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MPAA Targets TV Download Sites
KenDaMan writes "ZDNet.com is reporting that the MPAA is targeting websites that serve as traffic directors for BitTorrent swaps. From the article: 'Continuing its war on Internet file-swapping sites, the Motion Picture Association of America said Thursday that it has filed lawsuits against a half-dozen hubs for TV show trading.' Apparently it is OK to record TV as long as your aren't sharing it."
TFA has a list.
"The six sites sued Thursday include ShunTV, Zonatracker, Btefnet, Scifi-Classics, CDDVDHeaven and Bragginrights."
Not quite. Their member companies produce most of the TV shows as well.
What's funny is the MPAA and other companies scream up a storm of how it's illegal and wrong, have they ever stopped to consider how much of a fucking monopoloy tv is?
Case in point, I'm a huge sci fi fan. Take Trek as a main example. Sure if I'm at home during the day around 1pm I can catch TNG/DS9 reruns on "Spike" TV but most people with day jobs aren't home at that hour. Sure I could Tivo/DVR/VHS tape it but then again you have to deal with the inconsistances of stuff being prempted, etc Not to mention you're paying to record the stuff, those VHS tapes and blank DVD's aren't free, if you record it yer at least spending X amount of money on blank media.
So as most people are unlucky to not be able to tape shows, such as my example, what options do we have?;
- Wait till reruns begin/occur. Some shows are already in rerun syndication on other networks. Take Stargate. It has new episodes of SG-1 on the Sci Fi channel. but if you turn on say, the WB at 3 am some nights you catch old reruns of it. This falls into the above example of being able to record such things, as such times, in an affordable manner. And that doesn't take into account the current season of a show. Smallville just ended it's season (I think), so if you missed the last few episodes of the season you gotta wait till the end of Summer when the reruns of that season "catch up".
- Buy the seasonal DVD's. Ok this is my main deterent. I'm a huge Trek fan, have been for 15 years. I own not one season or movie of Trek on DVD. Why? Walk into the cheapest department store there is. Seriously, go to Walmart or K-Mart or Target. See those prices? $80-100 for ONE season of basically any Trek. $80 fucking dollars. I don't need 20 extra DVD's, sure their nice but I just want the series, in DVD format in DVD quality all in one nice little package. I honestly cannont justify paying more than $30-40 per season of a TV show. If you want all 7 seasons of a Trek series, it's almost $800......I can buy a god damn CAR for that (or at least put a downpayment on a nice one). Now some DVD's have become more, economical. This past Christmas when Buffy season 7 came out, they released a holiday package deal, all 7 seasons for around $200-250. That is reasonable. I can justify that purchase for the cost. And you still can find a deal here there, Amazon.com knocks off a couple hundred bucks on big series like Trek, but still not much... Now remember when I said go to a department store? Try a large chain store like Best Buy, EB, Suncoast, Media Play, etc..Double those prices.
- Avaiblility. Remeber how I mentioned the cheap stores and big expensive chain stores? What do you see most of in the dvd sections at Walmart or Kmart? New Releases. Sure they have a handful of tv seasonal dvd's but most likely the last that was released (i.e. you'll find Stargate Season 7 but not Season 1...). So what are you left with? Going to a store that specializes in electronics and shit like Best Buy or Samgoodie, whom have a nice HUGE selection of DVDs and such but charge INSANE prices. ($1200 for all of DS9 last time I checked...)
The quality of tv just doesn't justify things in the end. I mean, for every Trek dvd or Scape DVD that's fairly expensive you'll find CRAP like American Idol or the latest incarnation of Survivor selling like hot-fucking-cakes for half the price. Hell I haven't watched anything on the Fox network in years (except 24) cause every night it's their prime time lineup of "Reality TV" shit. ABC, CBS etc follow either in the same suit or throwing out the 14th different spinoff of CSI or Law & Order o_O
When prices are reasonable or tv schedules become more flexible in correlation with recording media prices then maybe I won't use BT for my source of entertainment.
Aw Frell this
I think these lawsuits will simply speed up the migration away from P2P to anonymous P2P. Many individuals believe strongly in the freedom of uncensorable speech and many also think that copyright (a monopoly on the free flow of information and a an barrier to promote artificial scarcity of knowledge erected by government enforced through threats of violence) needs to be reformed at best and removed totally at worse.
The more promising anonymous p2p applications is I2P, its Wikipedia article here. It is a network layer and has a variety of tools including anonymous bittorrent [ducktorrent], [i2pbt], [azeureus plugin] (Azureus 2.3.0.0 has I2P code in its core as seen from their release notes), anonymous p2p search [i2phex], anonymous IRC [core], anonymous http [core], anonymous distributed content store like Freenet [Quartermaster or 'Q']. All it really needs is people to share their content (just put it in your files in automatic webpage directory) and anonymous newsgroups.
There is also Freenet which is a useful backup to I2P until I2P develops a well working distributed content store (currently Quartermaster or the defunct Stasher fufill these rolls and are in the I2P core CVS). If you get Frost for Freenet there are a few distribution organisations there as well.
The FCC said it was okay for Tivo users to record and share tv shows with 9 friends.
A VCR lets you keep the tapes, you can't take any content off a TiVo. Once you run out of room, you have to delete the show. And you can't record and skip commercials. With a VCR you can pause during commercials.
A) you absolutely can skip commercials with tivo, and I'll bet you head-to-head I can skip my commercials faster and more acurrately. B) you can transfer files off your tivo to your computer/portable media device C) you can burn them to a DVD if you so choose D) your friend could give you said DVD as easily as a tape if he didn't think you were such a know-it-all dick.
-truth
I had a steady B+ in my AI class until I failed the Turing test...
Copyrights are internationally honoured. Unless you're in one of the few countries that hasn't signed the international treaties on copyright then you are bound by US copyright just as much as you are bound by Japanese copyright.
It's not quite so cut and dry. What is illegal in one country may not be illegal in another. Take America for example, half the laws in America these days seem to be written for the lobby groups and not the citizens. What is considered a copyright violation may not be considered a violation in another country.
Last year (or maybe two years ago) it was ruled in Canada that sharing music was perfectly legal. The judge ruled that having a "shared music folder" on your computer where other users could download copies of the music was tantamount to the public library letting a citizens use photocopier to copy pages of a given book. That is the exact analogy he used.
So while in America sharing music might be illegal and said to violate copyright law, in Canada it is perfectly legal. Even if the MPAA thought we were violating American copyright, they have no course of action to take against us.
While Canada & America and countless other countries are bound by international copyrights, what violates a copyright in each respective country can be very different.
Con: the admins are arrogant assholes.
Reason: because they have to deal with the worst of the worst kinds of adolescent assholery. They're strict with their rules, and there are generally no second chances. If you want your porn for free, you follow the rules; the fact that the site is so popular is a testament to how many people agree with the mods' enforcement policies.
Or, so I've heard.