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Investigating Online Movie Piracy?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the nfo-file-says-0-day dept.

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."

12 of 232 comments (clear)

  1. Bootleggers are paying? by ObviousGuy · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Why would they have to pay if the pirates are into giving the milk away for free?

    --
    I have been pwned because my /. password was too easy to guess.
    1. Re:Bootleggers are paying? by kaiwainz · · Score: 4, Interesting
      The people selling this stuff are not only tax dodgers, but are often taking the customers for a ride, some people often mistake these copies for the real thing and are buying in good faith, only to find out they have been ripped off by a shoddy inkjet printed jewelcase inner and an un-stickered cd-r costing next to nothing.

      I completely agree. I've seen some real fine work done in Ukraine. Some even go all the way and make a box. The problem is that the average user doesn't know what they're doing is actually illegal.

      Talk to your average user, I doubt they even know that the Office they're running which they borrowed off the neighbour is actually breaching the EULA. Again, the average user doesn't understand because they see it as a victimless crime.

      As I have said to people, there is VERY little money made by the software company off end users. 85% of the money made are off enterprise and public service sales. The end user *may* once it a blue moon purchase a cheap $50 card making kit, however, in terms of the Microsofts and Adobes, they make little money off these customers.

      Here we are in 2004, and now these companies, and rightfully so, are now demanding that customers actually pay for the software. Activation is the first step and I am sure there will be more full proof protection mecanisms on their way. The fact is, unlike the end user, large commercial customers are kept in line via random BSA audits, with end users, there is no such safe guard.

      As for the movie business, the problem is that again, the end customer see it as a victimless crime. They don't see the negative spin offs hence they have no way of knowing what they're doing.

      If it were just Hollywood, then I think I wouldn't worry too much, however, small independent film units are the worst hit. These organisations are on razor thin margins. They live day to day on the sales of their movies. Sure, many of these independent films are sponsered by grants from governments, however, if the government see that the money is being put into a bottomless pit then they may pull the plug.

      If the plug is pulled then diversity will cease to exist and as a result, we're all worse off.

  2. Piracy is competition! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Piracy is competition! by iainl · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Yes, it is your fault. If you had a laserdisc player (or even just bought the VHS releases when they came out), you could play the perfectly legal versions that the divxes were ripped from, like the rest of us.

      Laserdisc is great, and complaining that you need one in order to be able to watch Star Wars properly is only a little more relevant than the fact that I needed to buy an XBox as well as my Gamecube when I wanted to play Halo.

      As for Miramax's frankly useless attempts at Asian cinema, get yourself a multi-region DVD player and import the good versions like the rest of us.

      There are a hell of a lot of things that people get pirated, that they could have legitimate (and better quality) versions of if they only did a bit of extra work.

      --
      "I Know You Are But What Am I?"
    2. Re:Piracy is competition! by amplt1337 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Speaking as one of those "18 to Twenty-somethings" that you refer to here, I think you're overlooking an important point: people my age don't go to the cinema for the product, they go for the social experience. Music is different, yes. But, let's see, I went to maybe seven movies in 2003. In all but one of those cases (LOTR) it was because of the social environment -- it's an activity that you can do with people. I don't really care about what crap they produce -- maybe two or three good films a year, which I still don't care enough about to pay NY theatre prices for (again, excepting LOTR) -- but the opportunity to get out of the house and go to a social gathering place with a group of friends is what I wind up buying.

      So we may not even be endorsing the films we watch. They're just there as background noise, to provide an alternative to the bar scene.

      Meanwhile, the grandparent mentioned that Hollywood will pump ad money into its movies. This is true. But if my experience is typical (which it may not be) this money doesn't effectively advertise individual movies. Rather, it advertises going to the movies as a viable option for a social outing. Hollywood advertises for the cinema industry, which (given the predominantly social character of going to a movie theatre) is much more important for the theatres than what our tastes are.

      Also, don't forget that sometimes people see movies expressly because they're awful... :) But to the point, there's more forces at work than just "those ignorant tasteless kids" buying up whatever schlock you splat at a screen for them. If anything, art films might be worse than Hollywood crap for the purposes that people use it for (an insightful movie might be a distraction somehow). Though I'll be happy to rent it eventually.

      --
      Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
  3. Re:The next step by Mascot · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The aussies aren't the only ones. Where I live (Norway) record sales revenue has been on an upward trend for years. Ironically, it apparently started to accellerate shortly after Napster became a household name. Surely a coincidence.

    Personally I wish it would've started going down once the record companies started making their "CDs" incompatible with many devices. Of course, they would've attributed that to piracy as opposed to people getting fed up having to rip the CDs to burn on a CD-R and get the compatabilty back (I've yet to meet a "protected" CD that failed to rip as opposed to just ripping slower).

  4. Re:ISP customer bandwidth... by BrookHarty · · Score: 5, Interesting

    10 mbits common place by 2007? say hello to zooming movie downloads :)

    Linux ISO's are so common at 2-5 disc sets, Why would 700 meg DIVX CD's be any different for downloading, now? You only rent a couple movies, you could just download a couple movies at night and burn them to CD.

    What we need is an iTunes for Divx movies. :)

  5. Anyone notice its VCD not Divx or DVD... by BrookHarty · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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)

  6. Re:ISP customer bandwidth... by jez9999 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    My lecturer in Distributed Communications said that "increasin bandwith will just result in software makers letting their software use more bandwith", which off course brings us back to where we started.

    Perhaps... however, you can't deny that it's pretty mandatory for DVD movies to use a lot more space than most pieces software, which is the reason for the enormous size of the rip.

    The race between 'software makers' and media capacity/data transfer speed is one that the latter will ultimately win, unless software manufacturers literally start including files with gigabytes of random noise in just to fill up the space :-)

    --
    == Jez ==
    Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
  7. Re:These criminals have a weak spot! by Sklivvz · · Score: 2, Interesting

    You are joking but here at work FTP use is restricted for exactly this reason. Bit Torrent is totally blocked because it's a "pirate tool" and so is P2P.

    Totally ludicrous, expecially since our netadmins would be perfectly capable of monitoring who's using the bandwidth and how.

    --
    My Stack Overflow user
  8. Re:ISP customer bandwidth... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Instead of ripping to DIVX which is 1/10 the size of a dvd-rip or something like that, they now rip the dvd with all the extra material and data making it 10 gb instead of the 700 mb divx rip.

    The distribution of DVD images is still very rare. I have only seen it on a couple of occations. What the guy said was that people are now starting to distribute entire sets, like season boxes. A good DivX of a 42 minute episode is going to be 250-300 megs, so a 22 episode season adds up. I know a guy who has the entire run of The Simpsons, which is 59 gigs IIRC.

    The same thing is happening with music. While file sizes have gone up a little, it isn't like people are moving to FLAC or WAV files. Instead, while people used to download individual mp3s back in the Napster days, that became albums, and today in places like eMule, Overnet, etc, you generally download entire discographies in RAR files. I've dled files with 34 albums from Queen, 40 from Rolling Stones, 25 from Aerosmith - and I don't even like these bands enough to download a single mp3 when I was stuck behind a modem.

  9. Re:These people have NO clue. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Actually, YOU have no clue. The article is fairly accurate, with the exception of "MysticVCD" being a major scene group.

    This shit is way off base - Kazaa? That virus-laden piece of trash?

    Okay, so they didn't pick the p2p flavor of the day... P2P isn't a part of the active "scene" anyways.

    "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.

    No. They are private FTP sites in the 100mbit+ range. Groups release their warez and movies to these sites first and they are spread down to lower-rank sites and from there to IRC channels, FXP groups and P2P. These rankings are structured very informally. there are no "official rankings" (though there are groups that rank sites)

    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.

    Once again, the P2P flavor-of-the-day is irrelevent. They barely touch upon it in the article at all.