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United Kingdom Leads the World in TV Downloads
SumDog writes "The UK is known for many things, great food, a wonderful climate and beautiful women. However, according to a story on the Guardian, a new study puts the UK ahead in one more category: it leads the world in TV piracy, accounting for 38.4% of the world's TV downloads, with Australia coming in second at 15.6% and the US in third at a pitiful 7.3%"
My sarcasm detector must be malfunctioning, I actually had to read that twice before it blipped ...
Pathman, Free (as in GPL) 3D Pac Man
.. not like any of you whippersnappers know what USENET is...
I guess that just shows that the television we all want to watch is not available to us (in Australia) via normal means. I guess those figures also show that we're all watching American telly :)
According to TFA, the UK accounts for 38.4% of _EU_ downloads, but only 18.5% worldwide. For comparison, the worldwide number makes a bit more sense ;)
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication
The UK is known for many things, great food, a wonderful climate and beautiful women.
...and for complaining about absolutely everything in a sarcastic manner.
-Colin
... because there is a serious lack of content. Unless you like cop shows.
Damn it was hard going back there after US cable.
Australia coming in second at 15.6%
16% now....
http://www.livejournal.com/users/metricmusic
Thre real reason for rampant TV piracy on this side of the pond is that shows are released a lot later around here, sometimes even YEARS. This does encourage people to take their viewing habits into their own hands.
Pathman, Free (as in GPL) 3D Pac Man
Well, since US television tends not to make it to Britain for a long time after it airs here, it makes a bit of sense. A lot of shows have a one- or two-season lag time. It makes sense that fans who follow the show online would want to see the show as it comes out.
On the other hand, I score TV shows because I fucking hate commercials, and because I don't have an actual television any more. Funny how original Star Trek was about fifty-five minutes long, while newer "full hour" shows are more like forty-two minutes. That's nearly four times the ads. Yecch.
Also, it's convenient to be able to watch them when and how I'd like. And I get to insulate myself from the vast bulk of crap that's on TV most of the time, and pick the best of what's out there. (Firefly, Babylon 5 and perhaps some softcore lesbian porn: The L Word.)
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Didn't have to watch comercials and it was better quality then the crap Comcast quality I get. I would have paid money to see them in high resolution and with better sound, but these executives just don't seem to get it. I can download a TV show in less than an hour, in fact, I can download faster than I can watch. It is all about the industry clinging to a dieing business model and not seeing the future. Fine, do a 5-computer iTunes thing with DRM, it is not like music where I need to listen to them anywhere.
It being 1:36am where I am, my sarcasm decector failed.
My other first post is car post.
I know a lot of countries have TV Licenses - but the BBC takes the piss. We *PAY FOR THE PRODUCTION* of a TV show, but then pay OVER THE ODDS for the DVD's when they come out.
BBC make enough money to either a) scrap tv license or b) give us cheaper DVD's.
To be honest, I would preffer latter, Most people spend more on BBC DVD's than they do on licenses nowwadays (only takes one or two Christmas prezzies of the office to do that).
So I say, I paid for it already, give it to me. I think it is legal for me to download the prisoner DVD rips (I have never seen this show, I want to) because I pay the license fees already.
TV rental, a lovely fiscal model already in place.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
If you had read the article, you'd know it's 24, Enterprise, and Six Feet Under ...
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication
when the press spouts statistics without any reference as to how the data was collected..
No, American girls are ridiculously underwight with grotesquely fake-looking skin. No, actually, that's not true either
"beautiful" american girls are as above. the majority are McDonalds-stuffed rhinos
Or shall we just stop with the stereotypes?
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Quiet you! They'll never find out about it if you don't mention it!
Nothing to see here folks.
Usenet? Why that's what they called the internet before it went global. Yup. U.S. Experimental Network. That's what it was called. Al Gore ya know, he invented it.
"The UK is known for many things, great food, a wonderful climate and beautiful women..."
I'm assuming this is an attempt at sarcasm, but apart from the "wonderful climate" I wouldn't have realised. Sure we have a reputation for crap food, but then Americans have a reputation as ignorant redneck fuckwits, and we all know that's true, right?
Hmmm, someone has a problem with Brits, no?
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
Sorry if I'm stating the obvious, but it's television. Signals broadcast through the air. Sorry to burst the bubbles of the folks in Hollywood, but you can't control the genie if you're throwing it out of the bottle at the speed of light. Accept the fact that people have the right to record their television shows, and don't complain when they trade them.
(It's never too late to join the Renaissance)
Considering the population of Britain, and especially comparing it to the population of a huge country like the United States, that little group of TV-program pirates take up a huge amount of bandwidth.
I guess you can understand the low volume in the U.S., the television programs, though low in quality, are high in production value. I've never seen a high-production value British program. That kind of glitter and chintz keeps people coming back to American programming (which, aside from Japanese anime porn) is what I figure these downloaders are interested in.
Face it. On the evolutionary scale, we're all still fascinated by der blinkenlights.
Exactly. Why do Brits download so much US TV
i) They don't want to wait for it appear over here.
ii) Unlike other European countries, they don't need TV companies to dub/subtitle it into a different language.
File under : Not Rocket Science.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Just to put parent and sibling down:
As a brit male who has sown his seed in many a fine field, both here and abroad - the concentration of fine women does not differ greatly, however in tourist places or high profile places (in city centers) where shopping is good you will find some fine filly.
It is true, there are many corners of foreign fields that will be forever england. I just cannot remember some of thier names.
Tod the stud (I was drunk)
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
"and the US in third at a pitiful 7.3%"
I am sorry, I am certain that I have caused my ISP much grief by converting from elitist bitcher with a high profile to a total downloader burning tons of bandwith while maintaining a low profile.
Call me what you will, At least I get my downloads.
Matrix
The UK is known for many things, great food, a wonderful climate and beautiful women.
This is what is known as a "e u p h e m i s m"! It can be read as "The UK is known for many things, fish 'n chips, overcast skies and slappers."
but we do have doctor who!!!
'By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes'
I happily pay the TV license fee because I know that it goes to support the BBC and its endevours - hell its worth it just for the website let alone the advert free TV. My point is that maybe its *because* we get pay that we feel it entitles us to free TV from *any* source. So we download without feeling guilty. I would how this would compare with the music industry which is the same in the US as the UK?
You forget bad teeth. But a good british accent can be sexy on a woman, not as sexy as a french accent but it'll do.
Good food and good weather? haha cute.
Now on to the topic, TV piracy seems... I dunno almost impossible, ASSUMING it's something I get normally. How can you "pirate" say, Survivor (ugh) it comes on my TV normally, it's not something I couldn't watch otherwise, so what if I decide to watch it on saturday night around 1am via an mpeg? Ok so I didn't record it myself, I COULD have. Is it any more piracy for me to download that episode of south park, or Tivo it?
Sure I suppose if it's something I wouldn't normally get but then another argument comes into play "if I wasn't ever gonna get it no way, have I taken anything away from the provider?" it's not like "hey I was gonna buy this DVD but I downloaded it instead" ok that's theft of a sort, or "hey instead of buying this music cd I got it via kazaa" this is TV shows, they kinda give those away anyway.
Yeah I know, all sortsa lawyers could shoot all sortsa holes in my arguments but really what's being pirated? Either you get the show normally and could easily enough record it yourself or you wouldn't ever get the show at all normally and you're merely adding to the viewership, I can't see how this would be a "bad thing" for the people behind the show "hey not only did we get a nielsen rating of X there were at least another Y thousand viewers via internet downloads, PEOPLE LIKE OUR SHOW, please renew our contracts, k thx".
I dunno just seems like a no lose situation for the studios, it's not like they sell me the TV shows I watch (I wouldn't PAY for most of them UGH TV sucks ass).
--- www.f-theocean.com
Piracy is a pretty strong word for this particular act. I like to think of it as Distributed Tivo.
Okay, so a philosopher, a philologist, and a philatelist walk into a bar...
My supervisor at work probably accounts for about half of all the Australian TV downloads. Absolute champion.
:P
I personally don't see the point: Just go watch the TV for real you fucking nerds!
i have many tv shows in DivX and dvd ... if its not out on dvd ill download it... the latest season of the west wing isnt going to be shown in the UK till about september... so thats on my hard drive at the moment, as soon as it comes out on dvd it is added to my collection
Does anyone else find it strange that a country of 20 million people can account for roughly double the downloads of a country over ten times its size? The figures for Australia seem a perfect example of why studios should aim for simultaneous release dates for their tv shows across the globe. Even the relatively low speeds and high cost of broadband in Australia don't seem to be hampering the downloads. Some episodes receiving their first airing in Australia are TWO SEASONS behind the US release dates. Is it any wonder Aussies want to see the shows they see previewed on ET? I had many friends (Aussies) telling me how good the first season of Lost and Battlestar Galactica were - before they even ran the pilots in Australia. Surely putting it on at the same time would negate the "need" most people would have to download it.
And that kids is how I met your mother.
I personally hope downloads become more of a broadcast medium. Sure, throw some commercials in that 320x240 video! I'll watch them to watch decent News/Information/Entertainment. If I could subscribe to the Daily Show and scrap cable, I would. Even for like $10-$20 a month. I grab legal stuff from some places like Archive.org and play it on my PDA. There's some good content online both streaming and to download, but the models for getting to it (subscribe al la iFilm/Real, finesse google syntax, pray) suck when compared to downloading a file that I can convert into any format for any player I wish from the pirate channels. This, like other entertainment IP problems, comes down to convenience for a lot of folks. Listen up Networks!
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
Considering that the UK has roughly 1/5th or so of the population of the U.S. (60 million UK, compared to probably 300 million US), the number of downloads per capita is much larger over there.
My other first post is car post.
He got the UK mixed up with the Caribbean. Common mistake.
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
If you were brought up in some culture (heaven forbid) that says fat, bitchy white women are as hot as hell, your going to be turned on by fat, bitchy white women. Your sense of beauty only applies to you and people brought up in your culture. Even close friends differ on if a girl is hot or not.
Take for example Grant Snow on Fox's Point Pleasant (Image:http://www.elisabeth-harnois.net/images/alb ums/events/fox2005winterparty/004.jpg). I think she is hot (I am a teenager, so don't go all yelling pervert on me) but my best friend says she looks freaky. Eye of the beholder my friend.
nearly everything DOES suck on TV in the UK. BUT when there's satire, it's absolutely incredible.
Take 'This Morning with richard not judy' for example, or maybe a bit of 'the adam and joe show', or a bit of 'i am not an animal', or a bit of 'brass eye'...etc...etc
ii) Unlike other European countries, they don't need TV companies to dub/subtitle it into a different language.
This is very significant. Even here in the netherlands where most people speak english at an excellent level, the majority of the population is not able to follow a sub-title-less show. I have no idea whether it is due to lazyness (being used to reading subs), actual language problems or unfamiliarity with accents and vocabulary I have no idea. However it is a rather large issue.
BTW, the french have a very active fansubbing community for most mainstream shows. Just search on you favourite P2P netowork for VOST (voix originelle sous-titres francaises).
Pathman, Free (as in GPL) 3D Pac Man
If you had read the article, you'd know it's 24, Enterprise, and Six Feet Under ...
I would just like to take this opportunity on behalf of my great nation to apologise for the Enterprise thing - not sure what we were thinking, the series must be playing on it's predecessors good PR!
We will petition the PM and get back to downloading Pr0n forwith!
'By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes'
People will pay for bandwidth, then spend time searching and downloading and burning to CD-R that which you broadcast for free.
Bottled water. Seriously. It's a business model. You don't have to sue people who drink from the tap to make it work, either.
I can think of quite a few shows that I'd pay a bit to see again, and maybe burn to CD. If I knew they'd be available at the same price essentially forever, I wouldn't even bother hoarding them.
Where if it's BBC stuff is it piracy if they are taxed for it?
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
I think the simplest explanation is in eternal stupidity of media moguls on both sides of the pond. They extremely often say "Oh no, it's just a British/American fad, nobody wants in on our side of the pond". Most moronic examples are the refusal of American labels to release the Beatles on the US market ("we don't need British imitation of our rock'n'roll") or what American television did (and did not) with "The Monty Python's Flying Circus". In the age of Internet, it's just much easier to get a "bootleg" edition that, say, a bootleg "Love Me Do" single in 1963. So when British TV fans can't wait to watch some cool American TV shows - they just click and get their bootlegs, before old Auntie Beeb finally wakes up and decide to broadcast it.
Well, I dont watch a lot of TV but the UK seems to push out a lot of HDTV rips of most of the scifi programs I like to watch.
I noticed that programs like Stargate (SG1 & Atlantis) seem to air in the UK before anywhere else.
These guys seem to have it down to an art form. They even have links to TV guides. http://www.btefnet.net/
Most people couldnt be bothered with adverts and this is a good way to avoid all of that. Sadly, its still illegal though.
Oops, replace "Grant Snow" with "Elisabeth Harnois"
Oh rubbish. I don't know a single person who doesn't own at least one TV, and in many cases a number of them. Sure, lots of people grumble about the TV licence, but I don't know a single person who actually objects enough to not own a TV.
Hell, it's only £10 a month - in London, that's often not enough for a round of drinks down the pub.
People are downloading TV shows because they miss them (perhaps they hear about them too late), because they didn't/can't record them and they're not available on DVD/video yet, or because they are and they're too cheap or too poor to buy them. The TV licence has absolutely nothing to do with it.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Don't you mean "city centres?"
-- Sorry, I can't think of anything funny to say here.
Nathan Barley tonight looks good
Actually, I dont mind watching it. It is a lot more accessible than the usual Trek programs, which is a mixed blessing. On one hand it's definitely less "trek", on the other it seems to appeal to my gf, which is a good thing. Now if only she would stop singing along with the theme song ... AARGH!
With all the bad rep this show's been getting, I can't help but feel that it's still better than 90% of the popular pseudo-sci-fi series out there.
Pathman, Free (as in GPL) 3D Pac Man
Wouldn't it be impossible to track this kind of thing? I'd say this 38.4% is just an estimate.
And calling it Piracy is just plain silly.
If you ever go on a t0rren7 site that has UK TV shows on it, you'll find that many, if not most, downloaders are people living abroad craving for quality TV. Many are living in yankistan or canuckistan. I won't hazard a guess if they're all Brit refugees or natives.
I'm not sorry if I've offended someone.
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
The letters are funny too.
"Dear Sir.
We are really quite angry that you haven't bought a tv license.
While we have no proof that you actually have a tv we assume you've got one because, well, most people have got one.
Failure to buy a license will result in us sending you another letter telling you how angry we are."
Exactly. If it could have recorded and watched it myself, how the hell can you say I pirated it? After all, I "own" the original by seeing it or having automatic timeshift files on my DVR's hard drive.
Now, what the industry needs to grasp is that if they provided me a service with:
- Fast download speeds
- No DRM
- Open format video
- Acceptable price
, then I would USE IT instead of getting the episodes using BitTorrent without paying for them.I am not downloading the series because I am cheap, I am downloading the series because of the flexibility it gives me. This is something the TV industry can EXPLOIT to earn money. The Internet will not kill the TV industry, as long as the TV industry understands that it needs to adapt.
Then there's Spaced, which is an amazing TV programme. I hope there's going to be a third series.
---
"I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing and it was everything that I thought it could be."
what's the top p2p search used by the english? is videora helpful with this?
exactly! P&T should be required viewing by all citizens yo. but are we downloading shit? i mean, all the shit, that is, popular telly is already shown on the networks here (well, seven and nein:). the stuff i download is the obscure stuff that would never get shown here.
The TV license fee justifies downloading UK TV (and the BBC seem to have no problem with this). My (from the UK) downloads are like this each week:
From USA:
Simpsons
Malcolm in the Middle
South Park (when its on)
Family Guy (when it starts up again)
From Japan:
Naruto
Bleach
From UK:
BBC Documentaries that I missed
I already have most major series' such as Red Dwarf, The Office, Ali G, Father Ted, Hitchhikers Guide, League of Gentlemen, etc. and get more when more come out for them. These all go onto a big file server which is shared over with my mythtv box on my nice big TV, so I can watch the newest TV from around the world whilst sitting in comfort, eating my dinner. Mythtv runs on this as well so I dont have to download much UK TV as it gets archived on the myth box.
Warhammer forums
The people who don't pay the TV License (which is ~$200 USD a year) still have and watch TV's. Most people just pay it, it's not a big deal. It funds the BBC and some of Channel 4 (and a tiny bit of five). In the case of the BBC they put out top notch TV with no commercials - I bet you pounds to donuts many people in the US would pay that kinda money not to see Commercials on that kind of output.
I have no idea whether it is due to lazyness (being used to reading subs), actual language problems or unfamiliarity with accents and vocabulary I have no idea. However it is a rather large issue.
Mostly the "effort". Not that it is difficult, but most people want to sit down in front of the TV and relax and be entertained. I can quite well understand subless Norwegian (native, doh), English and German, already as a teen. I only really "broke off" from subs after spending a year in Germany when I was 23, where naturally there weren't any Norwegian subs on anything (but I managed to get away from the German dubs though - yuck).
I can't really explain it - I would have been able to translate it just as well as a task before that too, but for it to come effortlessly, to be able to tune in and listen to English (and sometimes German, but that is still an effort) as if it were Norwegian, that took some getting used to. Now that I do, I much prefer it this way though. By concentrating on the voice, you hear so much more of the tone and incantation. That, and that certain translators should be flogged.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
What? They are downloading their TV?
Jesus, we are quite behind in France, we still have to go and buy these damn TV from Darty!!
I will never forget the hot Florida summer my girlfriend and I spent indoors hooked watching British and Australian Big Brother... I'm not kidding, I downloaded about 40 GB worth a month off of usenet as it was posted, quite fun to keep track of with the time differences. Marco should have won.
What post? The one you're carrying inside your rusty innards!
Just what is the American obsession with dentistry?
Actually, I would imagine that the TV license is indirectly responsible for a lot of TV downloading. The TV license funds the BBC, and the BBC produce programs without advertising. This means British people are used to being able to watch quality programming without advertising - something that you can get from the Internet but not from most other channels. BitTorrent can be used as a time-shifting mechanism for programmes on channels like Sky One (15 minutes of adverts every hour! Who has time to watch that much?) which strips out the adverts - much like a TiVo. Used in this way, the legality is very close to the border line. It would need to be tested in court, but I think it would stand up.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
when it comes to losing Plutonium. ...
Way behind former Soviet Union.
At least lets hope they're in second place
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
As most of the Internet piratism, this problem exists only because there is no legal way of doing it. I live in area where I have to wait for years to see those shows you are currently watching in US or in UK as well.
I would be happy to pay to see those shows. Especially if I would get them in HDTV resolution as I do now from torrents. But I have no legal way of getting them. I have no choice but to download them illegally.
It's funny how companies blame piratism when their own business model is from the beginning of 20th century and doesn't work at all with new technology.
I have only one message to those TV/Movie companies: Please, put up your own torrent sites with a price tag on files.
Well, there's chicken tikka masala, no hurricanes or tornadoes, and Keira Knightley. So maybe the /. eds aren't being sarcastic after all.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
"So I say, I paid for it already, give it to me. I think it is legal for me to download the prisoner DVD rips (I have never seen this show, I want to) because I pay the license fees already."
You're a bit off the mark there - The Prisoner was not a BBC show. It was an ITC show, produced for Channel 3 (or whatever it was called then). It was nothing, repeat nothing, to do with the licence fee. If you actually bothered to look at the DVD box, you'd have noticed it was published by Carlton, not the BBC. So do you still think it's legal?
Increasingly, the BBC isn't publishing the DVDs - another company is. Take the Spooks (or MI-6, as it's called in the US) DVDs - they're published not by the BBC, but by the production company (Kudos), who get all the money.
And to be honest, I think some of the BBC dvds are very well priced - take the Red Dwarf DVDs, which retail for about £11 on Amazon for an entire season. I debate you pay "over the odds" for BBC DVDs - I think you pay the same as DVDs produced by any other company or studio.
You do raise some valid points though:
"So I say, I paid for it already, give it to me."
If you read the news, you'd see that's what the BBC want to do. It's even been posted on Slashdot before, for God's sake. The BBC actually WANTS you to be able to download TV shows and radio shows they produce for free. They're investing in P2P technology to try and make it possible. The thing stopping them is actually the issue of repeat fees for writers / producers etc.
"BBC make enough money to either a) scrap tv license or b) give us cheaper DVD's."
The TV license doesn't just pay for TV though...it pays for commercial free radio, one of the most popular internet sites in the world, educational programs and resources, transmission infrastructure, high tech R&D, etc. The DVDs the BBC produce are typically cheaper than other DVDs anyway, or at least around the same price.
"Most people spend more on BBC DVD's than they do on licenses nowwadays (only takes one or two Christmas prezzies of the office to do that)."
Erm. Let me see. Seasons 1 and 2 of The Office cost £15 on Amazon. £15. For 2 seasons. The licence fee is around £115. 15 x 2 doesn't = 115.
Perhaps you'd be interested in what the BBC actually spends the money on - they are accountable for it after all. See the website below:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/info/licencefee/
So what's your problem?
I didn't make this plain in my daddy post, but I do download TV, and it is exclusively American. At the moment it's exclusively The OC where in the UK we are about a half-season behind, but previously it has been Buffy, Angel, or whatever. I think I've only downloaded British TV when its been something I've been watching but missed an EP for whatever reason.
What a let-down. I read the fine summary and was impressed by the new technology which allows people to download physical objects. Now you're telling me that I've been cruelly misled?
they produce some amazing programs but their DVD encoding department actually manage to make many of their commercial offerings worse quality than the VHS versions.
Blue Planet was particularly bad.
Subs are just annoying. Im from Norway myself, and i actively avoid shows with subs.
The system had the verbosity of HTML combined with all the readability of compiled assembly viewed as bitmap images
As a Brtitsh ex pat I must be contributing to that statistic somewhat. I'm really missing BBC, and Channel 4, Phoenix Nights, Father Ted, and a load of good documentories and stuff. Thanks to BitTorrent, and a DIVX campatible DVD player (i recommend one of those), I am getting my fix again. (Check out "The Power Of Nightmares, The Rise Of The Politics Of Fear" fro example, I don't think this will be aired in the US in a hurry...)
I'd be more than happy to pay the BBC licence fee, and watch UK-TV legally here in Sweden, but it's not possible. I can't get it through my cable provider, or over the net.
Channel 4 have a broadband service you can subscribe to, unfortunatly it's not available outside the UK.
The only way to get access to most Brittish TV is via BitTorrent, and the networks can't be loosing too much revenue as they are not provising a service to compete with the illegal downloads. I hope they get their act together soon, I'd much prefer to pay and see the stuff when it's aired.
As for UK leading the world for downloads, what do you expect US TV is crap! We produced this and this, you guys produced this and this.
I WANT MY, I WANT MY, I WANT MY BBC
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated up.
However, according to a story on the Guardian, a new study puts the UK ahead in one more category: it leads the world in TV piracy,
Boys and girls, remember that every time you use the word "piracy" in this context you are guilty of newspeak. The people who want the public to use these words have a political agenda. The **AA want you to associate not for profit copying with attacking ships and murdering people.
Well, language knowledge and habits differ quite a lot around Europe. I'm quite a bit to the east from you. I myself watch quite a lot of English series episodes and movies. Hell, I even watch DVDs with English dub. Unfortunately for us, there aren't many people who do this around here. However, there are many, many people who write subs and they appear quite fast if one wishes to read them.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Maybe the Aussies and Brits are not subject to a draconian legal system designed to control the common man for the benefit of the wealthy?
I (UK resident) discussed this with a friend, a US citizen, resident in the UK, recently. The US legal system is based on the English legal system, but has obviously diverged over time (just as the Canadian, Australian, New Zealand etc legal systems aren't exact replicas of England's). My friend suggested that, from his experience, the practical difference between the two systems was that the US has comparatively less law, but those laws it does have are upheld. Britain, by contrast, has more laws, but those laws aren't necessarily enforced. I can't comment myself as to US law; but certainly the UK does seem to be full of laws that are rarely, if ever, enforced.
This is where the serious fun begins.
Anyone download the Queen's Christmas Speech?
If you're already directly paying for your TV shows via taxes, I can easily see there being far less guilt about recording and trading them.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Maybe the Aussies and Brits are not subject to a draconian legal system designed to control the common man for the benefit of the wealthy? I think our American legal system was evolved especially for controlling property, and people have been property in America for a long time, since its beginning, when we had indentured servants, and then African slaves.
There were indentured servents and African slaves long before there was a USA. Wanna take a guess at who brought it here?
And now consumers are the New Property. And the same old brutal plantation-oriented laws are being focused on American consumers.
Serfs and peasants were the property of their landlords long before Columbus sailed the ocean blue. American copyright law, up until the mid twentieth century was actually pretty fair as far as such laws go. Much of the rest of the world didn't even have such a concept as the "public domain". It wasn't until the US gave into the demands of Europe that they got downright draconian.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
It's not often I get to link porn to slashdot and be on topic!
I call shenanigans on the ugly british chick thing.
www.page3.com
...we want to watch the shows on US tv at the same time, I don't want to wait a year or more for SG-1 to hit Channel 4 in the UK, so I download it each week via bittorrent. ;)
I've spotted the UK TV licence fee mentioned a couple of times elsewhere on the page - I do not resent paying my £9 a month for that, the BBC is without question the premier broadcasting organisation in the world and I believe I get excellent value for my money. If only the satellite/cable people could offer the same, I recently cancelled my cable subscription because they mostly just show rubbish
Chris "Ng" Jones
cmsj@tenshu.net
www.tenshu.net
It hits 100F pretty much every year nowadays.
Global warming may be turning Africa, Asia and the Mediterranean into arrid deserts, but... actually, now I come to think of it, some silver linings don't have a cloud! (Disclaimer: I'm British and drive a 4x4... albeit only a 1.3 litre, and I live next to a farm)
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
and there not hardcore. you don't even see box. remember if its not hardcore its not pr0n
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
Man that just made my mind grind... like fingernails on a blackboard!
/translation nazi
VOST
Voix originale sous-titres* français**
Why is American beer like making love in a canoe?
'Cause it's fucking close to water!
Nobody that has ever eaten in an english pub and survived will ever claim that the UK is known for it's great food.
The fish & chips with vinegar are not bad compared to the rest, go figure.
Just to put how pitifully cheap the TV License is:
Last year, in amongst all those other hours of great television, the best radio in the world, and one of the most important news sites on the net, we had all the Euro 2004 football matches screened. With no adverts and excellent commentary.
It actually cost my friend in the US MORE MONEY, even given the fact that the dollar is worthless right now, just to watch the matches on pay-per-view, with a really, really crap commentary.
So anyone who likes football (and that's a fairly huge number in the UK) should consider everything else their TV license funded last year as effectively a free bonus.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
That wasn't what I was asking. It very well may be that 24 and Enterprise are the top downloaded shows, but what are the differences between what Americans download vs the British? That is just as interesting as the fact that people in the UK are downloading so much.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
Too bad that the Envisional report the Guardian article is based on is not fully available online, I would like to know the figures for other EU countries.
I don't know many people here in Germany that download their TV shows online, but those who do are really happy that option exists. US TV shows come to Germany about 1-2 years after they aired in the US, and most of the time are dubbed really bad.
At least that is how it used to be until very recently; German digital pay TV station Premiere right now airs Desperate Housewives in the original US version with just a few weeks lag between the US and the German air date. If they do that with all major US TV shows, I might be tempted to buy a subscription.
On the other hand, a downloaded show I can watch whenever I want, and those HDTV torrents still look good after you burned half a season on a DVD and watch it with an XVID-enabled dvd player...
"Oh, a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-my-own-Grandpa." - Dr Hubert Farnsworth
How about pay $600 a year and get 300 channels instead of just 1.
I thought that was version orignale sous-titrée
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
You obviously haven't watched Sky then. They place adverts right after the opening titles, exactly as you describe US TV. In fact, Sky One has more ads than the UK free-to-air channels, and yet you have to pay a monthly fee to view it. It's a nice deal for Murdoch, I suppose...
If your comment title says 'Re: Foo', I'm not likely to read it.
The UK used to have a lot of bizzare local laws that predate the existence of the USA. A lot of these old laws (such as ones requiring you kill Welshmen found after dark in some towns, etc) were repealed in the 1970s and 80s. Other laws on the statute books, such as blasphemy, are not enforced and the Home Office goes to pains not to enforce them but Parliament hasn't devoted the time to specifically repealing them. The USA had the advantage of a revolution neatly clearing out all the old rubbish and allowing them to start again but I can't see us ever getting round to that in the UK, and so new laws overrule parts of old laws and interpretation of which bits of what Acts are relevant comes down to the courts and/or CPS.
If you like Peter Kay (Phoenix Nights), I'd recommend Max and Paddy's Road to Nowhere. Top stuff :)
I humbly apologise.
Pathman, Free (as in GPL) 3D Pac Man
The TV companies have made a noticable improvement in getting American shows over here in the UK earlier. The Simpsons is now often shown on the Sunday after it is shown in the US, although Fox's annoying random breaks cause it to bump around a lot. Episode 5 of 24 is on next Monday, the CSI family of programs have all started new series (I think), and Battlestar Galactica was shown here first. So it seems like this TV 'piracy' has actually made the companies involved change their ways and give us what we want. It's obviously not the best way to instigate change (as it is still breaking some law/s, I assume), but it seems to have been very effective.
This comment was formatted for readability, but I forgot the line break tags
I'm a native English speaker, and I also speak Japanese and French fairly well. I can and have watched films in those languages without subtitles. However, watching with subtitles is easier.
It's not entirely a matter of laziness, although it is definitely easier work to watch something in your first language - it's less mental effort and more relaxing as entertainment.
Even if you can speak a language well in everyday two-way situations, the one-way nature of TV and film means that you lack the feedback loop that allows two people to find a mutually comprehensible vocabulary when talking. When watching foreign-language material, it's very easy, having missed one important word, to lose the thread of a scene. Being able to glance down at the subtitles for reinforcement and correction really helps.
Frankly, I like watching English stuff with subtitles on as well, so that I can check on misheard or confused dialogue. But I might just be weird that way.
If your comment title says 'Re: Foo', I'm not likely to read it.
I'm allowed to tape the tv so why can't I timeshift a scrubs episode if i i missed it.
altantis and galactica are both on sky one
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
The BBC provide 4 Channels without advertisments for free, not to mention numerous radio shows (local and national) on analog and digital networks (as well as being broadcast and archived online). The license fee also pays for bbc news and all their online services. I don't know if you were beating on some stereotypical view of what the BBC provides or not, but we get paid TV here Cable & Satellite which is the same dross as you see in the US. Hundreds of channels of shite (with commercials, that you pay for). Ultimately you get what you pay for, and the BBC delivers far more than any other broadcaster in the world as far as I can see.
Like stories or jokes piracy? Or Rumour and gossip piracy? Anyone?
The UK used to have a lot of bizzare local laws that predate the existence of the USA...
Aye, that's partly what I was thinking about - the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act (CJA), for example, removed the need for English police officers persuing a felon into Scotland to "carry a burning sod atop a pike, and announce their purpose to the first Scotsman they encountered". However I was also thinking of laws enacted recently: staying with the CJA, the police have substantial abilities to prevent picketing and protests. It's rare, however, that these laws are applied - like many current UK laws, they're "enabling" laws.
This is where the serious fun begins.
Except out side major tourney's (every 2 years) (like Euro 2004, which IIRC was 50% covered by ITV) there is fuck all TV on the BBC apart from highlight shows, and you have to pay Murdoch through the nose to watch the good stuff anyway.
So ... English speaking countries that get second class treatment from the media companies take the matter into their own hands by downloading behind the bloated backs of those media companies.
... why does a free nation ALLOW stupid things like region encoding: it is a complete restraint on free and fair trade, a profit maintenance scheme. Why should $1 of taxpayers' money going into upholding or policing such a anti-consumer scheme?
To borrow a phrase: the market treats restrictions as damage and routes around them. I call "market failure" - or rather, the failure of government intervention in the form of artificial monopolies and de-facto cartels. Britain and Australia download, because the market isn't serving them - it expects consumers to serve the corporations' own fantasies of total control.
The state should let the media companies adapt or perish. THAT is capitalism. Not the fascist state of play in which the government props up corporate monopolies and acts as the corporate policeman. Imagine if carriage builders had been able to block the use of any vehicle that didn't use a horse
I am anarch of all I survey.
You are part of an insignificent minority though.
They may not originate from the British Isles, but dammit, them titties are most certainly not tourists!
For those of you not in the know, go to http://www.page3.com. You will be pleasantly surprised at some of the wildlife the limeys have produced.
"No beer until you finish your tequila!" -Leela's Dad
Okay, you monster-modding idiots, the post above is supposed to be *funny*! Flamebait!? Just how uptight and insecure can you get? The baby jebus wept, already.
As an American living in Sydney, I just don't understand the download thing, because we get plenty of sh*t American TV free-to-air, and even more on the 20 bazillion channels on Foxtel Digital Cable (the most advanced digital TV network in the world, BTW, used to deliver mostly sh*t American TV downunder!)
what are you talking about?, skyone aired all the rest of season 1 of atlantis before even 4-5 eps of the 2nd half aired in the US. and canada's releasing sg-1 way early too.
If you consider the following.
1/ The US networks insist on giving us shows AT LEAST 8 or 9 weeks behind them.
2/ Some are then subject to the whim of Sky's programming schedule (Alias for instance has been hopping time and channel since it's inception).
3/ Some don't, or may not make it over here at all (not seen any word on Lost yet?
So, how about a brave new world for the networks? Start up their own bittorrent site. Allow the international TV stations to buy shows to be shown 5 days behind the US broadcast, then after a week seed them for general download. The bonus? They can leave the adverts IN! It would mean a new sales model for them (selling adverts at the BT site point), but it would also mean a new revenue stream. It should't affect thier ability to sell the repeats as there's little difference (and BT would not likely be mass market for a while).
If any TV execs are listening, I'd be happy to quote to manage the service for you!
Are you callin' me insignificant 'cos I is black?
Are you tellin' me you don't watch TV?
Piracy? TV Piracy? I call bullshit. This is time and geography shifting, pure and simple and as such has not been determined illegal. I am sure that there are television executives just slavering at the concept of declaring TV recording and commercial skipping to be acts of criminal nature subject to the harshest penalty. But that's not today.
Seriously, slashdot editors make editorial comments and changes all the time in the stories published here. You really should have done the obligatory s/piracy/sharing here.
Yeah, most of them from Spain and France ;-)
I know Sky shows stuff earlier (read what I said). But Sky isnt all that popular compared to Freeview and broadband.
m ?f useaction=ViewNewsArticle&ID=234042
http://www.revolutionmagazine.com/News/index.cf
**TODO** Steal someone elses sig.
Americans don't have free dental care like we do in the U.K. Therefore the condition of teeth becomes an indication of wealth (and status). E.g. if you're poor you can't afford to have nice teeth.
While us Brits don't have this association, so its not AS important to make your teeth look perfect..
Thats my theory anyway.
We get shows years after they have screened in the US. That's if we get shows at all.
Stargate SG1 is only up to the last episodes of season 6 by my last count..
Firefly was shown at 2:30am in the morning and other good shows are pulled off air after 3 episodes to make way for shitty reality or lifestyle shows.
Thank god for Foxtel and with Foxtel's new PVR being released soon, I wont have to download TV Episodes again.
To NULL or not to NULL.
I'm not so sure about that. $200 a year for two channels*. That's $100 a year per channel, $2 a week per channel. In the last week, I watched a total of three BBC programmes. That's over $1 per programme. Doesn't look such value for money now does it? Of those programmes, I didn't even watch one all the way through. A pay-per-view service would be a lot cheaper than that.
* Yes there are more channels than that. There are obscure digital channels requiring a 'set top box' to access. I bought such a box, and it didn't work. Even then, the channels are worthless. BBC3 and BBC4, absolutely no content whatsoever. The BBC use it to put new programmes on, to try and 'force' people to get a digital box. For every Little Britain, there are a million programmes which never see the light of day. And even Little Britain could have been showed straight away on BBC2. They just don't have enough content to fill that many channels. Take out all the repeats and shitty soaps, and they don't even have enough content to fill ONE channel.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It would be interesting to see a breakdown of content by origin.
I suspect a much higher proportion of the content is uk originated and older than many of our American cousins would think.
Sure, the lag between US and UK airing of big new shows is important, but the UK has a huge back catalogue of high quality indigenous content.
The blessed BBC and our private sector public service broadcasters have decades' worth of timeless gems sitting in their archives.
Only a very tiny proportion of this back catalogue is actually aired, mainly due to licencing deals with subscription based digital channels.
As a consequence there is significant demand for downloaded DVD rips of series from the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s, that haven't been seen on free-to-air TV for decades. The first re-showing of "The Prisoner" for ages and the recent revival of Doctor Who are indicators of this demand.
That doesn't make it cheap, it just means that in the US the European Championships are an obscure foreign event that hardly anyone wants to watch, so it's on an obscure pay-per-view channel.
Also you're not taking into account that the only reason the BBC got the coverage and not Sky was because the government effectively granted it the rights. If it was an open bidding war, the BBC would never get near any live football.
There are plenty of dentists in London. The problem is that we got used to GETTING THEM FOR FREE. If you're happy to pay you can get INSTANT treatment.
Conor "You're not married,you haven't got a girlfriend and you've never seen Star Trek? Good Lord!" - Patrick Stewart
Relevant to the topic at hand - TV "piracy" - Australian copyright law is certainly far, far stricter than that in the US.
Indeed, the idea has recently been raised - as a result of the FTA with the US - that maybe Australian copyright law should be modified to allow for "fair use" principles.
Not only that, but your basic British TV package gives you only 5 channels, and compared to US TV, much less of the programming is the sort of big-budget, lightweight drama and sit-com series that most consider "entertainment".
Yes, lots of people have cable, satellite or digital - but for the same money, you can get broadband instead.
There's a programme like the Office or Black Books perhaps every two or three years. In between that there are a million 'filler' programmes: cookery programmes, soaps, DIY programmes, fly-on-the-wall documentaries, chat-shows, gardening programmes, repeats, old shitty films, shitty forgettable crime dramas, more repeats etc. Occasionally there's the odd decent documentary, but it's dumbed down beyond belief. Also not forgetting the 'Robert Winston' bloke's programmes which consist of 5 minutes of content stretched out into a 90 minute bore.
The BBC probably releases two DVD's worth of decent content a year. Is it worth £120+ for that?
Difference is, our laws are not added to our Constitution; yours are.
$
"Man that just made my mind grind"
Not as much as mine when I saw a self-styled translation nazi fix a French translation...
I know the site you mean, as I'm also a member, and I'm glad you're enjoying the content! The feel is very different to your typical 'suprnova'-style site, in that it forbids the posting of any commercially-available (on DVD or VHS) material. If the TV companies had their heads screwed on correctly, they would *encourage* this sort of behaviour, as all it does is spread interest in the shows. I know for a fact that I'd now buy a DVD-collection of 'The Mary Whitehouse Experience', after recently watching the VHS-rips that someone posted. Sadly, these sensible arguments were exactly those used by proponents of Napster and other early music-sharing networks -- we can probably expect things to get much worse for consumers before they get better.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
...is because they need to buy a license from the government to watch broadcast TV, or own a TV.
I was convinced that American TV is, as a whole, better than British TV when John Cleese said it a few years back. I figure he ought to know.
And while on the subject of set-top boxes, it's not economically viable to continue an analogue signal when digital ones exist. The government has a deadline of 2006-2010 to turn off analogue broadcasts altogether. Sky TV already did.
If sky wasn't so expensive we wouldn't have to rip our fav TV show of the net. Not That I'm confessing to doing that! :)
oh my god.
Knightmare was just fucking incredible. I loved that so much. The kids NEVER EVER finished the quests and always used to look so upset at the end of the show, bless them.
I do wonder where all these TV shows went. There were so many just totally twee and bizarre programs. Knightmare, Gamesmaster (DOMINIC DIAMOND!!)... ahhhhh. Now it's just crappy kids sit coms. Sigh. Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh.
On another note, 'My Family' is actually a really bloody good sit com despite looking terrible on first glance. It's just spot on.
I'd agree heavily. When the women in the UK are beautiful, they really are BEAUTIFUL. True english roses aren't as rare as people think.
The climate is great, yes. I don't care about the rain. In fact, what I love about the UK is the localised weather. I used to live below a range of hills (the mendips) inland in somerset and it rained all the time, but had SCORCHING summers.
Now i live far south england in Brighton (flat 300 yards from sea) and we get the most incredible sunsets, beautifully sunny mild winters days, plus very quick showers. I love it.
The BBC is planning to offer a TV on demand service over the internet blogcritics.org article.
They are working to introduce a service where the last 7 days of shows are available for download in a similar fasion to their online radio player.
Additionally they are hoping to introduce a service where archive content is also available for download, featuring old shows that no longer have the same broadcast restrictions as recent content.
TV on demand is already available through networks such as HomeChoice which offer both recent archive (spaced, black books etc..) content and some of the shows broadcast in the last 7 days (from EastEnders to 'The Sky At Night'), all provided over a ADSL/LLU network.
To me, all this suggest that the BBC is looking to embrace the new delivery technologies now available. I wouldn't be surpried if they found articles like this Guardian piece to be encouraging, in indiating the public's desire to adopt more flexible viewing choices.
Well i refuse to pay for TV (cept my wonderful BBC license fee that id fight to the death to defend - argument for another day).
Yet i still get 24 with in a day of its premiere in the US, as well as other shows I just wouldnt get otherwise.. so yes, its piracy.
guilt...? nah!
bah!*@%!
If you don't like that, don't moan about the studios, moan about the law that allows them to do it, and work to get it changed.
Don't the studios buy the law? And don't the studios own both the copyrights in question and the media for telling the public about candidates for office? Or is it different in the UK?
FWIW, I believe you're mistaken about the elderly.
In any case, to me (as a licence fee payer) the most annoying thing is that the TV licence fee funds almost all of the BBC's activities, not just television. That includes both BBC radio (beloved of a significant number of non-TV-owners who pay no licence fee) and the newer on-line systems (the BBC news web site surely being one of the most popular in the world, but again supported by those of us with TVs).
These are all valuable services to many of our people, and I have no objection to supporting them. What I do object to is contributing support for these things when others who use the services just as much aren't, just because they don't have a TV.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Point out how stereotypes are bad, then proceed to cast your own stereotype about Americans. Brilliant.
One guy wrote that article, there's no need to offend the other 280 million people living here.
I went to England last year and I liked it. Didn't meet too many people like you.
Need I say more?
--go to dentist to get teeth sorted out
--teeth now not wonky
You forgot:
--pay frighteningly large bill
Seriously, while there are some things about American society that are desirable, their health system is *not* one of them (unless you're filthy stinking rich).
I mean come on, we practically wrote the book on piracy. Black Bart, Blackbeard, Chris Condent, Calico Jack, Henry Morgan for chrissakes. Hell you could add Francis Drake to the list, the Spanish wouldn't argue.
-- Religion is not an exact science
So, if something has been BROADCAST, either over TV or radio, for millions of people to see, it is OK to record it to watch later. But what if you forget? Or your power goes out? Should you be deprived from viewing what everyone else in the world has already seen for free? I personally don't see the problem with TV downloads. You can watch it for free on TV, what's the difference in downloading it? Besides, the production compaines have already received their advertising revenue if the show's already run. Can someone please explain how the TV compaines are being hurt by this?
I'm sure one of the channels shows that Dragonblast Z thing.
The term "piracy" has been used to refer to this sort of activity since well before the **AA existed. This meaning is listed in every dictionary I own, and has been for years. In fact, from the Online Etymology Dictionary entry for "pirate":
It's sad how many people on Slashdot seem to accept compaints about using "piracy" or "theft" for copyright infringement as a substitute for informed, logical argument. Ironically, perhaps the biggest offender in the "not quite what the word really means" stakes is the FSF's use of "free", but few people ever object to that.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
So the solution to all our problems is to introduce Jack Bauer to Brannon Braga? Now that I would pay to see.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Well they know which popular internet news site to find who's been downloading THAT!
I think you'll find it's Belgian.
I'm not surprised the UK came out top, we get most shows 6 months behind other countries if we even get them atall, sometimes it's possible to get them quicker with satelite or cable, but these cost a lot of money (and we brits already pay a tv license.. many people are quite insulted to be asked to pay even more, especially when most of the paid for channels also include commercials which we dont get on the BBC channels) and some landlords don't allow the installation of satelite or cable in their buildings..
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Your first example is of Catherine Zeta-Jones, she's Welsh not British.
The second is Thandie Newton, while her father was British, she's Zambian and her mother was the princess of Zimbabwe.
The third I'm not familiar with.
Elizabeth Taylor, while BORN in England, is painfully American. Both parents were from St Louis and she only resided in the UK for seven years.
Your only true correct example is Elizabeth Hurley.
I think you're leaving out the fabulous Bond girls that were English. I'm not sure of all their names, but you could've researched your torts much better.
Peace
Isn`t the BBC about to put all its content library online for people to download?
Its weird because TV here hasn't gotten to the stage where advertising makes it unwatchable, from what i see/hear in the 'states you guys have to deal with adverts around every 5 minutes, scrolling crap, banners, and stupid station logos, we have none of that, adverts every 15 or 30 minutes and at least the oldy free terrestrial channels have the sense to understand that the channel name can be transmitted with the teletext so its really really not needed on screen. Most US shows are about one series behind, sometimes more or less, and free-to-air digital (from aerial) tv is becoming quite popular which has more stuff. I download shows when they just aren't being shown soon enough over hear - what can I say: if you go and make your show SO exciting that I cant wait for the next series then im going to want to watch the next series one way or another, either cash in or shut up. Ok yes i know i can pay for cable/satellite/extra stuff but id rather just pay for the one or two things i want to see, and not be ripped off buy some £50 DVD set - not enough is being done to provide these things the way people want and at the price people want, so people are taking matters into their own hands, they're probably going to watch the shows again when they come on TV so whats the big deal? You can give me some moral crap but my morals are questionable so i dont care.
Actually women here are hot, at least in London, and the.. erm foreign restaurants are great, but way too expensive, and rain is cool too. Oh and since privatisation, our transport system is second to none, i don't think there's been a train crash, or air traffic control failure in at least 2 days, London roads are clear thanks to our wonderful Mayors use of public funds, you can actually set your watch by the bus.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Y'know if these shows were pirated, the networks wouldn't still have them.
I am NOT a number! I am a - oh wait, I'm number 761710. Look! 761710!
(1) I read the article, which did not mention the huge amounts of money Hollywood makes releasing TV shows to DVD. Case in point: The Family Guy; the DVD release of season one was sooo popular, Fox is re-releasing it on the primetime schedule. A very rare case of the tail wagging the dog. Obviously, Bittorrent may put a huge den in home DVD revenue. (2) Perhaps the reason a substantially greater share of TV show downloads are done by Britons has to do with necessity or other marketplace factors. The show mentioned in the piece, "24", is an American show. American shows compose most of the Top 50 of TV show downloads. Perhaps they are not as prevalent on broadcast and cable TV in Britain and Australia as they are in America. Therefore, out of necessity, many Britons and other non-American, English speakers have resorted to downloading them. On a personal note, I am originally from the island of Guam, where "America's Day Begins!" and where the local cable company sucks ass! Firstly, we get our TV *one-week* behind schedule because the videotapes(VHS) are flown-in from San Francisco and played through the cable TV. Our cable TV company extorts money from the consumers without adequate government oversight, and their service is down so frequently that I cannot rely on them to "broadcast"(a very loose term in their case) an important TV event. One year even the Super Bowl broadcast almost did not air (because they had been using the US Gov't's Far East Network satellite feed without paying for it!) As I've given you ample anecdotal evidence, sometimes mainland America is so blessed, that the necessity to utilize an innovative solution just isn't there yet.
Oh and on top of that, I get a typo.
I am NOT a number! I am a - oh wait, I'm number 761710. Look! 761710!
Dentistry is much, much more reasonable than health care here in the states. I think I pay 1 dollar a week for dental care rather than the 25$/week.
Those clever Brit.s have figured out how to download televisions? I still have to lug them home physically.
People waving the skull and crossbones coming to your home, taking away your TV?
Or movies like Peter Pan?
You no longer need the TV companies to distribution your shows...
I would quite happily download AND WATCH shows that contained adverts from the internet.
THINK about it... why bother getting a bad quality rip of a TV show SOMETIMES if you can go to the studios website and download a show for free.
The Studio could sell advert space in the downloads.
I would have no problem watching an advert or two.
Current TV shows are 40 minutes long repending on 20 minutes of adverts to fill up the 1hour slot.
Why not make 40minute shows with 10 minutes of advertising (you will not have the overheads to support of one of the networks!)
but for heavens sake do NOT try to force us to watch the adverts... we don't have to do that now (simply using a VCR and forwarding through adverts, or just going out to make a cup of tea)
surely theres a businessman out there with some nouse...
When are we going to be able to download TVs in the US?!
BTW, do you print them out after downloading, or what?
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
I seem to be using the internet as a VCR now, as opposed to pirating TV. Every Monday we have a problem with there being three shows on at once, so we watch one, record one on the VCR, and i download the other off the internet.
When we go on holiday, i can download anything interesting i missed without the bother of setting the VCR, organising the tapes so everything fits on and hoping that we didn't forget to hit the "Power" button which sets it to record from the settings.
The fact is, the internet is far more flexible (I can "record" a show a week after it was aired, or one that i missed but wanted to see. I can also "record" more then one show at once), better quality then my VCR and pretty quick (An hour or two for a TV show, i don't really have a problem, i'm not in a rush).
Some of us really don't watch TV. In my case, it's partly a dislike for TV licencing people, partly no time to waste, and partly that I need to be watching things in a second or third language rather than reinforcing my English any further - and you don't get much foreign TV on the BBC.
I'm aware that it's confusing; one of my friends took months to get her head around the idea. She'd ask if I'd seen last night's episode of whatever, I'd always say no.
Eventually I explained in detail that, having no TV, I never watched anything but DVDs. She sat there frowning for a while. Then she said, "But can't you video it and watch it later?"
Certainly you only have to look at what's happened in comedy and animation in the US to see how the US has improved. The Simpsons and, arguably, Beavis and Butthead (whether you liked it or not, it was remarkably innovative) proved animation could be aimed at adults and has spawned an entire industry. At the same time Comedy Central has pretty much had to make itself useful and that's also where a lot of the innovation has come from.
So I suspect Cleese is right. Hopefully we'll see, long term, an artistic resurgance in Britain without seeing any reduction in the quality of material coming out of the US. That'd be, in a literal and figurative sense, the best of both worlds.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Many do sell complete serieses on DVD, usually around the $30-50 mark for a complete "season", but it's usually region locked and usually a series that was broadcast several years prior.
A lot of fuss was made in the US recently about the (incorrect - the decision was widely misunderstood to mean this) assumption that the FCC was about to allow cable users to pick and choose which channels they want and just pay for those channels. I think an environment in which we fund directly the programmes we like, getting copies to watch when we want to watch them, would be infinitely better. Proctor and Gamble has more say over what I watch than I do. That's not how it should be.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
..Is its *far* too close to France.
Slashdot group think* in full force again I see.
/. mind bitched and complained about their 'rights' when the RIAA police was starting to knock on the P2P door (Napster).
/. group think spouted, "They are infringing our rights!" What they really meant was they are infringing our right to the free sharing of information.
/. group thinkers(tm) once agin arose to the occasion. "They make garbage too! I openly and civically disobey and mock the preview movie trailers telling me by downloading movies, I am putting keygrips out of a job!"
/. group thinkers proclaimed, "They can't do that!" The Internet was meant to be free and you guys are ruining it!"
/. groupthinkers are spouting off about their rights and how it should be free since it is captured from the air.
/rant
The
Napster got shut down with a court order and finally a lawsuit. A dark day for P2P geeks everywhere. No matter, this just spawned new & improved versions of P2P for which to share the gooey caramel center of P2P music sharing.
Then the RIAA starting suing people.
1000s of lawsuits were settled. Most out of court just so the RIAA could make an example and teach the public at large that it was 'illegal' to download music. The public got the message. Sure, P2P music sharing still happens, but it isn't anywhere near what it used to be.
Geeks everywhere starting boycotting the music industry since they were boneheaded about adapting to the new information age of sharing. "So what!", they proclaimed, "I hate their tripe anyway! I still have movies to download!"
Then the MPAA, bolstered by the success of RIAA, started going after the P2P scene. Learning somewhat from the previous PR mistakes, they researched for a very long time to come up with a pretty good solution. Never found one that both sides could live with and decided to start with the litigation anyway (since they had all those logs from the research they did).
Still the MPAA persisted and succeeded in taking out vast swaths of the P2P bittorrent scene. Ahhh. The Internet can breath once again. It's not so choked up with that nasty bittorrent traffic. As least that is what the major backbones that have those IP taps on them say.
"No Fair!",
Hate to break it to you folks, but commercial interests have already subverted the Internet for their own business models. Why, how else could they pay for all those javascript popup companies?
Well now, in a truly original move, they (whoever they are, the Man(tm) no doubt) are starting to rally against P2P sharing of TV and Anime. Once again,
Umm...actually..no. That's not entirely true. see broadcasters have paid millions for the right to use the electromagnetic spectrum and billions more for the equipment to best utilize those frequencies to make money. Now those bratty P2Pers are messing it all up...again! (shakes fist randomly in air)
The newest attack on P2P will succeed. Lawsuits will be filed. ISPs will be subpoenad for their IP logs, and people will be hurt financially.
It's happening folks, and there ain't a damn thing you can do about it. The golden age of the Internet was gone long ago. The only way to reclaim part of it is to go completely underground. Encryption, private networks, and trusted communities. Most of which are starting to happen.
-FlynnMP3
* To be fair, Slashdot group think is a phenomenon of perception inside the human mind. Of course not everybody think the ways the very vocal minority thinks. The majority with their dimuinutive voices of reason tend to get drowned out in the pompous, showy, and hyperbolic arguments that the minority has.
Course, that still doesn't change perception. As any sales business person will tell you, "Perception is reality. Or it's so close it doesn't matter that it's not completely right."
You omitted to mention the *reason* that global warming could well make Britain colder; the gulf-stream (ocean current), which keeps the British Isles warmer than they'd otherwise be at that latitude could be affected. If it moved away from the British Isles; BAM!
.
The loss of heat from the Gulf Stream would more than offset the increase due to global warming.
Also, I'm not sure if the predicted increase in precipitation (rain n' stuff) is due to that, or whether an increase in the temperature would cause the UK to get more rain
Bear in mind that due to its position and physical shape, the UK weather system is complicated.
I've heard of people who thought the British interest in the weather was unjustified, and just an excuse to make polite, inoffensive conversation.
Until they actually came to the UK and realised that the weather really *is* that changable. Going from grey overcast skies with heavy rain to hot sun and back again in the period of 3 or so hours is not unusual, although it *is* annoying even if you live here.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I think you'll find it's fizzy chemically produced shit.
"The UK is known for many things, great food, a wonderful climate and beautiful women."
Yeah, I know...don't like it. Want that one.
What exactly is TV piracy? Is it a bunch of people getting onto a boat with sony tvs and stealing them?... or is it taping a show then sharing it with your friends? Exactly how is that illegal since it has been broadcasted? There is no monetary value to a show that has been recorded off the air. When did the copyright holders have the right to make sure that when it reached the show reached the TV that it would end there?
Really, this sounds more like time shifting than piracy.
I fucking LOVE the British climate. Then again, I'm the kind of person who likes a bit of variety in life, so I consider the fact it isn't sunny all year round to be an advantage.
I happen to think that frosty mornings are the best mornings, that plenty of rain is essential for maintaining a lush, green landscape, that fog and snow are atmospheric and that two or three months of scorching hot weather a year are plenty. The only weather that pisses me off is wind, but since I've given up smoking, it doesn't bother me so much. (I used to roll my own)
The British countryside is beautiful all year round, because of the climate. It just wouldn't appeal to someone who's idea of heaven is getting sunburn in the middle of winter.
"The Milliard Gargantubrain? A mere abacus - mention it not."
How do they come up with these statistics? Its not something that you can easily track. Are they calling people on the phone and asking them if they download tv shows from the net?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Let's see, it rains in over almost as much as Seattle, the climate is colder, and you have a seemingly more open policy towards skin on the tube...
Yeah, I can see "piracy" higher as well as just copying a program and lending it to your friends (otherwise known as legal fair use that corporations are trying to stop here in the US).
I've read a lot of interesting solutions in this thread. Some might even be feasible. But like the music and movie industries, no one will try any of them until it's too late. Which it may be already.
Do not touch -Willie
In fact, when I was in Southampton a few years back I lived with a landlord who did in fact own several TVs. But he came home drunk one day, announced to me that he was 'giving up watching TV' and asked for my help throwing all 7 of his TVs out the window. I didn't object because it was quite funny. Especially the faces of passers-by the next morning gazing at the electrical graveyard in our front garden.
The particularly amusing thing was that the next day, he realised one of said TVs was part of a home security system he'd shelled out for only a few days before. Oops.
But the point I was trying to make is: no, not everybody enjoys TV, although I'll admit the great majority do.
Not quite. I watched some TV when I was visiting my parents over Christmas. I don't have a TV myself, though.
I think that if you want to judge the entire UK restaurant secene by only eating fish-paste sandwiches, then you've missed the point.
Personally I'd prefer to eat some of the nicer food available and drink some of the best beer in the world.
Actually every time I go to Denmark, I rediscover how rude and arrogant most Danish women apparently are, in comparison to UK women.
Why this Slashdot thread has an abundance of posters openly admitting to regularly downloading copyright protected stuff, yet not being challenged by the 'copyright infringement is theft' brigade?
Not that I'm having a go at the parent poster, but it just seems strange that other threads, like the Lokitorrent one - have caused a number of people to arguably get on a high-horse and this one hasn't.
Ok, so the difference is that this is TV, whereas those other threads were movies and music.
Is it simply because we are less in touch with the artists, producers, set-designers-who-now-have-to-eat-from-rubbish-bin s etc. connected with TV, than with other media?
Hmmmm. (Oh no, I didn't want to start a big moral debate *ducks*)
... when a program that is given away for FREE, is spread around and enjoyed further by a larger audience?
a) the broadcasters don't have to use their broadcast networks, saving more of the precious tv time for infomercials and reality-tv shows
b) the producers get re-viewings without having to pay residuals to the actors
c) the commercials are invariably edited out, but anyone who thinks we're actually sitting and watching that umpteenth commercial for feminine maxi pads instead of going to get a soda is either fooling themselves or a self-delusional advertising mogul.
-Styopa
And it does happen in America. That's what anime fansubbing is all about - bringing Japanese animation outside Japan years before it gets put out on DVD overseas, if it is put out on DVD at all. The main differences are 1) fansubbing is a lot more work than just copying, 2) conscientious fansubbing groups stop fansubbing it when the series is licensed and 3) you will have to PAY MONEY to watch the licensed dvd version of what was meant to be shown for FREE on broadcast television. In rare cases it will be shown on TV, but only in dubbed form.
Really most of the blame for this goes to the Japanese producers, who rather than directly bringing their works to other countries via in-house localization and foreign subsidiaries choose to negotiate exclusive arrangements with completely separate companies on a per-series basis, generally well after the series has completed its original Japanese run, and to the highest bidder, and regardless of the quality of the final product.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
Looking at the tracker for a popular (and recently licensed, ninja) anime, yesterday showed over 30,000 unique downloads. I have no clue what region these people are in, but thats a lot of downloads, and the torrent was just released. Give it a day, and it will pass enterprise; a week, 24; and a month it will probably set its own record.
Oh the horror, sharing stuff that was already pubically broadcast for all to see, oh when will the madness end...
The number of people watching your show sans advertising (you can at least sort of spin the TiVo crowd as having received the ads) doesn't really concern the network that much. They produce a show for advertising dollars, and without eyeballs dollars goes down ...
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
Actually, even the Black Pudding recipe sounds awful, it's really rather good with a traditional full English breakfast.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Many UKian women are hotties.
The climate isn't that bad. Spring in Yorkshire is, well, can be, lovely.
Best Slashdot Co
of course they lead tv piracy, they have 5 channels.
-- lol pwned
Exactly!
'By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes'
Hell is where the police are German, the lovers Swiss, the machanics French, the chefs British, and it's all organsed by the Italians.
And occupied by the Americans!
If the stuff is already paid for the BBC should post all of their content on line for free for the world.
And Hollywood movies are "already paid for" once they've been made, so we should get them free too.
Put simply, I'm all in favour of British people being allowed to download BBC-owned material for free, because most of them paid for it through the license fee. But I don't have a problem in charging people elsewhere for (most of) it, unless they made a contribution towards the production costs.
Don't get me wrong; I support things like World Service radio being freely available across the world; if nothing else, the BBC are, for all their faults, a better news source than most others, and this is particularly important in countries where the government or other forces would like to censor the facts. (I'm not forgetting that people thoughout the world benefit from (eg) GPS, which is paid for by the US; World Service radio is semi-altruistic in the same way).
However, this does *not* extend towards (eg) letting Americans get "Fawlty Towers" and "The Office" for free, and so on. News; yes. Comedy, drama; no.
Sorry, but if you don't want to pay directly for the BBC, you shouldn't expect to receive their non-essential output for nothing.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Monty Python's Flying Circus -
"Cheese Shop"
[ from Monty Python's Flying Circus, third season, first shown 30.11.1972 ]
The Players:
John Cleese - Mousebender;
Michael Palin - Wensleydale;
The Scene:
An Edwardian-style shop which carries the signs:
'Ye Olde Cheese Emporium';
'Henry Wensleydale, Purveyor of Fine Cheese to the Gentry and the Poverty Stricken Too';
'Licensed for Public Dancing';
Two men dressed as city gents are Greek dancing in the corner to the music of a bouzouki.
Mousebender enters.
[snip]
MOUSEBENDER:
Camembert, perhaps?
WENSLEYDALE:
Ah! We have Camembert, yes sir.
MOUSEBENDER:
You do! Excellent.
WENSLEYDALE:
Yes, sir. It's, ah
MOUSEBENDER:
Oh, I like it runny.
WENSLEYDALE:
Well, it's very runny, actually, sir.
MOUSEBENDER:
No matter. Fetch hither le fromage de la Belle France! M-mmm!
WENSLEYDALE:
I think it's a bit runnier than you'll like it, sir.
MOUSEBENDER:
I don't care how fucking runny it is. Hand it over with all speed.
WENSLEYDALE:
Oh
MOUSEBENDER:
What now?
WENSLEYDALE:
The cat's eaten it.
[snip]
MOUSEBENDER:
Er, Wensleydale?
WENSLEYDALE:
Yes?
MOUSEBENDER:
Ah, well, I'll have some of that.
WENSLEYDALE:
Oh, I thought you were talking to me, sir. Mr Wensleydale, that's my name.
...nothing like an English bird's smile.
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a wonderful climate and beautiful women.
I am an American who has spent time in many large U.S. cities (New York, Chicago, LA, Denver), so I feel I am qualified to make a judgement. I had the good fortune to visit London on a few occasions. In March the weather there is very pleasant, the flowers coming up, people out in the parks. The people are very friendly to us yanks, and very courteous. The babes were hot as anywhere. London is a great town. The smack people talk about Great Britain is just that.
an ill wind that blows no good
I'm not trying to be trolling here, promise, but from where I come (Sweden), UK is NOT famous for its cuisine nor for its women. Not that they are ugly, but I would actually say sub-standard (*if* you must compare looks and not look at the inside, blah blah) when it comes to looks, although very nice and with great humor.
wait...was that sarcasm? Or...does someone actually believe that? I found none of those things to be the case. The UK is *not* known for its food...at least, not known for it being good. Stuff pig stomach, etc...no. France, Thailand (thanks to France), Japan, Germany, and even the US - known for its food. The UK? ...
Wonderful climate? Umm..you've never been to San Deigo, have you...72 degrees year round, rains only a couple times a year...that's a wonderful climate. The UK? Gets really cold, to the point of some transportation methods becoming impossible at times. Always messy, raining, etc.
And, the women...while some can be cute sometimes, the UK is definately not known for its "beautiful women." Southern California is. Sweden, France (again, damnit)...a few other places. But the UK?
The UK IS known for being incredibly strong (character, and power), blunt, honest, etc. They don't hold back - as far as the large-scale culture is concerned. Better traits than having good food, I'd think - food can be imported. I'd also rather have a fiery lover than a pretentious one, so they win there too. Weather? Well, can't have everything...
"according to a story on the Guardian, a new study puts the UK ahead in one more category: it leads the world in TV piracy, accounting for 38.4% of the world's TV downloads, with Australia coming in second at 15.6% and the US in third at a pitiful 7.3%"
What, precisely, is "pitiful" about having less piracy than the others? Since the internet kinda started here, most of the major mips are still here, and a very large portion of the traffic is here...one would think we'd have more of the piracy. Well, except for the insight someone gave about the UK and Australia having a (sometimes very long) lag on when they see TV shows from the US. If the shows were put out at the same time, then...yeah, I bet piracy from Australia and the UK would go down tremendously.
accounting for 38.4% of the world's TV downloads, with Australia coming in second at 15.6% and the US in third at a pitiful 7.3%"
America is really falling behind in TV piracy. I blame our current school systems.
Well , I am a Mexican who recently moved to Liverpool UK. Now for my experience living here (about 6 months) I must tell I found the following:
1. Women are pretty, yep at least I can say that the "average" woman is prettier than in Mexico, I may generalize the UK woman as: "if its not fat, its good" but I am just talking about AVERAGES.
2. The food, well it really sucks from my point of view. The only thing I eat are Pizza (Italian?), Kebabs (India??), Hamburgers (USA?) Fries (???) and English Breakfast (now I eat this, and I think is the best thing they have as a dish...).
I have tried something called Bovril (and Marmite), and it tastes Terribly Bad in the bread... it tastes better as an infusion...
As for salaries, I have seen at least for computing seem to be fine (again, comparing from Mexico so... it may not be even).
3. The ppl here is of course colder than in Mexico, and I think that girls are kind of dumb (the average-standard). Someone told me that he bought (in UK) an Atlas of Europe in order to help him traveling when he was in vacation in UK, and, his surprise was that the atlas didn't included UK!!! (so as if UK was not part of Europe for English...)
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
And the stuff that's copied (actually bought and licensed in most cases) is usually as bad as or worse than the British Original. In our defense however, about half of what's left is almost watchable.
Just because there is an occasional gem out of Britain (The Office for example), doesn't mean their product isn't about as consistently crappy as ours. Americans have a flawed perception that British TV is of a higher quality because they never see 90% of the CRAP that gets on the air over there. Don't believe me? Try living there, crap with quaint accents is still crap.
well in some countries.
If it is, how can sharing what you recorded be different then passing someone a VHS recording.
Thanks - you've just brought back the mentally scarring images of Vicky Pollard in a bikini. That's more of Matt Lucas than I *ever* wanted to see.
It makes sense that the U.K. tops the list of TV downloads. Most of the TV programs downloaded are produced in the U.S. The U.K. is a populous country of people whose culture and language are largely similar to the U.S. Most of the TV programd downloaded are not available in the U.K., or are if they are available, they're aired in the U.K. later than in the U.S., or and only on premium satellite or cable networks.
It makes sense that the U.K. tops the list of TV downloads. Most of the TV programs downloaded are produced in the U.S. The U.K. is a populous country of people whose culture and language are largely similar to the U.S. Most of the TV programs downloaded are not available in the U.K., or are if they are available, they're aired in the U.K. later than in the U.S., or and only on premium satellite or cable networks.
I wonder if there could be a standard computer literacy test in computer operation and use...
I'd like to see the result as i feel the US lags FAR behind.
Of that there is no doubt. Still, you can't blame the French for everything.
For example, I missed Wednesday's Alias. And thus I downloaded it using a torrent. I feel no guilt here...the show came into my house for free, I simply didn't record it. I will watch it and delete it.
What about commercials, you say? I have to point out that the vast majority of TV shows are broadcast using satellites unencrypted, and thus you can quite legally pick them up without commercials if you have the right equipment. Even cable channels. What you're paying the cable company for, 99% of the time, is running a satellite receiver farm, along with a bunch of correctly aimed antennas for broadcasts. (Some channels are encrypted, and thus the cable company has to pay to get them, like the sci-fi channel.)
So the question becomes why, if would have been legal for me to purchase a satellite dish, aim it correctly, record Alias, timeshift it to later, and then delete it, in accordance with copyright law, why exactly is it illegal for me to do the same thing with a broadband connection instead of a dish? (I hope you realize when I talk about a satellite disk, I mean those big-ass things, not those mini-dishes that require subscriptions.)
And while it is illegal, I see nothing unethical about it at all.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Advertising is becoming increasingly integrated into the show. The Toyota ad on the big screen in the background. The Motorlola logo on the dude's cell phone as he pops it open to take a picture.
Heck, in my day you had to GET UP OF THE COUCH! and walk over to the TV to change the channel. Someone came out with a volume switch on a long wire. Sitting in your couch you could TURN OFF THE SOUND! durring comercials without getting up.
The 'avoiding the ads' argument is as old as the hills. People have and will avoid commericals.
I think a more appropriate thing to say would be "The Chinese eat stuff LIKE dog retch". More accurately describes the situation.
Um, well, no, it's not public domain. It might be fair use, but it's certainly not public domain.
Can we flamebait the original post? Due to his sarcastic remarks about the UK, hardly any of this conversation has had anything to do with the actual article. (OTOH, of course, I did enjoy the my-country-is-better-than-yours discourse)
One man's Funny is another man's Offtopic.
While this reason was mentioned in another /. article I'm sure, I download a lot of TV shows because they are no longer aired and are not released for DVD. ie, unless you saw them at the time there is no way for you to view them again. I wonder how many downloads for TV shows are based on that reasoning?
Warning, comments may not have been passed by the sanity department of my brain.
We gotta trump the world in something else! Pick up the pace!
Wrong!
No, actually he's not.
Certain measurable variables are linked to good health, and therefore our genes are programmed to see them as beautifull.
This is true to *some* degree - however the original poster is correct (at least with regard to his specific example.)
With regards to weight, for example - fat was once thought of as desirable. If you were fat, it means you were well-fed, which meant you were wealthy. Being wealthy means you were able to provide for your offspring.
Same goes for suntans. A suntan meant you were poor, because you had to work outside. Rich people had no tan, because they didn't have to spend all day in the sun. It's only *very* recently (the last 80 or 90 years - as the bulk of the workforce moved to working from outdoors to indoors) that a tan became a desirable trait.
long hair
BZZT. Wrong. Long hair is considered attractive on females because it's a *differentiator*, not because of genetic cues. If it was a genetic cue, then long hair on *men* would be considered attractive too.
The idea is that a society will emphasize a difference (even if it's an artificial difference) between the sexes; basically it's considered attractive for a woman to have long hair because men have short hair (which began with the Romans - Roman soldiers cut their hair short because long hair is something that could be used against you in battle.)
Commercials == popups.
Remember when TV was free? Now we pay the cable companies to serve us hours of popups on the television or Internet. Either way, we're paying for the right to watch these shows. It is hardly "piracy" to download a show that we missed last week while working overtime to get some of the money that we send to our CableProvider/ISP each month.
In the mean time, would someone please repost the last episode of 24 WITH commercials so I don't feel so bad about "stealing" this garbage that I already paid for... twice!
While I agree with the sentiment of your comment, how is it any different than getting music off of P2P? I have a radio, don't I? I could have just as easily recorded the songs off of the radio broadcast... I know that quality of downloads from P2P are generally right on par with CD audio, but this is just a "for instance".
It always bothers me when people complain about word choice. It seems like a substitute for a real argument.
I agree about the FSF, too. Most people think about price when they hear the word "free"", not about the information being free to learn from.
"Wit and charm are somehow less appealing than falseness and insecurity (the two overriding traits when I think of American women)?"
Honestly, I just think they are better at hiding their insecurity. Although, I'm with you in the sense I won't bother with American women. They just aren't worth the effort.
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- H. L. Mencken
If I could pay the UK TV license fee and get BBC1, BBC2 and Channel 4, I'd do it. Absolutely no question there.
I thought BBC America would save my sanity, but they only seem to show heavily censored, cropped versions of shows. Screw that.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
As a side quesiton... is there a TV watchdog group similar to the RIAA or MPAA? If so, who are they?
"Oh dear, she's stuck in an infinite loop and he's an idiot" -Prof. Farnsworth (Futurama)
Vancouver has pretty much the same sort of climate as London with some variation: about the same amount of rain but it seems to be concentrated in the spring. Vancouver pretty much has Indian summers every year. I've lived in London now for six years and I do prefer it, but that is because of the opportunity here as opposed to Vancouver (where I grew up).
...
Vancouver's climate is relatively stable as there is a bit of a valley thing going on. Two sides are mountainous, the southern bit's not far from the Rockies, and the only 'open' part to the sea is actually protected by Vancouver Island to the east. So when the weather changes you can relatively sure it will remain like that for several days.
The 'philosopher'-consort of the Governor-General, John Ralston Saul, once noted that one of the main reasons Canada (I think he really meant Toronto) is so cumbersome in terms of winter living is that the architecture takes no account of what the average person has to wear in order to be comfortable. So when you go to the cinema or the theatre there are no cloakrooms for your winter coats and boots, etc. Despite the impression I have that Saul is a buffoon, I think his observations about that aspect of Canadian culture are accurate. And, I can say that after living in Montreal during my first degree, that Quebec seems to have a better sense of what's what in precisely that 'taking-care-of-you' way.
So tell me something: after living over there in TO, you strike me as having adopted the Canadian custom of taking off your shoes by the door. Did you ever see anyone in Britain doing that? I still find it hard not to do so myself over here
========================================
Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
My TV broke a few years back, I decided I didn't miss it, never bought another.
I watch TV sometimes, when visiting people. I often get remarks like "you don't watch tv often, do you?" because I tend to laugh at every other commercial...
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
Now see, its hard to tell if your being sarcastic or are deadly serious. The first (ugly) I would agree is quite hideous, at least not in that shot, the second (ugly), while not to my taste, is quite pretty, and the third (women) is, to my eyes at least, one of the most stunningly gorgeous creatures I've seen in a long time.
Beauty is of course in the eye of the beholder, so YMMV, but perhaps more extreme examples might have been better.
....And eat some curries my friend! Nothing better than getting pissed up on lager and guzzeling a really hot curry; of course when drunk theres always Kebabs, but I reckon Shwarmas are better as they have all the greatness of kebabs but without spilling it everywhere...
:-)
Of course there are loads of Italian places to eat too, theres such a wide variety of food available (including of course the tradition english cafe for a fat fry up!)
With that post, I think we've lost the right to call anyone else overweight..
Information wants to be beer.
You miss my point entirely. I don't care what term people use. I was not seeking to justify modern usage on the basis of historical usage; I was merely pointing out that claiming modern usage is incorrect because the word "pirate" implies ships and hooks and eye patches is not true now and has not been so for centuries.
Language evolves naturally, but the action in question is well understood in all cases, whether it's described as "copyright infringement", "intellectual property theft", "DVD piracy" or whatever. A point to which you alluded in your post was that all terms used in such a passionate debate are somewhat coloured. Each side of the debate will use descriptions that it feels portrary the matter being debated in the light that best suits its case.
Personally, I would rather have a substantive debate on things like:
- the merits or otherwise of copyright
- the level to which exemptions should be allowed
- any rights users of copyright material should be given
and other relevant subjects.Incidentally, the latter two aren't the same issue: "fair use rights" is another popular term around here whose users clearly don't understand the legal significance of the word "exemption". In this case, there is a significant difference in the meaning of the terms, and the correct one should be used. For example, whether the current fair use exemptions should be replaced by a right to the ability to copy the material under the circumstances described, regardless of DRM for example, is a pertinent question in the debate.
You can have these debates quite constructively regardless of the synonyms you choose to use. Where terms have genuinely different meanings, by all means select the correct one, or challenge someone who does not. Otherwise, arguing semantics does nothing to further the genuine debate behind the words.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
"The UK is known for many things, great food, a wonderful climate and beautiful women."
And don't forget the excellent, and abundant, "magic" mushrooms - a subject of which the author is clearly familiar.
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
He could be any passenger waiting for a flight, sitting patiently on a red plastic bench in Charles de Gaulle Airport's Terminal One, luggage piled neatly by his side.
He sips a cup of hot chocolate and scans the crowd, occasionally cocking his head to listen to the airport announcements. He peruses a book, Hillary Rodham Clinton's "It Takes a Village."
But Merhan Karimi Nasseri is going nowhere. He has been waiting for a flight out of France, he says, for 10 years.
Nasseri was expelled from Iran a decade ago for his political views. Through a series of fateful missteps, he landed here without any documents. Since then, Europe's increasingly stiff stance toward refugees and his fragile mental state have kept him at the airport here in legal limbo.
His is a story of broken hopes and bureaucracy, of a trip across Europe in search of a homeland that became a journey into mental chaos and despair. And it is a story of a man who has searched for his family, only to find an adopted one here, at Charles de Gaulle.
"He's like a part of the airport. Everyone knows him," says Muhamed Mourrid, the manager of the Bye Bye Bar, pointing to the spot where Nasseri, 47, has lived for a decade. "That's his table, his chair, his place." Adds Marise Petry, a Lufthansa clerk, "He's one of us. We even get letters for him."
Among the annals of horrific refugee tales, Nasseri's story is remarkable for its pathos and complexity. It begins in Iran in 1977, when Nasseri, fresh from studying in England, was expelled for protesting against the shah. His expulsion left him without a passport.
Nasseri came to Europe. He bounced from capital to capital, applying for refugee status and being refused, again and again, for nearly four years. In 1981, his request for political asylum from Iran was finally granted by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees in Belgium.
That decision gave him refugee credentials, which in turn allowed him to seek citizenship in a European country. The son of an Iranian and a Briton, Nasseri decided in 1986 on England with the hope of finding relatives there.
He got as far as Paris, where in 1988 his briefcase containing his refugee documents was stolen in a train station.
Nasseri boarded a plane for London anyway. But when officials at Heathrow Airport found he had no passport, they sent him back to Charles de Gaulle. At first, the French police arrested him for illegal entry. But as Nasseri had no documents, there was no country of origin to which he could be deported.
So he took up residence in Terminal One. From its circular confines, he and his attorney, the Paris-based human rights lawyer Christian Bourget, battled to define his status and send him to London. In 1992, a French court finally ruled that Nasseri had entered the airport legally as a refugee and could not be expelled from it.
But the court could not force the French government to allow him out of the airport onto French soil. In fact, Bourget said, French authorities refused to give Nasseri either a refugee or transit visa. "It was pure bureaucracy," said the lawyer. French immigration authorities have no comment on the case.
Bourget and Nasseri then focused on Belgium, where they hoped to reclaim Nasseri's original refugee documents. But Belgian refugee officials refused to mail them to him in France. They argued that Nasseri had to present himself in person so that they could be sure he was the same man to whom they had granted political asylum years before.
But, inexplicably, the Belgian government refused at that point to allow Nasseri to return there. And under Belgian law, a refugee who voluntarily leaves a country that has accepted him cannot return.
In 1995, the Belgian government finally told Nasseri th
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I'm glad we can now consider downloading of all media (especially over Bittorrent) as piracy. Last I checked (at least in the US) it was OK for me to record a broadcast show and share it with my friends independent of the media type or venue.
Reminds me of the episode where the TV License inspector comes 'round to their flat and yells at them through the door that he knows they have a teevee and that they're breaking the law. Their response? Vyvyan at the teevee.
I tried to find the script, but the internet gods told me that those sites are not available for viewing by me on my work computer.
Now I wish I had stayed home and watched the Young Ones today.
"How like you to drag your keyboard to a gun fight." - Aaron Bedard (BANE)
First I live in Canada.. No such thing as a digital copy right act here! So I don't Download movies, or atleast not anymore. I never downloaded a song I never owned in the past.. but recently I've been getting into downloading TV shows. Shows I can get on the old fashion method of an Antenna. When I miss those shows I just goto a bit torrent site and get the one I missed. Is this illegal in the USA? I mean, you get the show anyways, what wrong with getting it in a digal format?
Well I grabbed it via Bittorrent myself, my ISP's usenet server sucks and I'm too damn cheap to pay for access to a decent 3rd party server.
I have no problem with British beer. That is drink however, not food.
The last time I was in England I had a chance to listen to the speakers at Hyde Park Corner. One gentleman stood up and made the observation that if you travel around the world you will find Chinese restaurants, Italian restaurants, French, Thai, Korean, Vietnamese, you name it. But never never an English restaurant. The point is obvious.
The reason that 24 is at the top is not just because it is great, but because the first two series were broadcast 'free' on the BBC, but then, for various reasons Fox/Sky/Murdoch didn't sell them the rights for series 3 or 4. They were only broadcast on Sky One which fewer people had access to. Hence more people download them.
"Pirating" in this context has been used since the second Apple ][ computer was built...
If you still think of "piracy" as attacking ships, you're such a moron you probably buy food for your computer's "mouse" and try not to open any "windows" during winter in order to keep the heat in.
If you still think of "piracy" as something invented by the **AA, you are so braindead you've been easily brainwashed by the same **AA that you hate.
Moron!
Also we loose out on the quality, 24 etc are being shown in HD and with 5.1 sound...If I watched 24 on cable in the uk I get video quality that can be so poor it looks like a realvideo from the dialup era.
I'm also forced to use a naff cable box that often crashes, and no way of properly linking a dvd recorder into the system. Tivo pretty much died over here (probly because we were limited to one box manufacture)
The only good thing about cable in the uk is that's its reasonably priced, unlike the ripoff merchants at Sky.
----- I refuse to have an argument with an unarmed person
When you watch sports, they have these commercial that saids the show cannot be rebroadcasted in any way without the WRITTEN consent of blah blah blah. Legally, you don't own it. But in this world, techies > lawyers.
I live in Canada, but I download a lot of Japanese, American, etc. programming we simply don't get here.
Though I think the ruling was later questioned (?), it all reminds me of the case of the man hacking USA digital satellite TV in Canada. It was found that it's not sold here, so it has no value on our market, and he was simply decoding the signals his house was flooded with anyway.
Going on that, how exactly are we stealing something when we're not depriving others from it, and have no way to pay for it anyway? When companies get up in arms over "TV piracy," you know the they've gone too far. What's next, being fined for public exhibition of a radio signal? ("Oh, sorry your honour! I should have used headphones! What? I have to pay royalties for each person who heard it?")
whats the problem with viewing tv shows online? i don't see whats so bad about that... the majority of people still watch it on tv... who here has missed an eppisode of there favorite tv show?... and then how long do you usually have to wait till the network deciedes to do a rerun on that eppisode?.... 346580 years.... or so it seems... and if that show fits into a story line.. you have missed that part of the story.. and is just annoying to fill in the blanks.. in general.. i think it makes far happier fans... that get to see the tv show they love so much... but without the wait time... nobody used to complain about people taping there favorite show on VHS... and then maybe lending it to a friend of theirs that had missed it.
In Austria, the national tv station usually airs the Superbowl for free. Not that anybody is interested in Football over here. Funny, how capitalism works. We don't care about the superbowl, therefore it is worthless over here and this it why we get it for free. They didn't show this years' infamous superbowl-commercials though. Instead those from last year were shown, because they couldn't get the rights for the new ones.
Seems to have been a loss in reading ability from the submitter. Quoting from the article properly
We are responsible for 38.4% of TV downloads in the EU and 18.5% worldwide
Not 38.4% in the world as the blurb mentioned. It doesn't mention much about what shows are being pirated. The only interesting bit being a show first shown in the US, so no wonder that US downloads were so much lower!
Ask the British if they are Southern Scots...
Click here or here.
The sports things go even further. According to some of them, you can't even comment on the game without their permission. "You see the game this weekend, Joe?" "Sorry, Bob, I can't tell you that."
Can't beat a nice bit of fried pigs blood! ;)
Caw, I'd KILL for a good salmon and shrimp paste sandwich.
Don't get me started on Danish women. They can do no wrong.
Need Mercedes parts ?
If you ask the Welsh if they are British, they'll tell you they are and the English aren't. The Brythons were a celtic tribe in Wales. (They call their country Cymru. Wales comes from an old germanic word meaning "foreigner".) They call the English "Saxons" still.
Ahem:
Hooray for Hollywood! The turned the baquette into Wonderbread, again!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
WTF? ... You've never lived in the UK have you?
My teeth are fine, everyone has free dental care up until age 16 anyway and it stays free if you go to an NHS dentist.
But as NHS dentists are like unicorn shit, lots of people go to private dentists instead.
Stewart's point wasn't that they should live up to the shining journalistic standard he sets. He runs a fucking comedy show. Hell, he said himself, "the show before mine is puppets making crank phone calls---what is wrong with you?!", when they kept needling him about not being a paragon of journalistic integrity.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
A great climate? 99% of the year it's either rainy, overcast or windy. When the sun does come out it's too cold to enjoy. You get about a week a year where the weather is pleasant, and even then the sun gets covered up by a cloud every five minutes, making you freezing cold again. The brain reacts to sunlight and warmth. The warmer and sunnier it is, the happier and more content you are. Living in a miserable climate makes you miserable. That's why scandanavian countries have such high suicide rates.
Granted there are no poisonous spiders/snakes, but Australians seem to survive, they don't live in constant terror. Then again there aren't too many poisonous spiders in France/Spain/Italy, and they are infinitely more pleasant places to live.
English breakfasts are vile. Yes they're satisfying in a salty/greasy way after a night on the booze, but they're bland and horrible, especially when you have them every day.
But a good british accent can be sexy on a woman
There's no such thing as a 'British' accent. You're probably thinking of the posh southern accent you hear from most British actors on TV. When you're from Britain, such an accent has terribly negative connotations, so is a massive turn-off.
I would feel it's perfectly fine to record the radio and put it up for download but when you buy a cd and make a copy it really oughta be just for your own use or at least the use of your "household" in my case, I feel no pains at all when I rip a cd and burn it to an mp3 compilation and put a copy in both my wife and my cars to listen to. It's a matter of quality same as cassette copies, I won't copy the radio or a cassette because the copy sucks and it'd annoy me to no end to listen to it, a cd RIP however heck that's near perfect quality and I guess that's the fundamental issue, the issue of quality.
--- www.f-theocean.com
Yeah. Hollywood sucks doesn't it? The problem is simply this: excepting the few relatively cases where a sufficiently influential artist gets his own way (or funds a project himself) their films are created primarily as products, rather than works of art. Wonderbread indeed.
A night at home watching american television is one of the most boring things I can think of. With the exception of watching military propaganda on the History Channel, I haven't spent an evening watching TV since maybe 1995. If Brit tv were on more, I could almost see myself sitting and watching that.
American television programming is dumbed down to a junior high school level.
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
Since the production and promotion of a major picture costs about $150 Million, very few risks are taken with such an investment. That's why we get the least "challenging" treatment of material with a history of success - The Brady Bunch, or a film about the police, for instance.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
One gentleman stood up and made the observation that if you travel around the world you will find Chinese restaurants, Italian restaurants, French, Thai, Korean, Vietnamese, you name it. But never never an English restaurant. The point is obvious. Not necessarily a bad commentary. You won't find American restaurants either (well I hardly think McDonalds counts in the edible food category), but I've eaten at many a natural foods restaurant in the US that was delicious. For a time they categorized some of these as "California Cuisine", but the name evidently didn't stick.
A good point, and I suppose it firmly convicts the public in that it's their fault for continuing to patronise these expensively produced but soul-less spectacles. I think my faith in the American market's abiity to produce good movies crumbled when I saw what they did to the ending of Brazil. The purpose of every movie should not be to have every moviegoer leave the theatre feeling warm and content. That's what food is for.
What the fuck is it with Americans and "beer"? That fucking stuff is called "lager" and should be poured down the fucking toilet directly, bypassing the taste buds entirely as it is flavourless anyway.
Try a proper pint sometime and ditch the fizzy piss.
I would be amazed if you could find it, but Uley Brewery make some amazing beer. More accessable is perhaps London Pride, which is a nice tipple.
Anything from Freeminers brewery (Forest of Dean) is amazing. In short smaller brewerys make the best beer, but some of the bigger ones can make a reasonable pint.
-- You ain't seen me, right?
Look at our crappy, overpriced broadband services. When I read /. articles about 10 Mbps service in Taiwan for less than we pay for fscking dial-up, I really get a sence of what a backwards nation I live in.
Are you saying that you think John Cleese in drag is sexy?
What group carries TV series? I've been searching.. maybe my provider just doesn't carry the right group.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
it was meant has half a joke, it doesn't bother me that much actually! I felt a little bad at pointing it out hence the "/translation nazi" ending!
:))
when one doesnt speak a language day in day out, especially french, its very hard to translate it
sry if I sounded too serious!
I am concerned that BBC's tests may in fact be more propaganda than science, in that they found the neutron increase expected from a fusion reaction, but declared the result negative because the surplus neutrons detected appeared at the wrong time --- without explaining an alternative source for the surplus neutrons.. stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4270297
The point is that neutrons are tricky beasts to measure-in this experiment doubly so because you have a large source of neuts present to initialise the bubbles. The only way that you can be sure that the neuts you're detecting are a result of a fusion reaction at the same time as the bubble collapse is if you detect them at precisely the right instant of time. They didn't. This would suggest that, whatever the reason for excess neutrons may be, it's not bubble fusion. This is in fact excellent science. The goal is always to be sure to measure the effect that you think you're measuring.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman