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."

Comments

Re:Bootleggers are paying?

[WIAKywbfatw]

The bootleggers (ie, the people who make and selling lots of unauthorised copies of movies) are paying "the players" (ie, people in the movie industry who can get their hands on screeners and other preview copies) for preview copies of movies.

In other words, some of the people who are opening the door to the bootleggers (or pirates) are charging them for the priviledge.

Re:ROFL

[gringer]

Try reading the *whole* article before commenting on parts of it:

"According to Nguyen, it takes minutes for a newly released item to reach all of the topsites, but it may take hours or days to reach the lower echelon of private sites. After that, the digital booty leaks out intermittently to online areas more accessible to the public, such as chat channels and news groups.

To get the movies, you just need to wait. But to get the movies as early as possible, you need to know the right people.

Re:ROFL

[1u3hr]

But downloading a movie that's been taken by a shaky handed teenager with a hand camera in a cinema...

In China you can buy DVDs of just about any movie within days of release in the US, or sometimes before. They all have very nice packages, probably pasted up from promo sites on the web. (However, the English text is often nonsensical, or relating to an entirely different movie. And sometimes they include real reviews from, eg, AICN, like "[Matrix 3] is a steaming pile of crap".) The quality of the movie though is a crapshoot. Sometimes it's a perfect dupe of a DVD release (especially Oscar screeners with the anti piracy notice floating across the bottom every 10 minutes), sometimes a slightly blurry image with good sound, not bad but a bit worse than VCR quality, sometimes it's obviously a video camera in a cinema complete with audience coughs and shadows on the screen. But as they're less than $1 you can just shrug and throw those away, or go back to the shop and exchange it -- it's actually a lot easier to exchange pirated goods than legit; less paperwork I suppose.

Re:These criminals have a weak spot!

[Hanno]

There is a sad actual quote from a German lawsuit where one judge used the following sentence in the official verdict:

http://daufaq.de/index.php4?aktuellerubrik=Techn ik

F: Was ist ein FTP-Server?

A: Es antwortet LG Braunschweig, Urteil vom 21.7.2003 - 6 KLs 1/03, rechtskraeftig, CR 2003, 801: FTP-Server sind Systeme, in denen gecrackte, also nach Ueberwindung des Vervielfaeltigungsschutzes kopierte, Software geladen ist.

Translation:

Q: What is an FTP server

A: As answered by the court of Braunschweig, in its decision from July 2003: FTP servers are systems used to store cracked software - software that has been copied after removing its copy protection.