Online Groups Behind Bulk of Bootleg Films (& Games)

xasper8 writes "First it was the RIAA, now Hollywood is cracking the legal whip on online piracy." There's a better article about this in the recent issue of Wired that gets more in depth on this. Basically, good background on how file releases get made. <update> Yes, we did have Wired link yesterday as well. My bad.

Comments

What a load of bullshit in the article!

[rbarreira]

I know that media news about technical issues are rarely accurate, but this article's mistakes are a little bit exagerating, I think... "Unlike popular file-swapping networks where millions of files -- mostly for music -- are shared relatively easily, it takes more than a casual effort to even begin to find the right place to download a movie." -- what? "Typically, large movie files are broken down into text that appears to the naked eye as gibberish. Files are distributed through news groups or made available through so-called top sites or private computer servers accessed by File Transfer Protocol, or FTP, an early conduit for exchanging data on the Internet." -- half-right... There are other examples, and if one cares to think about it, many of the stupid statements (like the second one I've shown) only happen because they try to explain things too much. Who cares how the movie files are "broken"?

You are misunderstanding the point..

[goldenglove]

Personally, I feel the central point of the entire article (beyond the obvious revealing of the inner-workings of the scene,) was to reveal the POWER of the scene, and its distribution system. Specifically, near the end of the article, the article mentions a company named "JunGroup" that distributed MP3s over P2P, IRC, and FTPs to promote products. Now that consumers actually understand the basics of The Scene, they can begin to accept untraditional business models that utilize the piracy avenues for legitimate distribution. If you look at the JunGroup site, they have a link to their "The Scene" TV series, a TV series about the inner-workings piracy from a desktop perspective, revealing (graphically) the majority of scene practices (both good and bad.)

Re:Free movies, then and now

[0x461FAB0BD7D2]

If the MPAA wants to stop internet piracy, they should stop releasing movies in Asia at the same time as in the USA. A month delay would do it. But for them the quick bucks are more important than internet piracy.

Actually, many movies are released much later in many Asian countries. However, delaying releases doesn't solve the problem much. Only CAMs will be delayed, and not many people actually download CAMs anyhow.

Screeners and Telecines are a lot more popular.

Warez Scene != Drug War

[aardwolf204]

Members of these so-called ripping groups, also known as warez groups, have created a community referred to as "the scene." It exists primarily on the Internet's back alleys -- private Internet Relay Chat, or IRC

"There are a lot of similarities with the drug war," said David Israelite, chairman of the U.S. Justice Department's Intellectual Property Task Force. "You never really are going to eliminate the problem, but what you hope to do is stop its growth." I'm not sure wheather to laugh or cry. Remember kids, dont copy that floppy.