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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."
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
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.
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.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
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
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.
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.