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

Piracy is competition!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Piracy is competition!

[iainl]

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.

Re:The next step

[Mascot]

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).

Re:ISP customer bandwidth...

[BrookHarty]

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. :)

Anyone notice its VCD not Divx or DVD...

[BrookHarty]

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)

Re:Bootleggers are paying?

[kaiwainz]

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.