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Pirates Promise Improved Version of DaVinci Code
Y'arr, Matey writes "CD Freaks is reporting that pirates are not happy with the quality of the DaVinci Code. According to the article, "A sales assistant at one Shanghai DVD shop said the initial copies were 'pirated overseas' and that 'better quality' versions would probably be available early next month.""
Stealing a physical objects, i.e., property theft, is nothing like copying an object. If anything, by making a copy a person has increased the abundance of an object and thus made it less a target of real theft. In that way, to copy is to help increase the security an object to an owner. The movie companies should be thanking the people who are making their originals more secure.
...but it does illustrate a point about the protection of content and the unauthorized distribution of said content. Look, these "pirates" have a copy - crappy though it may be - shortly after the first screening. And they're, apparently, selling (though no number figures are given for volume).
What is interesting is that the unauthorized distribution chain is well organized enough that a typical time frame can be placed on the "next" release of the film. It speaks volumes about the actual control content producers have on their material.
In this day of first weekend hits which fizzle or stay on the charts for such a short time, and the inevitable surfacing of the video in the "pirate" channels - both physical and online - is it really advantageous to the bottom line to spread (a) the theatrical release from the home video release by several months and (b) the theatrical release across continents by several months. In an age of essentially world wide communications and market size, and with the ability to distribute and screen content digitally, why not release the films one weekend, and the home version the following Tuesday? Have a blockbuster you think will have staying power and want to try and get a repeat audience? Delay the DVD 2-3 weeks. Get your hype budget right up front, and make sure the patrons who liked the theatrical screening can pick up their own copy before they forget about it.
All the laws and controls the studios have bought from the various governing bodies in the world won't stop the people who make a living doing this kind of stuff. And, unlike drugs or arms traffiking, we're not talking about societal crimes and social unrest. It's a God damned entertainment flick. Quit trying to constrain these "pirates" with rules they won't abide - beat them at their own game. Get the real discs into stores and into consumers hands before the "pirates" do. Crappy copies are no fun to watch. And I don't know about you folks, but if you've ever tried to get a movie of any decent quality off of the usenet you know it can be a royal pain. Quite honestly, it's not worth my time to futz with it if I can have Amazon deliver it to my door for $15. And I pay for good usenet access, so my dowloads are easy and fast. Provide the goods and take away their business and reason for being. Sure, you'll still have to deal with the snot-nosed teens who pirate stuff for the thrill, but those folks aren't going to be buyers (by and large). Write them off.
FWIW, I have unauthorized copies of Star Wars (IV), The Little Mermaid, and (on VHS) Song of the South. I have since purchased Ep. IV, though it had been out for a while (heck, I already "bought" a copy, right?). TLM is "in the vault". I couldn't purchase one from Disney if I wanted to, so some Malaysian pirate got my $20 - I'm claiming fair use since I own the VHS (with the phallic cover, no less). SotS will "never be released", though having watched it I can't quite figure out why. The NAACP has nothing to worry about in the portrayal of of the slaves, but caucasians should be appalled at the portrayal of the plantation owners in the film.
IMHO, the movie cartel actually keeps these shady shops in business. That's what the story really is.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Ummm... Actually, they usually are.
The top release groups are very picky about the criteria* they use to evaluate a release that they're going to stick their name on.
To make sure that nothing gets past their filtering process, they have guys whose sole job it is to Nuke "bad" releases.
*The wikipedia article only gives you a broad overview. Some release groups are insanely specific about their release and won't accept/distribute anything that doesn't fit within their narrow definition of "good"
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
A friend of mine owns a mastering studio and contracts out large pressings. A few days before the release of the Da Vinci Code, he was contacted by somebody who claimed to have a copy and wanted 10,000 of them pressed as soon as possible.
Of course, my friend turned him down.
Judging by TFA, he must have finally found somebody to do it.
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When I first saw the headline, I actually thought that they were going to edit it to make it better. I haven't seen it yet but I heard it was pretty bad.
I make websites and stuff. Buy one.
Earlier this week the shops in downtown Kuala Lumpur (capital of Malaysia, for those unfamiliar with southeast Asian geography) were shut down by one of those periodic raids, the ones where the cops take all the DVDs they find on the premises and smash 'em up and email some photos to the MPAA. Obviously that's not many, because the guy outside the mall selling the plastic toys that nobody buys has already phoned up to the shops to let them know the police van is looking for a parking spot.
The shops that sold exclusively movies and TV shows were shuttered up. The ones that also sold pirate software and games were open, but the movie shelves were empty. A few guys were loitering furtively in the corridors of Plaza Imbi (the most grungy and underworldy of the big pirate malls in central KL) with small folders of movies but even there the shops were shut. I ran into one of the shop guys at a restaurant Tuesday night and he made it sound like the raids were their annual holiday leave system.
Just for fun I tried to find a shop selling legit DVDs but never came across one, except for the always-deserted video sections at Borders and Tower Records. So I guess everyone had to watch shitty Malaysian satellite TV for a few days. The cinemas were packed, but they always are.
By Wednesday evening, it was back to business as usual for all.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Here in Beijing, there are CD/DVD shops pretty much on every block, and in none of then can you find "legal" products, at least not for non-Chinese stuff. In any place with lots of pedestrian traffic, you'll find "street merchants" with boxes full of DVDs. Stores that carry "legal" imported DVDs are quite hard to find, if you really want them.
Movies that are showing in the theatres will usually be in the stores a few days *earlier* than in the theatre; most often, they won't show in the theatres at all. And a few weeks later (about two weeks after the theatre premiere), you'll have the decent-quality DVDs, although those second-batch disks are typically either sans subtitles, with subtitles copied from some other random movie, or really bad "all your base" subtitles. The third batch are the actual DVD copies that come usually a few days before the "legal" DVDs are released in the rest of the world.
If you're a good customer, and the second batch is expected at some point in this same week, the clerk will sometimes even tell you, "no buy this, the better quality come tomorrow".
The Shanghai poster neglected to mention prices. A regular DVD costs an average 10 yuan, 15 or 20 if it comes in a box rather than envelope (not so much for the box, but because these are usually slightly better). A DVD9 ranges from 20 to 40 yuan. One USD = 8.14 yuan.
Having just gotten back from China I can tell you that ANYTHING you want on DVD is available for a BUCK. High Quality packaging and everything with FBI warnings and disclaimers in place. They use to just make VCDs that everyone had players for, then they went to DVD-5 and compressed the quality of some movies a bit. Now they rip full DVD-9 and market it as DVD-9 or HDVD. The "Broke Back Mountain" rip I saw (my wife made me watch it with her, BTW BORING!) had the "For Academy Viewing Only" disclaimer scroll across the screen about 3 times, but he quality was great. In Guangzhou lot of people have 50+ inch plasma Hi-Def TVs. I'm sure they will pirate Blu-Ray when it comes out. I saw lots of PSPs in use while I was there.
I was sorely tempted to snap up DVDs for bootlegging before coming back home but resisted.
I'm not sure I have much of a point other than piracy is here to stay in China. Copy-protection won't matter one wit because it is done by professionals with the equipment to do it right, and it is so firmly a part of the society I don't know anyway you could stop it if you really tried. I for one like the fact that if things become too draconian here stateside I always have a source that can hook me up in the East.
Letter To Iran
Yes, I am anti-media (which, I suppose, you might term "pro-pirate"), but not without reason.
For example, a common mantra is "artists deserve compensation." I could point out, yet again, that they do not *get* this compensation, rather it goes to middlemen, eaten by crazy accounting practices where things make millions of dollars but no "profit" because of the money the studios & such charge themselves. And I could point out that DaVinci, Michaelangelo, Plato, Socrates, and a whole host of others did just fine sans copyright (or any other sort of imaginary property). However, that would not be directly relevant.
Rather, I should point out that no one *else* gets to do work *once* and expects to be paid many, many times for it. It is a form of "rent" that real economists know will get squeezed out of the economy... absent government intervention, that is.
Further, rather than sensibly giving us fixed terms, they've keyed them to the life of the author. At least (and ironically), *corporate* works have a fixed term. This makes it very difficult to find out if something is still under copyright or not. And the Copyright Office files can be waaaaay out of date, which doesn't help any. But no, it's still under copyright, and it will be for 70 years after they're dead. This is unreasonable, this is unfair, and this is stupid.
You don't agree? Well, it's also a great vector for stupid contracts of adhesion. You didn't know you could read this part first? Too bad, you *could* have known. This post is copyright to me (C) 2006. By reading it, or having any copy on your computer, however briefly (i.e. the copy you're reading right now), you agree to the following terms. If you choose not to agree, you owe me statutory damages for your infringement of my intellectual property ("IP").
From the desk of IANAL:
A) You may not use, make, import, acquire, help with, support, or otherwise assist in making, writing or creating any form of Digital Restrictions Management (often called "DRM", or less accurately "Digital Rights Management"). You are, however, permitted to do whatever you like in the way of disabling, circumventing, or bypassing it per the terms of this license. Obviously, this license cannot exempt you from applicable law to the contrary; the previous statement only means that the license does not prohibit such activities, the rest of section A notwithstanding.
B) To the extent you can be bound to do so under applicable law, you agree to vote for, politically support, endorse, or otherwise agree with pro-circumvention and anti-IP laws, policies, and statements. Clause B as a whole is void if it is contrary to applicable law, consistant with the severability clause of this license.
Non-Compete Clause -
You may not accept any job competing with licensor. This means that you may not do any pro-copyright work, such as lawyering on behalf of the plaintiff in a copyright case, drafting pro-IP laws or extensions (anti-copyright laws, filing DMCA takedown notices (putback notices are fine), including those which significantly shorten copyright terms, are acceptable), or anything else inconsistant with anti-IP principles. If applicable law requires consideration to uphold this term, you are entitled to 1/20th of one cent or something with equivalent cash value (i.e. any random cupon). If applicable law requires that it be limited in time and/or within some geographic area, the largest area and the largest time must be chosen. If it recognizes no specific time or area, this applies for the next calendar year and within a range of 100 miles from your current residence.
Severability -
If any part of this license is held to be contrary to applicable law, that section is void and the rest of the license stands. In choosing how much of the license to void, the smallest section of the license that leaves the license, as a whole, to be consistant with its anti-"IP" mission must be chosen.
Termination -
This license expires w
It wasn't even a good movie, couldn't they at least wait for X-Men 3.
This does bring up an interesting point, RIAA and MPAA are so busy suing average folk in the US that they don't really make any serious efforts against the huge pirates in China. Chinese pirates will continue to go about ripping off movies and software because the Chinese government would rather side with its people than some evil foreign capitalist organization.
True Story.
A friend of mine was looking for an original copy of Star Wars on DVD for a movie night. After looking around for a long time, he finally found someone selling a custom version of the trilogy. These are mastered from the lazerdisks, and have been remixed to match the originals as closely as possible. The audio had been re-edited with the original effects, title, etc. They also included four disks worth of bonus material collected from the LD's, VHS editions, Re-releases, TV interviews, holiday edition, etc.
In short, they sold him the definitive box set that Lucas wouldn't*. The customer support was great. The vid and audio quality was excellent. The extras and menus were nicely polished. And of course none of the people who actually produced or worked on the movie got any money at all.
*Rumor has it that at the end of 2006, Lucas will be selling a box set of the hexagy, that includes the revised revised special editions plus the original versions of the films as they appeared in theaters. This is great, and would be considered the definitive archival set, except that he's also planning a revised revised revised "definitive" edition on blu-ray for 2007. And after that definitive, final, this-is-really-it edition, they're working on a 3D version. Sigh.
The ______ Agenda
I've read all the dan brown books, but from what I've heard of the movie, it's quite tedious.
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I cannot read. Let me say that my attention span causes me to skim pages, skip words, go back and forth. Because of this, I end up reading with no comprehension if something goes more than a few pages. Character development is difficult for me to follow. Along comes Dan Brown with a writing style that has short chapters, little descriptive notation, etc. He has been criticized for his writing style, but I find it easy to follow. Admittedly, I listened to the 13-CD audio book for Da Vinci Code, but I read Angels and Demons and Point Deception (?) (the meteorite book). I can pretty much only read a Stephen King novel if I have seen the movie, but I can start and finish a Brown novel without difficulty. I did not finish Digital Fortress because I lost interest in the story.
Inaccurate information is what good stories are all about. I doubt there are many that bitched about the Indiana Jones trilogy for similar reasons. I enjoyed watching National Treasure, which was rife with errors. Any science fiction film -- don't get me started. For us computer nerds, I enjoyed many movies with tons of errors: Virus, Wargames, Sneakers, Lawnmower Man, etc. I think some people need to lighten up and enjoy a story every so often. Da Vinci Code is a work of fiction, building on convenient coincidences and half-truths. That statement describes half the history books I have read in the past.
Can't we all just get along?!?!
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