen. Yep, that worked REALLY well.
There are always people who want something for nothing. There are also those who want to copy things for the thrill, or as a way to get friends, or for other reasons. These people won't go away - as long as the technical means exist (and in a free society, the means will always exist) people will copy works. I think that these people make up a small segment of the market - that doesn't mean copyright holders shouldn't protect their works, but this set of people is unlikely to destroy the business of selling recorded works.
DVD copying will run rampant if the MPAA decides to screw their customers. The music industry (the larger labels, anyway) raised the prices of CDs, homogenized much of the product, made CDs hard to use, and tried to extract money from customers for fair use rights that weren't theirs to sell. Record companies (RIAA labels) have a product that people want, but they decided that they could get more money from their customers than their customers wanted to pay. Once P2P apps came around, the large set of people the record companies angered had an alternative - copy the music and pay nothing. There would have always been copying at a low level, but the frustration of people with the record labels meant that as soon as a means to get records some other way came around, people would take it. Had there not been significant frustration with record companies in the first place, most of the people who get their music from file trading would not have gone through the trouble to do so.
The means to copy digital media is not going to go away. What will determine whether copying becomes rampant or not is the level of frustration of the customer base (and the cost of the product - e.g. high-end software). If it becomes very easy to obtain copied movies, more people will do it as well - but they probably won't try as hard if they aren't frustrated in the first place. At least, IMHO.
Similar to the poster who said his friend said "Here, try this" from a library of tons of movies, I was just exposed to the world of Anime Fansubs. Having just turned into an Anime junkie, I'm curious where this kind of stuff lies. Is it just a gray area because these are not licensed in America yet? They weren't the best in the world but it was kind of cool to see something that will probably never be on the Anime Network or on Best Buys shelves.
Now eight.
You make a good point. The again, for years the SPA, the RIAA and the MPAA have been publicly pushing the idea that anyone who gets a copy of something without paying for it is a Thieving Pirate, and anyone who assists them in obtaining the data (warez, mp3z, moviez) is Aiding Piracy. The recently re-written intellectual property laws specifically make no differentiation between people who SELL unauthorized material and those who give it away for free. For years (decades?) there's been a thriving community of Bootleg Music Collectors. Most of them traded material they had for other material. Most specifically did not sell the material they had - almost as a matter of principle. From what I've read, The Well, one of the first popular online communties grew in large part because of the activities of people trading Graeful Dead tapes. This spirit is probably the same that motivates most of the release groups.
-------- In Soviet Russia, "Soviet Russia" sigs hate Slashdot.
I just wanted to say that the article is quite accurate. Something that is too rare in the mainstream press. Kudos to Jon Healey for doing proper research.
If some bootleggers are selling a copy, while others are giving the same copy for free, those getting charged are paying an "ignorance tax". With Internet searches and messaging for finding alternatives, that becomes more of a "stupidity tax". Geeks should be grateful to those paying it for the subsidy.
--
make install -not war
Da Blog
If the price of the official movies were way cheaper, (say half the price they are now) then there would be no piracy, and Holywood would sell vastly more copies than they do now, and probably make more money in the process.
Why would you buy some cheap crappy reproduction when the official movie was a "reasonable price" right??
Start->Run
cmd
C:\>ftp
ftp>
Oh My God! I've been rooted and had illegal file sharing software installed! Darn Microsoft and their so-called security.
Rich
On A PC I NEVER get the right color, brightness, etc. I change these things all day in XINE, Avifile and MPlayer and NEVER get the right result.
On a Mac (I have a 12 inch PB) the colors, etc are RIGHT, I dont have to change anything. Both Videolan and Mplayer do a great job. In NEVER use Quick Time, because the interface is ugly.
FTA- "Unlike the private sites, most of the chat channels and news groups are open to anyone who can master their relatively arcane protocols."
Dam, I want to get on Usenet but I can't find my crystal ball.
: )I know a lot of people who grab these movies, and I don't see why the industry is complaining. Everyone I've ever met who does it still goes to the theater, and still buy movies.
If anyone has a right to complain about this, it's the rental places. Most people download to save on the price of a rental.
Hollywood and all the people making movies are probably not losing millions (despite the claim), but I'm willing to bet that Blockbusters profit margin is down.