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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.
It actually disturbs me deeply that someone in the U.S. Justice Department is admitting casually that the war on drugs is useless and a waste of lives and money.
Aside from what this says about the drug war, which is another post entirely, this pretty much sums it up. People are always going to find ways to get access to movies without paying for them.
In the bad old days it was one person goes into the theater and props open the emergency exit door so all their friends could sneak in. (And this probably still happens.)
These days one person goes into the theater and copies the movie and distributes it in DVD or VCD format so all their friends can watch it from the comfort of their own couches. Which are much nicer than those cramped movie theater seats, don't you think?
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
Please, no moralising about whether copying movies is right or wrong. These digital files of movies released are out there, we can get them free, and it won't be stopped. It's not much use defining something as wrong, because it doesn't actually HURT anyone. Not the studios, not the actors, not the writers.
What *IS* wrong is the methods the MPAA will use against people who copy movies. Watch them chew up the courts redefining what is right and wrong
Let me be the one to point out (and point out with my identity shown) that copyright is protected by federal law. I'm not going to talk about right and wrong, but I am going to point out that the monkies out there who have a copy'n'paste "copyright is a civil issue" for every piracy story on /. have no idea what they're copying and pasting about. You may now continue with the rationalizations of your illegal activity already in progress.
"Wow. Now THAT'S a lot of angry Indians." - Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer
From the article:
Private Internet Relay Chat, or IRC, which is a precursor to the modern instant messaging software, or Usenet news groups that function like bulletin boards.
I still think of instant messaging software as a dumbed down version of IRC and of webbased bulletin boards as poorly implemented frontends for usenet.
I must be getting old ...
The MPA and the RIAA need to keep things in perspective! The article acknowledges that these 'groups' are hard to gain access to - >>"The scene is a very close network. Everybody knows everybody else but they haven't met them," said Bruce Forest, a Norwalk, Conn., digital media consultant who says he belonged to the scene for years and now advises entertainment companies. "It can take years until you can get access." will loose their jobs and not get paid b/c you are stealing their income" is ridiculous. In an industry that produces a product that can generate $100 million in a matter days - not to mention the amount of money that is generated over the entire run of the film + additional revenue to movie rentals + 'over seas' releases is hardly in jeopardy b/c a hand full of nerds download a few films.
s s
.00001% of total revenue. To put that in perspective, to put that number in dollars and cents... for every ONE MILLION dollars gained the studio lost 10 CENTS!
.0013% of total revenue or $13 dollars for every ONE MILLION dollars gained.
Look at the numbers:
http://us.imdb.com/boxoffice/alltimegro
Keep in mind these number are just for domestic lease - only in the United States and do not reflect global sales or rentals.
#1 is Titanic - $600,799,824 in domestic sales. Breath taking - now lets say 1000 people download the movie and 'stole' $8 ea. From the studio... the studio 'lost' $8000... that's
Now lets say the article is wrong and these groups are rampant and it's easy to get ahold of these pirated movies and 100,000 people download them (I'm being very generous here)... so now the studio looses $800,000... that's still
Granted Titanic was the #1 movie - look at #100 on the list - you can do the math at home... the number are still unreal...
To further my point in 1999 Michael Eisner was paid $589 MILLION dollars for his annual salary. If the poor set designer is worried about loosing his/her job to internet privacy, maybe they should stop looking online and start looking at the real pirate.
This is nothing more than greed - who is stealing from who here?
Don't even get me started on the RIAA...
Instead of raising your voice, try strengthening your argument.
There are a lot of similarities with the drug war ...
Except illegal drug distribution is linear, file sharing is exponential. Big difference.
Unfortunately, you said theft in your post. So now anything you may have said will be entirely ignored as you get flamed on the definition of theft. Enjoy!
Copying files may be legal sometimes; maybe the guy has permission ,maybe the file represents something more than 80 years old, maybe it's some other kind of 'fair use', maybe it's a file produced by the US Government, etc. Matter of opinion, for a judge to check every time. It is a civil problem; I don't want my tax dollars used to stop it, and I don't want my prisons filled up by someone on the wrong side of this law.
Copying files and then taking money off someone under the false pretence that there is permission is a crime, though, becuase of the 'money' side, and also if intimidation happens along the way. Also might become a tax crime later, if the 'money' is not declared.
Use my tax dollars to stop the money-changing-hands fraud, the intimidation-if-it-happens, and the tax-evasion-if-it-happens.
Copyright doesn't exist to make media moguls rich.
If the originals goals of copyright no longer require the creation of media empires, then such empires should crumble from the face of the earth.
The "industry" is ultimately irrelevant.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I don't think he ever watched more than a few - he was a compulsive collector (like his hundreds of Elvis CDs) and just had to have them, not watch them. He never would have spent money on them.
[...]
Now, this doesn't condone the practice. I still consider it to be theft (no, this isn't flamebait), since someone ends up losing money at some level whenever someone else doesn't pay appropriately to view a movie or listen to a CD legally.
So in the case of the compulsive collector you mentioned, who lost money, and where did it go?
Depriving someone of legally due money is theft
No it isn't. Taking money from somebody is theft. Notice the taking. One example not related to copyright, where somebody deprives somebody else of money is insurance fraud. Notice how it's fraud and not theft. Different actions with different consequences - the same way copyright infringement and theft are different actions with different consequences.
But more importantly, it doesn't really matter whether you think copyright infringement is theft or not. The Supreme Court made it clear that copyright infringement wasn't theft in Dowling vs US, 1985.
They do it because its a hobby. With ANY hobby, once you finish your objective at hand, you feel a great sense of accomplishment. Whether its knitting quilts, coding an open source project, or even pirating movies. The people who do this take pride in the fact that they feel like they are achieving something, that they are actually GOOD at something. As with any hobby, people are willing to spend money on it. I personally enjoy video editing, and I've spent far more on it than I care to admit. My little videos don't really have any actual value, but they sure give me a good feeling on the inside. I'm pretty sure its the same way with these guys.
You're confusing "mistakes" and "exaggerations" with "complete load of lies". AFAIK, the term "bullshit", and the phrase "load of bullshit" is used for lies, FUD, and similar stuff. Not for "inaccuracies" and "errors".
:P IMHO this article is just a badly-phrased summarization of the longer wired article we saw yesterday (which personally I did enjoy reading).
/. article on that yesterday, didn't we?). If you think ripping a movie from DVD or whatever is EASY, you're completely off track. Rippers see themselves as ARTISTS. They want to achieve perfection: Practically null visual defects while achieving the most compression. They tweak the codec, possibly adding postprocessing filters to get rid of blocking artifacts (due to MPEG2 compression) in the original DVD, etc (I won't talk about anime fansubbers here, but I think the same criteria applies).
Example: Frankly I don't believe the "broken down as gibberish" stuff... if it meant breaking it down as BASE64 posts on usenet
I've done a few reencoding of *unlicensed* (read as: legal) anime episodes (fansubs), just to test the capabilities of Divx and xvid (we saw a
So yes, they're organized. Yes, they meet in private chat sessions. Yes, they do rip dvd's.
Another fact: Pirated DVD's are *obviously* cheaper than original DVD's (otherwise people wouldn't buy them). So I don't think one of these rippers would buy an original - unless it's a title they *love*, and want to immortalize themselves by ripping it and distributing it.
So is the article a "load of bullshit"? I don't think so. Irrelevant? Probably, we all (or at least those of us old enough to have used irc at a time) know such warez invite-only channels do exist.
And yes, I know Wired isn't "news for know-it-all uber-geeks who already know how things are done". It's a good article for common people. Let's not forget that.
Depriving someone of legally due money is theft
/. thousands times, why is it so hard to comprehend?
No, it is not theft. Theft is when one stoles something from an other, thus depriving him from his property. It was explained on
The phrase 'legally due money' can only be applied to contracts. If you do your work based on a contract then you are entitled to your 'legally due money'. However, if you are not paid that is also not theft. That is a breach of contract and you can sue the other party.
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
When I was a kid in the 70s, our prime social activity was going to each others' houses and taping each others' records. When VHS took over in the 80s, everyone shared movies this way too. Nothing has changed.
People who could afford to buy new did so to avoid the hassle, and they do now too. Most grown ups with jobs and other responisbilities don't have the time or inclination to fuck around on Kazaa. It's easier and cheaper to just buy or rent a DVD. Also notice how the $20 CDs sit for months, while the ones in the $7 rack sell like crazy. The problem with first-run music is that it's too aggressively priced.
Copying is mostly done by people who were never going to be customers in the first place, because they don't have the money. But copying reinforces their interest as fans, which the media corps will profit from eventually. A pirated CD today leads to a future concert ticket sale, etc. Even the media corps' own marketing people know this.