Slashdot Mirror
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."
...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 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.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
"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.
Bandwith "can never get high enough".
Already I have seen DVD rips of an entire set of DVDs, making it more than 10 GB. Even with 10mbps it will take some time to download.
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.
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.
...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.
Bring out the stromtroopers!
Christian Engström, Former Member of the European Parliament 2009-2014 for The Pirate Party, Sweden
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.
The ripping of a DVD itself doesn't take very long. The compression might, but that really depends on how you set it up, how you resize, and how you then compress it. If you know a little bit about what you're doing, you can get those times down, sacrificing quality sometimes. VCD and SVCD is unsurprising as these will play in set tops, and you can encode to VCD more quickly than to higher quality DivX formats.
Common mistakes :
There are many other things as well, like the hardware you have, what you're doing at the same time on the PC, etc. But on a reasonable system you can rip and compress to DivX or XviD in less than three hours. Make sure you have a 2GHz+ processor and plenty of RAM.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
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.
This is one of the things that really annoys and gets my goat every time I see it.
People selling pirated movies and music at car boot sales, markets, roadsides, ebay, etc. This is totally wrong and I think is what the RIAA/MPAA should target and not joe bloggs downloading britney spears from kazaa.
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.
What irritates me further, is that some people are also under the impression that those who do download for their own PERSONAL use are looked upon in the same league as those who download, copy, and sell to people for huge profits.
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.