Slashdot Mirror
TV Delays Driving AU Viewers To Piracy
Astat1ne writes in with a story in The Register about the delays Australian TV viewers are experiencing getting overseas-produced series and how this is driving many of them to download the shows via BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer networks. The problem is compounded by the fact that Australian viewers are unable to download legal copies of the episodes from the US iTunes website. Quoting: "According to a survey based on a sample of 119 current or recent free-to-air TV series, Australian viewers are waiting an average of almost 17 months for the first-run series first seen overseas. Over the past two years, average Australian broadcast delays for free-to-air television viewers have more than doubled from 7.9 to 16.7 months."
Seriously, 17 months?
Why the delay? What exactly is it that could possibly take so long? You could almost put the DVDs in a hot air balloon and get them there quicker.
Especially considering that this is sales. Who waits that long to make money? Especially in that industry?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Much of the piracy of new releases is by those of us who can't stand the theater and don't want to wait half a year for the DVD.
If you can create a cloned copy of my Ferrari without damaging mine, then I'd have no problem with you doing so. Make two.
I find it humorous that the article talks about how the Australian TV networks are "unable or unwilling to change their programming policies", yet makes no mention about the actual core problem here--the licensing of the content. Yes, if a TV show is produced and owned by an American TV network, then the Australian TV network needs to license it from the American company. They can't just decide to air it whenever they feel like it (which is what this article seems to suggest). Whether the problem is the American company not offering up the content for licensing, or whether the Australian companies don't want to pay the fee until it's lowered needs to be mentioned in order for this article to be more than an uninformed gripe. Then again, it is the Register, so it comes as no surprise to me that it's actually missing the point...
This guy's the limit!
I know that as a Doctor Who fan in the states I'm not going to wait to see new episodes of Who. When I can download them and watch them less than 12 hours after they have been on in BBC, there really isn't any reason to wait until SciFi channel or whoever decides to air it. More and more it seems as if my favorite shows aren't aired on channels in the USA or if they are, they are shown months later.
Sure it may be copyright infringement to download them, but since there's no legal way for me to see a lot of these shows in the first place, I don't have a problem with it. I can't pay for them if I wanted to, I do pay for cable, and I'm not a Nielson Rating's house, so the arguments against downloading these shows seem pretty weak.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
Who said it's about justifying piracy? It's not. It's still wrong, but it shows that there IS a market that is willing to pay for it ... if it was provided.
Piracy isn't justified, but if the consumers want to see a TV show, they will. The question now is, are you going to sell it to them, or are they going to have no choice but to steal it?
While slashdot has indeed tended toward becoming a forum for piracy excuses, this is not neccesarily an example of it. This seems more to document a stupid move by a corporation that give the unethical a stronger motive for piracy.
While piracy is bad, I think most people would agree, this study shows an interesting phenomenon of our shrinking world. With the increased availability of digital content the barriers to acquiring a product available in a region of the world that is not your own are almost non-existent. In the past you would have to fly to the region that had the product you sought out, buy it and fly back or have it imported via some other means. Now there is no technological reason you shouldn't be able to do the same, just some legal hurdles imposed by countries out to make a buck anywhere they can and media companies out to do the same. I don't know what the solution to the former is but in regards to the latter I would think this would be enough to show that there is a demand for the content and for them to find a way to distribute it.
Is the that the toilets in Australia flush counter-clockwise. This really messes with Ted Steven's tubes and prevents licensed content from quickly reaching the country.
You heard it here first folks...
Yes, it is wrong. The media is wrong by not catering to the world market. If the media gave the market what the consumers want, there would be less of a problem with piracy.
We have the media corps not giving the consumers what they want.
and
We have the consumers taking what they want, but not from the media corps because they are not giving the consumers the choice to choose what they want, legally.
No one is really right in the situation, and thus it continues to perpetuate digital theft, and aggressive litigious bullying.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
You can't afford a Ferrari. That doesn't mean it's not available to you, just that you don't have the means to get it. The issue here is that Australians don't have the means of legally acquiring this material. They can't even log on to the US iTunes and pay for it. That's the problem.
I love how Slashdot has become the only place to come for incorrect car analogies.
Yes, it is still probably illegal, but when or how it is released does have an effect on the legal/moral implications of downloading.
For example, if the show was NEVER aired in Australia, and is never made available for sale on DVD, then is it still illegal to copy? It would have no impact on earning potential, or?
Either wait or it, or petition for it to be made or sale.
In a passive/aggressive kind of way piracy is a petition for change. No stealing it is not right, but mass piracy does convey the will of the masses. People want their entertainment, fresh and cheap. Maybe in order to supply that, quality will suffer, but that is what the demand is. If a legal unlimited media-crap P2P network that cost the same as cable TV, was made availible, there would be much less piracy.
We are all just people.
TV in Australia sucks because of the constant barrage of overly loud advertisements for 3 minutes after every 5 minutes of TV show.
Cinema in Australia sucks because of long queue lines, high prices and poor quality movies, as well as the 20 mins of lead-up-to-the-main-feature advertisements.
DVD release in Australia suck because we have to wait and wait and wait for a DVD that gets superseded 1 month after arrival by the Gold Edition, then the Extra Gold Edition, then the SuperMegaHypeUltraBlaster edition shortly after.
The whole experience of entertainment via TV/DVD or cinema is completely wrong. It lacks that all important component - ENTERTAINMENT.
Why bother? I can buy a bootleg copy of just about anything, download it if I can be bothered or borrow someone else's copy of whatever it may be. Either way, these three elements of access to entertainment guarantee I get my entertainment fix.
Yes - I am an Aussie.
I guess a bunch of execs are sitting around the board room table, still thinking it is 1970 and they have exclusive control over video distribution of their content. It will probably take an entire generation worth of executives to die off before some of these industries can reform. It really takes serious denial to think that consumers would prefer to wait for them to broadcast the content over their channels, when it can be obtained immediately, on-demand, in HD without commercials for free.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
We need this car example to make things clear to people. thanks for your input.
No the question is not are you willing to sell it, it's are people willing to pay you what it would cost. Chances are these people aren't stupid, but have looked at the numbers and concluded that people aren't willing to pay enough for them to make a profit.
Being willing to download for free doesn't mean being willing to pay the real market cost.
I disagree with you here. Note, I've been modded flamebait and troll a lot for saying stuff against the partyline on copyright. The problem with piracy is that has the potential to harm producers because some people who would have paid won't (it's impossible that all copyright infringers absolutely never would have paid for the content). Thus, the producer is harmed by illegal downloading and it should not be condoned.
This situation different. If the material is not released in any pay format, the content producer cannot possibly suffer any negative consequences by banned groups' piracy.
The question is different when there is delay as in this case and there are more questions to be answered. For example, do all shows make it to Australia or just a few? Why exactly are the content producers delaying so long? Is it actually the AU media that is standing in the way of distribution?
Answers to these kinds of questions could sway my thinking (remember, it is based on the potential for lost sales, not any "moral" argument posed by either side). If it is simply a choice by the content producers not to sell to AU, then I don't really have a problem because they would never have made a dime of Australia. I would think the answer though is more complicated. Politics? Protectionism?
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
It is unauthorized, which in some peoples opinion makes it Wrong. Other people have no problem with that. And to a sizable fraction of the people, it is Wrong only if there is an option of authorized copying.
Claiming that your Wrong should be the viewpoint of everybody isn't going to help. On the other hand, providing an authorized option is going to change something, as it will make the last group switch to that option. That is why the article, unlike your opinion, is interesting, it shows a way to change status quo.
[ I personally never do unauthorized copies, not because I think those are Wrong, but because I want to argue against current copyright laws without being accused of trying to justify my own behavior. ]
The government can't save you.
I would happily pay, but no one offers it for sale. What happened to market forces?
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Seriously, you guys. Studio Executives always have to re-dub shows each time they go to a new language region. They do this when the show goes to Germany, they do this when the show goes to China. And of course, they re-dub shows when they go to Australia. The reason it takes so long is that Australian is notorious for being one of the worst languages on the planet.
I always loved seeing christmas episodes, in mid summer. Made me feel like living in Australia I guess. Too bad Europe is in the Northern Hemisphere.
I could never, rationally, understand the year and a half delay either.
Thank you P2P.
Woot, a troll.
Okay, so listen up. If you can't afford a Ferrari, that is understandable. Ferraris are spendy little cars. But DVDs? They're perfectly affordable. So is basic cable. The problem here is not cost, not at any level -- Australia is an English-speaking country with similar obscenity laws and a excellent grasp of American culture. There should not be any costs associated with "preparing" episodes for export to Australia, neither for broadcast nor for DVD.
People are pirating it because there is no other way to get it. For some inexplicable reason, the industry seems to think that there is little to no demand for importing these shows, and so they've neglected to do so. It's sort of sad, really; the industry hasn't always been this way. For example, Cartoon Network started airing late-night anime precisely because polls showed that the biggest demographic of anime fansubbers and traders was also the demographic most likely to sit up late at night and watch cartoons. While this may not seem like a big deal to you, it was an amazingly awesome thing for anime lovers, and I think that Cartoon Network got it right.
Your "wait for it" method assumes that the show in question will in fact be aired and released in Australia regardless of consumer input. This is not true. There are many shows in markets which simply never arrive in places due to a lack of demand. For every anime imported, dubbed, edited, NTSCed, and aired or released in America and Canada, there are dozens that they predict just won't sell no matter how snazzy the packaging is. The only way to show that there is a serious demand is to pirate the shows.
The TV business is usually not as receptive to input as the Adult Swim guys. They don't understand much besides money and ratings. The only way to force them to speed up their importing schedules is to create economic impetus -- to pirate the shows that are being demanded. Anything else is futile.
~ C.
so i could tell all our Australian friends how the shows they are still waiting for ended =p
seems like there are similar problems everywhere..I for example really like TopGear on the BBC..... sadly however there is no legitimate way for me to watch it here in America.... So naturally I never watch it at all =p (pro tip never admit piracy or other crimes on teh interweb)
actually I am happy to see you, however that is in fact a banana in my pocket.
Incorrect. It's illegal, not necessarily "wrong".
There's no stealing involved here, sir.
Yes, it makes it right. Globalization is for everybody or for nobody. The businesses move freely, but consumers can be forbidden from purchasing in another country (see AllOfMP3, DVD region codes, etc.) If you sell something to someone in the US and there is no technical reason why you can't sell it to me, then it is wrong for you to exclude me. Levelling the playing field is not wrong: My conscience is clear.
No kidding. It's TV, for crying out loud! This isn't a life or death situation. Go read a freakin' book!
Or, if you wish to be part of the solution, and not part of the landscape, write to your local TV stations and start complaining! Write to their advertisers! DO SOMETHING CONSTRUCTIVE!
It's not that simple. Production companies charge more for new shows and less for old shows. Basically the AU tv company has said we are willing to pay $X for your show and no more. The Production company then replies, well if that's all your willing to pay you'll have to wait at least 12 month since we have other markets whom are willing to pay a lot more. If they where willing to sell for $X to AU at once then for example the UK market who where willing to pay more than $X will refuse to do so and the production company loses money. That's all basic economics.
As for putting it on iTunes. By doing so the program loses value for the AU tv company since it will mean that less people will watch it on TV and so they'd be willing to pay even less for the rights or even decide not buy it at all. So the US production company will eithert lose a sale or get less money from the sale than they could have had they not released the show to iTunes. That is a real and significant cost for them, one which any profits gotten of iTunes may very well not cover.
Piracy IS theft.
Copyright violations ARE NOT theft.
TopGear is apparently the most pirated(sorry watched) BBC show after Dr Who worldwide. It is very un PC and that is what makes it so attractive.
Goody, 55mins to go before this weeks edition. The lads are messing around in Tractors trying to grow their own Fuel.
Keep up the good work lads. I'll be at Dunsfold next week for the show.
Perhaps the BBC should copy UK Channel 4 and setup a pay downoad site for non serial shows like TopGear
Off Topic:-
The place where the show is filmed is the place where the Harrier VTOL Aircraft was flight tested before delivery to the like of the RAF, USMC and Spanish Airforce..
I worked there in the late 1970's.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
Not only do we get most movies much later (if at all). We also get TV series MUCH later (if at all), and to add insult to injury, it's all in some crappy translation (you just can't translate puns, nor can you really adequately translate interesting dialog), spoken by speakers with totally different voices than the original ones, and so forth...
As a result, I don't even own a TV anymore (just not worth it, especially since the government makes us pay >$15/month), only watch DVDs once in a while, and otherwise watch downloaded stuff from overseas.
It's like the war on drugs: wake up, nobody cares if it's illegal. When people want something, there are two choices: sell it to them in an open, competitive market, or prohibit it and live with the results (mafia gangs, illegal distribution). But you can't change people.
Except they can make money by directly selling it to the people and cut out the networks altogether. I suspect that since the media companies are really married to the advertising model however, they don't consider the potential for direct sales. Now, I don't condone piracy when the piracy might interfere with the content producer's ability to earn money, but by the same token, I've become quite accustomed to having commercial free entertainment on DVD or through iTunes. I'm in the US so it is easy for me to get things by legal means and so I do. If I was AU, I wouldn't feel guilty about downloading because nobody wants to sell it to me anyway. Right or wrong, this is the future market media companies have to deal with and what they ought to do, is figure out how to deal with it profitably.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Sounds like they deserve what they get for reading stuff on the internet.
Well it is wrong in the legal sense but I would call it right in the moral sense. Americans have the show for free on broadcasting networks. They can tape it, share the tape with friends, but can't do this digitally or can't give it to australians friends ? Yeah, that's the law, you should comply but you should also change it quickly.
Luckily I am free of the series addiction that seem to get all my colleagues, but I must say that it is very hard for those watching the series on the national network to not be spoiled by the bittorrenters who knows who gets to be killed at the end of season 1 12 months before "honest guys".
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Just because they haven't released it YET doesn't mean there's no potential harm. If they can't get the content in a timely fashion and everyone has already watched it off bt, then why bother releasing it late? You don't get to decide when and how they have to release the content.
The reality is that we have a global audience now. Aussies can get on the net (except for the Tassies that are still working on that whole fire thing) and want to talk with other fans of the show, but it's impossible for them to do so because the dominate online presence is a year ahead of them. The content providers have to do a better job releasing things everywhere at as close to the same time as is reasonable or else human nature is going to take over.
You sir are brainwashed.
The people who began calling the process of copying files from the network w/o the permission of the "IP owner" "piracy" and "stealing" are the **AA parasites, and they add little to no value while conspiring to hold us all back technologically and for what? To keep milking a clearly obsolete business model.
Data wants to be free; we can only restrict distribution and charge $$ for it by making some artificial arrangement (which is always going to be defeatable). Even so if they would price their "IP" at a level the market is willing to bear and provide it in a format people find useful (vs restictive) most people would rather just buy it, it's easier.
These are some *reasons* piracy happens.
So the real excuse makers and criminals here are the **AA .
All this is not big news --- do try to keep up old man!
The post about copying the ferarri is spot on and should be modded up.
Caveat Utilitor
After burning the files to a dvd and popping them into my divx capable dvd player I was able to watch the shows in widescreen format without commercials. I could have gotten them in surround sound as well but my player doesn't support surround for divx files so I went with the smaller non-surround sound files.
When watching these shows via my dvr I obviously have to contend with commericials, but because I don't have a high def setup, I can only watch the full screen version of most shows even though I would greatly prefer a wide screen version. By downloading I get exactly what I want, with no hassle of fastforwarding past commercials and I get it whenever I want it, not when some company says I can have it. I don't think this is something they can compete with. It's like when Napster fell the RIAA thought people would suddenly stop downloading just because Napster was gone. I have access to a better product then what DirecTV is selling me for free so what incentive do I have to keep their service? I will because at some point it becomes a hassle to download everything you want to see. Would be nice if there was some automated program that would access the torrent site and retrieve the latest files for each of my favorite shows and now that I think about it, I could easily right such an animal in perl. I think I'll do just that. Maybe I will drop DirectTV after all.
How is it that one careless match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?
Germany has a thriving torrent culture for the same reason.
I often wonder if I would trade their lack of good media with our lack in America of good fast and CHEAP broadband connectivity?
Were it not for Battlestar, Firefox and 24, I would probably vote for the broadband.
The real problem is clear if you study the history of Australia. It started as a penal colony. So, the fact that the Aussies are committing crimes isn't entirely unexpected...
"Much of the piracy of new releases is by those of us who can't stand the theater and don't want to wait half a year for the DVD."
Man! It's amazing how your founders managed to make it without the benefit of instant gratification. Good thing societies are ditching that mindset. Now! Now! Now! is the wave of the future.
Hey did US & OZ sign a free trade agreement recently. Shouldn't that allow us to download these movies. Or is it a typical one deal.
I don't pirate software (there's enough very good free stuff out there).
I don't pirate movies (anything worth having is worth buying on DVD).
I don't pirate music (same as DVDs).
However I do download 7-10 TV episodes off usenet every week. I pull them the day after they are on in the US as they won't be shown here in the UK for months - if at all.
What I can never understand is why Murdoch et al don't sign deals with the American networks to show their channels as part of their cable / satellite packages. Same goes for the BBC in American (the "proper" BBC channels - not BBC world).
If I could just record these shows on my PVR my own "piracy" would drop off to almost nothing (and the networks would get me watching more adverts instead of my current number of zero).
If the copyright holders are unwilling to sell a copy of a digital work, how can it possibly be morally wrong to obtain your own copy at zero cost to the original owner? The owner can't even try to claim that they lost "potential sales", because they were not selling copies in the first place.
I am a viral sig. Please help me spread.
Similarly, if a movie or show isn't available in my market, it doesn't justify piracy because the distributor for one reason or another didn't make it available.
I will argue against that. First lets call a spade a spade and not mix things up. We are talking about copyright infringement, not moral/ethical issues and definitly NOT stealing (people love to equate the two on the grounds of morality, but it pisses me off that they deal out vastly different degrees of punishment upon the guilty of each).
Copyrights are a social contract between producers and society, the later will assist (NOT gaurantee) the former in obtaining profits so as to encourage a healthy and growing existance of the former in the HOPE the former will continue to create works FOR the later. The emphisis is on the benefit of the later, NOT the former.
If for one reason or another, the producer is unable/unwilling to provide a work protected by society at its true value; society or elements of it have every right to seek other means of obtaining the work at its true value. Of course producers are a part of society and they can sue copyright infringers, but that just reduces down to a cost of obtaining the work by certain means. Legality is an issue of cost, not morality.
Consumers will look at their options and always choose the least costly method, therefore producers need to make sure that the profitable path is that method by either adjusting their price or adjusting the price of alternatives through lawsuits, legislation, regulations, etc. The two paths effect each other and both have points of diminishing returns; so one needs to balance them properly.
I am not providing excuses here, but just showing the basic ground rules that exist.
I know how it feels to wait a long time for TV shows. And I suspect many Americans do too.
Scifi channel delayed finishing up Stargate Atlantis' Season 3 and Stargate SG-1's last season until April. But Canadians and UK (Sky One) have been watching it since December and January. So many Americans have to wait 4 to 5 months just to watch their favorite show.
\
It seems that in the torrent age, everyone has forgotten that tv shows used to be traded on VHS all over the world. I used to get Dr. Who episodes from my cousins in England (I had a very expensive PAL/NTSC converter-player) and I used to trade episodes with a lot of people all over the world. Now I can just download whatever tv episodes that I want. I don't understand why nobody gave a shit about tape trading, but now if I share a private torrent or a custom made dvd of a tv show with my friends, instead of sending them a tape, I am a now PIRATE! Television has always been regarded as "disposable" entertainment. It was not till Lucille Ball started filming all her show that anyone thought that a tv show could hold any future value after once it aired. Look at the BBC, they have had a policy of no reruns past the original broadcast. While we here in the states got to watch Dr. Who/Blakes 7 over and over again on PBS stations, it was difficult to find old episodes in the UK.
"Jeremy, you need to get to an internet cafe and cut and paste some appropriate sentiments about me from the world wide
Its also a problem in Europe where we are probably 6 months behind on Neighbours or Home and Away dammit!
Same for Battlestar Galactica series.
They are not stealing it. I don't know about the law down under, but in the states, if you receive a copy from someone who made the copy, not only have you not stolen it, you also have not received stolen goods nor violated copyright law. Please explain this whole stealing business.
Well, we wanted all this "globalization", didn't we? And we have worldwide communication now, don't we? So why do they act surprised when people start pirating titles when they delay release dates across different continents by months?
I mean, geez, who's running the television industry, the Dutch East India Pictures Association? Why is their incompetence the fault of the market? Why do we have laws to protect incompetence?
"The delay in airing doesn't bother me, but being forced to wait four months for the resolution of a double episode pushed me over the edge."
Did you climb to the top of a clock tower with a high powered sniper rifle? I want to see a reality show, "411 TV viewer", as time runs out, and they steadily take a dive towards the worse. Kicking the dog, snarly to coworkers, and as they finally lose it...Ahhh!! The download finally finishes.
In Sweden, many american tv-series and moves could take quite some time before getting shown or released. It's much better now though, with many tv-series only a couple of episodes behind, if even that.
/ The Arrow
"How lovely you are. So lovely in my straightjacket..." - Nny
Battlestar Galactica out on DVD before it airs on tv? Our tax money going to co-produce a BBC Program (Torchwood) that won't even be shown in Canada until 2008? They wonder why people download tv shows?
It is really that bad for a majority of programs especially scifi:
Alias for example, according to wikipedia it was shown 2005-2006, It has not been shown in australia yet with no plans from what i can see to have it shown, There is also no release date for the dvd. Star Trek: Voyager was the worst you finished in 2001, we finished in 2005.
With Battlestar galactica we just showed the last episode of season 2 a few hours ago (started at 11:40pm but would be shown anywhere between 10:30pm and 2:30am) You are half way through season 3.
Stargate sg1, we finished season 9 last month, Stargate Atlantis we are at season 2 episode 6.
Extras started their second season last week.
The O.C. Is one exception though, channel 10 actually showed episodes of this within a week of the us, You showed it on the 22nd we showed it on the 23rd or 24th (the Australian rules pre-season has started so some regions where delayed).
Most programs are put on a 6 month delay much of this is because of the difference in ratings periods, yours is around September ours started a few weeks ago.
Is that you Ben Affleck? Don't worry the Aussies aren't downloading Daredevil or Gigli.
Can I bum a sig?
The first who can get 720p/1080p high bitrate surround sound TV series on the net, in a way that is fairly priced, is bound to make a huge amount of bucks, and make it a hell of a lot easier to start convincing people to pay instead of pirate. It is about two things first and foremost:
1. Convenience. I can watch it when I want, where I want, with no commercials or similar horrors.
2. Quality. TV/iTunes just doesn't cut it. I want full widescreen 720/1080 HDTV with full quality surround and top notch bitrate choices (I'll pay the double for 2x the bitrate).
(3. Price)
Ever heard of, if you can't beat them, join them? I'd hire the big boys in torrent/ftp to run my systems instead of trying to give them jailtime. They are sure to run a tight ship (they didn't even get paid before! well, kinda not at least:)) and they will be sure to upset the other nets so they can get more profit:) I'd pay them by the download ofcourse:)
Many people in europe could be willing to buy lots of games from online-retailing places like Ubisoft's Direct2Drive, but nearly all titles say "Only to be sold in North America". I really do wonder what makes my Visa or Amex worse than any John Doe from Newark. We would both want to buy a product. It's very lame excuse to say that I pirated some game cause I couldn't either buy it online nor it wasn't available on the local store, but I do think this is common dilemma. Same thing with the movies. You would want to buy it, can you can't. What happened to Globalization?
Here in Norway the only series we import is mainly reality shows, which i have absolutely zero interest in. I myself am mostly a sci fi fan, but sadly there is currently only one single sci fi show being aired on norwegian tv and that is season 1 of battlestar galactica. Firefly did never air here, stargate did never air here, no enterprise, no star trek ds9, no farscape and so on.. My only option was then to resort to illegal downloading over p2p and similar.
This actually made me buy dvd set of shows that i would never even have watched if it was not for the internet.
The first two I see have already been mentioned, and then there's Torchwood, the Doctor Who spinoff. There's no way we're going to see Torchwood here in the US... Too much swearing and nudity... Likely too much homosexual 'activity', as well.
And Sci-Fi channel, while I'm grateful you picked up SG-1, there's nothing you can say to convince me to wait until April to watch a series you've killed off and won't allow other networks to pick up since you have exclusive TV rights. Oh, and the whole wrestling thing... Screw that. Your credibility dies a little each time. In the meantime, you're bringing the whole piracy thing upon yourselves by trying to call the mid-season cliff-hangers "season finale/premieres"
As for Atlantis, well, same thing. You delay airing it by six months or so, all the while, the customers of other carriers of that program have this really neat series of tubes...
If your best argument is "you're breaking our copyrights" or "violating the law," then you need to re-think your lineup strategy, because I am not really interested in waiting THAT much longer just to watch your commercials. Maybe a few days, OK, if SkyOne is airing Tuesday, and you on Friday...
Just because something is illegal does not make it morally wrong. I download shows on bittorrent, and if I like a show, then I go and buy the DVD when it is later released. So, they are making more money from me than if I were watching them on TV. Everybody wins! I get the shows when I want them, the producers get to make money. Where's the crime or immoraility?
... and then they built the supercollider.
This happens everywhere outside the USA. Just take a look at all the people downloading series as they air on the USA and all the non english speaking people looking for subtitles on the net to watch those series.
Who wants to wait a minimum of 6 months to see a series in low definition, poorly dubbed, with commercial breaks and surely not in 16:9 format?
I don't have any moral issues downloading those series nor I call this "piracy" or "stealing". The word is "sharing".
Then I guess I was lucky to get by mistake a super-secret military monitor when I lived in the US. I later brought that monitor to Brazil, and guess what? It worked absolutely perfect in any position at all, just like it did in the US.
The earth's magnetic field varies everywhere, not just from the northern hemisphere to the south. Besides, the natural magnetic field is so weak compared to many other forms of interference against which CRTs must be shielded that variations in the natural magnetic field are totally irrelevant.
"TV in Australia sucks because of the constant barrage of overly loud advertisements for 3 minutes after every 5 minutes of TV show.
Cinema in Australia sucks because of long queue lines, high prices and poor quality movies, as well as the 20 mins of lead-up-to-the-main-feature advertisements."
And piracy is going to change that how?
This.
"DVD release in Australia suck because we have to wait and wait and wait for a DVD that gets superseded 1 month after arrival by the Gold Edition, then the Extra Gold Edition, then the SuperMegaHypeUltraBlaster edition shortly after."
And this.
"Why bother? I can buy a bootleg copy of just about anything, download it if I can be bothered or borrow someone else's copy of whatever it may be. Either way, these three elements of access to entertainment guarantee I get my entertainment fix."
And when the "Gold", "Extra Gold", and the "SuperMegaHypeUltraBlaster" all come out you have to rebuy, or redownload. So all you've done is to experience the same, only cheaper.
So, sell it on DVD direct to the Australian market. As you said, new shows are worth more - so they can sell at a premium. If they wait until after it shows on Aussie TV, the DVDs are worth less, and people might pick them up from a bargian bin, if at all. After all that time, the show is less desirable, so people might forgo buying the DVDs altogether.
... and then they built the supercollider.
And we need to argue semantics over something like this... why? Especially when you keep calling it "piracy" which last I checked meant attacking a civil vessel over international waters?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
For every anime [..] NTSCed
Um, Japan uses NTSC so that wouldn't be a conversion.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
My family went to Brisbane for a holiday in 1973, and Coronation Street was behind even what we were seeing in New Zealand.
The 'crime' as they would have you believe, is that you didn't pay for the 'privledge' of the format shift from DVD to . And that's a 'crime' of the highest order because they can't increase their profits with minimal work.
I own a legitimate hard-cover copy bounded set of all the seasons of DS9 and get a letter because I downloaded the avi rips? Where's the fairness in that?
If you were offended by anything I said... No, I'm not sorry. Please lighten up.
It all started with Lost. I really got into that on our local Free-to-air. Great show (well, back then :)). But what was it all about? Where were they? Who were 'the others'?
Being a highly connected person, I decided to check the internet. Surely there'd be people there who loved the show also and wanted to discuss it? Woohoo! There was. There's hundreds of sites and thousands of people talking about it. But THEY'RE ALL A SEASON AHEAD. I have to stop looking. I want the drama of the play-out. Don't tell me. Don't SPOIL it. But I still want to be able to talk about it. I still want to swap theories on what's going on.
So I decided to put my bandwidth to good use and catch up. So I caught up and watched it with only a slight delay from the US air time. I was able to discuss it with people and make wild guesses about things that weren't already a year old.
So now I watch the most part of my TV via BT. I watch Pay-TV for documentaries and most other 'time-wasting' television. I hardly ever watch free-to-air any more.
Cheers!
Rick
Oh, and I remember they advertised they were going to show one of those Survivor things just hours after it aired in the US. I'm told the US pilot was 2 hours but we were only shown the first hour. So really, the whole series was at least 1 week behind. I assume they did the same with Jericho which they advertised in a similar matter. Treat the viewers like crap and expect to get treated like crap yourselves Free-to-air!
If you would have told me that Jake and the Fat Man would be on DVD two years ago, I would have laughed. Now it is. What you would be doing is impacting future earnings. It is a companies right to not distribute something that they paid for and created. While you might not like that, it is true. If a company makes a movie that they do not like and don't distribute it, which has happened before, that does not mean that it is ok to pirate it. It is a buisness calculation to not release it and whatever happens for the company, be it good or bad is the companies problem. Since music and TV and movies are not a necessity, I don't see why there is this arguement that it is ok to pirate or copy it. These things are not like recepies for bread, ways to get clean water or other things that are needed to sustain life. Tough shit if you can't get the music you want. I wanted to go to a concert earlier this year but the tickets were 80 dollars. That does not give me the right to sneak in for free. The same goes with DVDs and TV. Companies pay for these things throught investors on future earnings for movies or advertisements on tv. I am guessing the TV shows you download do not have the advertisements in them. While it has been declared legal to fast forward through them, it is still illegal to copy and distribute them without the ads. Life isn't fair, you don't deserve everything that you always want. I want a Porsche 911 Targa, but I don't have the money for it. I don't rail against the machine and complain that it is unfair that it is priced at 80-100k. Buck up and accept the facts. If you want to change them, go ahead, but that doesn't make it legal to go around what you do when you pirate or copy things. You are not saving or preserving human life, liberty or the persut of happyness when you download Family guy.
Welcome to the Entropy Bar, may I take your order?
Just because some people can't get something, doesn't make it right. I can't afford a Ferrari, but nobody would justify me stealing it
That's a really shitty argument. I can afford to purchase the content, it's just impossible for me to attain it. If show's were available to legitimately download for a realistic price at the time of broadcast, I'd be there with bells on.
Similarly, if a movie or show isn't available in my market, it doesn't justify piracy because the distributor for one reason or another didn't make it available. Either wait or it, or petition for it to be made or sale.
It's not my fault that broadcasters, publishers and producers are caught in the 1970's while the world is getting ready to move into 2010's
If content providers were willing to adapt to a changing market, I'd be more than willing to pay.
This happens over here in Sweden aswell. I saw people do this lots and lots with both Prison Break and Lost, since the episodes aired about one or two weeks later over here, people downloaded them from BitTorrent.
I think it's worth noting that because of this issue, some companies are changing their tune. I saw the first half of Season 2 of Battlestar Galactica in the US, but then moved to Canada, where the whole series was delayed by several months (on Space Network). But, now in season three, the Canadian episodes are not delayed. So, companies are adjusting.
Now I am old enough and ornery enough and imbued with a certain sense of basic right and wrong. And as such, some of the things I did when I was younger was I walked in protest marches where the bullshit laws said people of a certain color could not use certain public facilities or go into certain open to the public businesses. Yes, that was "the law" back then and the pigs tried to enforce it, sometimes extremely violently, on orders from their masters, their pig political bosses and pig lawyers and pig "businessmen" who were worried about their pig "profits" should "the law" change, or some other weirdo crap they spewed. The law needed to be violated en masse once it became apparent the system was corrupt and so hopelessly broken that the only actions left to take was either break the law peacefully as possible or break the law violently and have a revolution. I can say it got close probably.
Back before my time, they tried to enforce "no, you can't ever have a drink, for any reason", and that was "the law", and the law was bullshit and it needed to be violated, en masse, and it was, because of basic human nature, that humans can see when things get to the "fuck you, that is total bullshit" stage. Humans can have a drink if they want to. I don't drink, don't like it, did for a long time but just quit, grew tired of it and prefer to be with all me wits all the time-but I don't care if other folks want to because it is their right to buy it or make it and drink it. The bullshit law eventually got changed back to medium non-bullshit. Because of mass "civil disobedience" which is a polite way of saying "you are full of bullshit and I no longer am going to respect your asinine "law".
It's something you can either see or not, two choices.
Right now copyright and patents are hopelessly broken, because of pigs and their profits, so they are being ignored, because it is basic human nature to not be gouged, lied to, taken advantage of, and so on.. People all over the developing world can't get affordable medicine to save their lives, so now they are just going "ok, enough,we've tried for years to be reasonable, but now that it is patented bullshit with extremely high artificial scarcity prices based on western income levels, which don't exist where we arem we are just going to make the medicines and fuck you and your gouging bullshit pig profits", because it is way past the obvious to anyone rational "bullshit stage" over there.
Now I personally don't download or violate any copyrights with music and movies, because I don't give two craps about hollywood movies and screeching popular music. I have more than what I want, bought it legit years ago, keep getting nailed with format changes, etc, so enough already, noticed the price gouging and bullshit "laws" that keep getting extended, so I quit buying their crap new. And if I can't get it over the air for free by the support of ads, either music or movies or shows, I just don't care, but I *certainly*, on general human principles can relate to people who are human and know they are being lied to, price gouged to the extreme, and forced into technological serfdom by the bullshit pigs of the media industry who want to keep technology to themselves and charge 1000% markups complete with more DRM and other bullshit buggywhip job protection practices and "laws". What do they expect, people will jump up and down and scream HALLELULAH! WE CAN KEEP BEING PRICE GOUGED OR IGNORED!
It used to be illegal for those pesky "commoners" to READ, that was "the law", it was bullshit and got violated and people learned anyway.
The redcoat pigs tried to say the early settlers had to pay taxes to some ignorant drunk royal "king" 3 thousand miles away for no representation, that was obvious bullshit,so the "law" got broken, along with enough redcoat heads to make the point stick.
And so on. Once stuff starts to get into the obvious bullshit stage, you can just expect it to be ignored/worked around/resisted, and depend
Piracy IS theft.
Copyright violations ARE NOT theft.
a) wrong.
b) correct.
To elaborate, piracy is robbery, not theft, committed at sea. Stealing something from a ship without getting noticed in the act would not be piracy. Threatening the crew of a ship with a cutlass while helping yourself to their booty is piracy. Possibly rape, depending on your definition of "booty".
It's not about semantics. It's about clarifying what the of the act of piracy is and is not. There's no point even trying to have an intelligent discussion about software piracy if one party doesn't understand what it is to the point that they can't differentiate between piracy and theft.
As far as the term "piracy" goes, I guess the last time you checked that meaning was some time before the 1990's since it has been used colloquially within this context for well over a decade. If anybody misunderstood my post to be of a nautical nature please raise your hand now.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
BSG's pilot, I watched a year or so after it aired after I downloaded it. Liked it and
watched "33" on Sci-fi's website for about 10 minutes before saying "screw this".
Real media (blech, but whatever) 3 inch window (c'mon, 640x480 days are long gone)
and of course frequent pauses for buffering.
Fired up BT client and all of the rips were from Aussie satellite and looked fantastic.
Also, they were 1/2 to 3/4 through season 1, so "what the heck" snagged them all before
they even showed on Sci-fi. Still watched them on Sci-fi (hey, Sci-fi/charter how about
a hi-def channel, or ffs a bit more gamme on your output, please! This is BSG, not
DooM3).
Still bought the DVDs.
Same thing with Dr Who, heck season 2 was worth it for the Daleks vs Cybermen exchange of
"Daleks would not be at war with the cybers, it would be more like pest control" (pause)
BWAAAHAHAHAHA.
Heck, I forget where Sci-fi is with Dr Who, but doesn't matter much as the DVD's are
released shortly after the British season ends, if I'm not mistaken. 80 bucks is
rather steep, but as I said, for some eps well worth the price.
Torchwood, too. Show grew on me quite quickly. Depending on season2, might actually
be worth it to get the DVDs.
Heck, the US/UK/Aus TV ppl would make a killing money/ratings-wise with an P2P/iTunes like
distribution without the bullshit delays and some easy way to unlock it/burn it.
Heck, the shows are going to get to viewers eyeballs one way or the other, and you'd think
something that benefits the studios bottom lines (rating/$) with them in the picture would
be better than out.
Global market whether they want to admit it or not, and as one quip by a brit I recall:
Yanks get Dr Who/Torchwood, and we get Sopranos and 24...fair trade.
Agreed, heck that 7month hiatus for BSG almost hurt, tho giving American Idol to the Aussies
first and us waiting a year sounds splendid.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
Moral realativism in the context of this discussion is problematic because it leaves open to interpretation, unquantifiable words like "cost", or "reasonable". Moral absolutionism avoids such issues and their consequences by not permitting them to come about. Either it "is" or it "isn't", but it is based upon constants that don't sway with the current climate, social, technological, or otherwise.
People know exactly what copyright infringement is but that's a long word so they pick shorter ones to type. Everyone knows what is being talked about and whether we call it theft, piracy or copyright infringement is merely semantics. Also you say piracy is correct because it's being used colloquially but isn't the fact that so many people call it theft strong evidence that theft is also a colloquial term for it? In fact I'd expect "stealing ideas" to have been in use much longer than "piracy". Noone thinks you ruin in and steal actual copies when you call it stealing. People only argue about semantics there to prevent analogies from being used. By stealing an idea you take away the benefits of authorship from the author, THAT's what you steal.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Because if consumers can buy shows on DVD there is less incentive for Aussie TV to show them, so they'll pay less for them and the production company will lose more money than they made on DVD sales.
Saying that "TV delays" drive piracy ignores the Australian citizens' free will in the matter. TV delays may whet their apatites to the point where the Aussies are willing to break the law, but the delays certainly don't force them to.
An alternate headline could have been: "Australians chose to break the law rather than patiently await delayed entertainment."
But now, thanks to the power of the Intarwebs, people can press a button and get a much better quality inheritance right away, without having to interact with their parents at all. In fact, it's so much larger, faster and less restricted that the parents are complaining that the kids never visit any more, even just to stand around saying "Aren't you dead yet?"
But people don't know what we're talking about, that's my point. At least they haven't bothered to consider the full implications of what piracy is compared with theft (ie. to take a copy of something versus to take the original). This isn't a case of colloquialisms because the GGP's post made the analogy of pirating media with stealing a Ferrari. Which is, as I originally stated, absolutely incorrect.
People don't use "theft" in place of the term "piracy" or "copyright infringement" unless they don't understand the difference or intentionally wish to misrepresent piracy as theft to the uninformed reader. Either way, they can and should be called on it so that the real facts on the subject can be presented and an objective and relevant debate can be had on copyright infringement. As I said previously, that's not possible as long as one side believes copyright infringement to be just another kind of theft, in which case they will almost certainly presume that it is (or should be) subject to the same moral and legal standpoint.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
Not only do we wait up to 18 months for the shows, the local networks air them at stupid times, keep changing timeslots, air the episodes out of order, start the episode late because some other live show earlier that night ran late.
Due to the crappy timeslots, I'd have to tape almost all the shows I want. If I'm watching a tape, I'm going to fastforward the ads. So why not download it off the internet a year earlier and save all the hassle?
This isn't the same as a movie. I go to the cinemas every few weeks and pay to watch a movie. This is free-to-air TV that I wouldn't have paid anything to watch in the first place.
the studios film much stuff in Australia and New Zeland in order to get around union obligations in the USA. Yet they want to use the same laws to prevent their finished material being sold on the "open market". Just because somebody sells iPods only in the USA is not going to prevent somebody from buying boxes of them here and selling them in a market Apple chooses to ignore. That's the falacy of globalization. It's the new mercantillism, where a small number of players move their pices at will without boundaries, but the local govts are demanded to prevent the customers (serfs) from getting the better deal thru the same channels.
look at copyright laws... they are reletively syncronized between the USA and Austrailia, something copyrighted here is automatically copyrighted there.. so what seriously prevents the media being sold there? Natural laws would say that a "thing" should be sold anywhere to anyone once it leaves your doors. Why are movies and media different? What natural right do they have to prevent global trade of their product that a maker of rubber bouncy balls wouldn't have?
After seeing some of the offerings, I wish I could wait for ever.
You never catch me alive
"The unethical"?
I'd say that's pretty subjective. Personally, I believe that since I pay a lot of money for cable TV, I've 'paid my dues' with respect to gaining access to the media. I don't believe that advertisers have any moral right for me to watch their ads, and I can easily show that nobody in the entire chain loses money as a result of my downloading a TV show I've paid for access for, to watch at another time and place.
Within my ethic, then, I am acting in a perfectly ethical manner. I'm simply attaining content I've paid for from another source, using an internet connection I've paid for. Since, in my ethic, I am not obliged to watch advertising just becuase some company paid for it, downloading TV shows is completely ethical for me.
It's been a long time.
Yeah, but the only reason you'd own a poseur car like a Ferrari is because few other people have them. If they did, and you were interested more in driving experience, you'd buy a good driving car rather than a poseur one.
Yep, good old Oz and its protected free to air (FTA) cartel. We have three, count them, three commercial tv chanels, so as you can imagine, there isn't much incentive for them to get us new episodes to watch in a timely manner. But it doesn't stop there. Our pay tv networks are mostly re-runs of old shows that have already been broadcast on the commercial stations. There are some exceptions, such as shows that are not picked up by the FTA networks, like Deadwood, but if an option has been contracted by an FTA network, then it won't be shown on pay tv for some while. And when you factor in the huge amount of sport and reality tv drivel on the networks, it doesn't leave much time for real programming.
The networks are always squeezing for a higher rating margin, so if a show doesn't perform straight away, they either bin it or change it's schedule. This usually makes the ratings worse, so if the show does stay on, chances are it will be moved to at least 10:30 at night. Imagine what happened to Firefly happening to nearly every show you care about. An example is Battlestar Galactica. It is show at 11pm, and there is no advertising to let you know when a new season has started. The Sci Fi network has just started here on cable (yours for only AU$52 a month), but it only has season 1 of Battlestar. It will have season 3 after it has shown on network 10 at 11pm....
I started watching pirated programs when channel 9 binned Smallville midway through season 2. Two years latter, network 10 picked it up and started showing season 4. Needless to say, I just kept downloading the episodes from P2P.
Until the government and the networks actually start caring about the viewers enough, I can't see the use of Bittorrent as a alternate tv network declining.
I am a big fan of 24 and until this year I have always downloaded it from usenet as we were always a few months behind the US. This year it is only one week, I can wait a week and so I do not download it.
Some say a few weeks or months isn't that bad however with the internet a couple of months is a long time! Long enough for you to accidentally read about something that happens in 3 episodes time and ruins the show for you. True this can happen with the one week delay I have now but the worst it can do is ruin one episode, not half a season!
I really don't feel like dragging out the legal dictionary (not that any would read the damn thing), but it's not a legal requirement of theft for one to actually make off with something, nor deprive one of the actual item. Otherwise we could never have "theft of services".
Now in fairness here's the court case that most base their argument on. I recommend reading it in it's entirety before making a judgement. Make note of the "congress shall..." part as well because it's important.
Piracy isn't justified, but if the consumers want to see a TV show, they will. The question now is, are you going to sell it to them, or are they going to have no choice but to steal it?
There are many ways to justify piracy. Free advertising to markets who otherwise would not be exposed to it without shelling out money.
Anime is the best example of this. Fansub groups have been pirating Anime for a couple of decades, more so in the past 5 years as VCD/DVD and digital subtitles became practical. Most fansub groups pirate material until such time it becomes licensed in their country, which they feel they contributed to creating a market for material that otherwise did not exist. 100% justified. Whether it's right or wrong is up to the respective copyright holders, who in the past have shown tolerance to anime fan-sub groups. You can't say it's wrong, holding the copyright alone gives you the moral and legal authority to what you want. I can say, without a doubt, my spending on import material has increased as a result of these anime pirates.
How would a TV station know what the viewer wants unless they ask for it? What does an end user do when a series is cancled mid-season? What about DVD-region codes which were designed to prevent one market from viewing until such time as it was felt to be "ok" for them to view?
On the one hand, I agree that they should not be pirating this material when there is a viable option. But on the other hand, media companies are not respective the fact that we are a global society, and the concept of borders between peoples is obsolete. I would propose rather than thinking of these people as thieves, then of them as another demographic group, and market tward them. Establish either a planet wide television network, or permit downloadable viewing within a resonable period of time. Problem solved!
Forget about right or wrong... establish a system to meet the demand, and profit by it.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
This isn't a case of colloquialisms because the GGP's post made the analogy of pirating media with stealing a Ferrari. Which is, as I originally stated, absolutely incorrect.
Why is it absolutely incorrect? Whether that Ferrari costs thousands of dollars or mere cents, if you send it to China for disassembly and replication you'll still do severe damage to the company by forming competition that has no cost for inventing things because they just steal other people's ideas. Capitalism is designed to select for those who create the most benefit for society but someone who's just stealing ideas and thereby destroying the business of the inventor sets society back instead of helping it and since capitalism by itself has no safeguards against such parasites intellectual property law has been designed.
While I'd agree the original poster probably didn't have this in mind I still think it's splitting hairs to complain about the lost original. His idea was that not being able to get something legally isn't justification for getting it illegally, whether that Ferrari is stolen or counterfeit doesn't make a difference for that anyway.
People don't use "theft" in place of the term "piracy" or "copyright infringement" unless they don't understand the difference or intentionally wish to misrepresent piracy as theft to the uninformed reader.
I disagree. You're not using the term piracy to demand capital punishment for copyright infringers, he's not using the term theft to misrepresent copyright infringement as theft of the copy (although theft of ideas is another issue). He's using it to illustrate that you shouldn't take something just because you can't get it the legal way or at least shouldn't feel like you're justified in doing so. Because most copyright infringers infringe to save money and time without losing out on whatever they're infringing upon.
Of course the concept of copyright infringement is strange for most people since they rarely have ideas that are of any value, never mind having them stolen. They know that theft has financial implications and probably experienced it but few lost money to idea theft and as such they think it's a nasty thing to do but nothing that has severe financial implications for the victim. For a corporation however copyright infringement is much, MUCH worse than physical theft since a stolen item can be replaced but warez can't be unreleased and will keep hurting their market so equating copyright infringement with theft actually makes it less severe for the corporation.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Artificial waits are bullshit. If artifical wait periods are required to teach kids right moral values, perhaps you should rethink the moral values.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
This is the same arguement over and over again and IMHO it's stll WRONG.
Where does it say that any major television producer/studio HAS to sell its product to YOU? If Paramount decided for whatever reason that Aussies suck and therefore won't sell Star Trek to them that's their right to do so. It's like any retail store with a "we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone" sign in the window. This whole "I want it so therefore I'm entitled to it" attitude is complete and utter horse shit.
I can say I'm truely frustrated with how tv shows are handled down here. We're lucky to even get shows aired here at all, if not after huge delays.
Another point to bring up is, when the shows finally do get aired, it's at a unreasonable timeslot which forces the network to pull it prematurely because it "doesn't pull in the figures". Let me ask you this: does playing a show at 11pm ever expect to pull "good numbers"?
I find it strange how people tend to think of TV as a necessity, like food, clothing or shelter. Supposedly, there are loads of families living in the US who can't afford daycare or health insurance but can afford a nice 21-incher. The article makes it sound like the aussies are experiencing some sort of "TV famine" and are willing to do ANYTHING to get their episodes. It makes it sound like they're being forced to use bittorrent, like villagers forced to eat rats during a siege or something. You can't blame people for stealing food when they're starving, right?
Wake up. TV isn't a necessity. Nobody NEEDS to watch Lost, or Idol, or any of that stuff. This whole thing is really more like prohibition. The governement has made copyright infringement illegal for real, justifiable reasons. However, nobody knows whether p2p actually hurts content producers. Furthermore, like having a drink, people are not really conditioned to think piracy is wrong, and hence you see a thriving "black market" run by swedes and russians and the like.
When content distributors (in Australia or anywhere else), hold a monopoly on content, you cannot buy a show unless they want to sell to you. In fact, the only reason they can afford NOT to release those shows in Australia is because they do hold a monopoly. In a free market, you never make more money by not selling product. But in a monopoly, you do.
The real problem with a restricted market is that it's suboptimal. Ayn Rand fans might wax lyrical about the virtues of free enterprise, but the fact of the matter is that monopolies just plain suck for everyone involved. When the FTC split up Standard Oil, stock prices jumped, and they actually made more money in the end. When media companies try to lock down their content as hard as possible (HDCP, AACS, CSS, WMV, pick your favorite ancronym) or when they refuse to distribute to a specific country, they are losing revenue and creating the perfect environment for piracy.
Piracy isn't exactly right, but it's quite appealing when it's more convenient than the legal alternative.
This ignores the fact, whether illegal or not, that people will get the material when they want it. Laws and lawsuits notwithstanding, the media companies have a choice -- make some money and provide the content in a form people desire, or make little to no money and watch the people receive the content in a form they desire through unauthorized means.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
If you ever invent a star-trek replicator, burry it in your back yard and speak no more of it 'cause anything else is going to dump you in all know forms of pain and misery and probably a bullet in the brain.
Actually, the first thing he should do is make many, many more copies of the replicator and then distribute it all over the world.
Cost of production goes down to zero. No one ever starves again. Material goods become worthless. Humanity evolves.
+++ATH0
Bizarre that anyone is amazed by this. My wife and I got hooked on an Aussie show, which ran on a minor cable channel. When it stopped, I was able to buy it from an Aussie website, and it was shipped to my CONUS home inside of a week. A region free DVD player closed the deal, and the PAL sourced video looks darn good after conversion. Copyright holder paid. Happy viewer. Too Bad about that region crap.
I am so looking forward to this season's line-up of "quality" Australian shows, such as "The Wedge" and "Comedy Inc: The Late Shift"
/sarcasm
But let's not forget the "Up-late game show": that's done wonders for Aussie TV, amirite mates?
"But people don't know what we're talking about, that's my point. At least they haven't bothered to consider the full implications of what piracy is compared with theft (ie. to take a copy of something versus to take the original)."(1)
Well semantics really isn't enlightening either. There are different kinds of theft with different degrees of punishment. The same could be said for piracy (copyright infringement) as well in the US. Most of it is indeed a civil matter, but there are examples that fall under crimminal statutes with harsher punishments.
"Either way, they can and should be called on it so that the real facts on the subject can be presented and an objective and relevant debate can be had on copyright infringement."
A noble gesture except for the fact that even with correct terminology, a proper debate with facts and everything isn't happening regardless of what side one's on.
"As I said previously, that's not possible as long as one side believes copyright infringement to be just another kind of theft, in which case they will almost certainly presume that it is (or should be) subject to the same moral and legal standpoint."
As already stated, most falls under civil, but there are exceptions that fall under crimminal. So playing with words really doesn't help ones cause of one engages in "piracy". As for the moral aspect, that really is too amorphous to be basing a pro or con argument on.
OH! And in closing remember we're talking about an AUSTRALIAN issue. So these semantic games may not apply in the US, but there's nothing to prevent an australian court to equate the two.
(1) I should point out that I don't think your side has thoroughly thought out the consequences either. Weasel distinctions don't help either.
I mean.. I'm pro-copyright in principle. I buy loads of stuff on itunes and I think there is a case for DRM (in that content producers should control what happens with their content) but ultimately, I'd rather download the TV shows now and buy the DVD's later than wait for Australian TV networks to get their shit together.
Ultimately downloading + DVD buying = Watching good TV shows earlier for me + Extra cash for the content producer + Australian TV stations getting fucked in the ass until they learn to quit screwing us around. It's win-win-win.
Not Meta-modding due to apathy.
i have never understood this, i do not get why a production company gets so darn pissed when someone copies a tv show. why?? might you ask am i so confused? im so darn confused because they just broadcasted the entire thing OTA over the air for the whole world to see with a moving picture box and a fuzzy bunny sitting on top. so if someone were to copy that show onto VHS then to the computer then distribute it all they are doing in helping the tv station propogate what they already blasted at everyone
In Australia, the five television networks fight and bid about who gets what programme. Sometimes it's a matter of them being smart enough to buy a programme that the other networks haven't discovered yet, but usually it's a matter of competing with them for the rights to show it. Coupled with the fact that Australian TV networks have to buy the HD versions, and buying a tv show from an American production company is really expensive.
I'm not entirely sure of how the licensing system works, but once someone's bought the rights to broadcast a certain show in Australia they remain pretty influential in how it's distributed by any other means within Australia.
Again, I don't know how this would apply to something like iTunes, but for example when the Channel Ten (FTA) bought The O.C., and Arena (pay tv channel) wanted to show it, there was no way Arena could show an episode before Channel Ten had broadcast it. I don't know if it's because Arena had to buy the rights from Channel Ten to rebroadcast it in Australia or what, but such an environment means iTunes releasing episodes of certain shows before the massive FTA networks had gotten around to showing them would probably result in a lot of issues. It's the same kind of problem which has resulted in pay tv networks being pretty terrible failures in Australia - the FTA networks have a lot of money, and individual pay tv channels have very little money in comparison, so they have no bidding power against the FTA networks, and if they get to show a certain programme at all they're not going to be allowed to gain any competitive advantage over the FTA network showing the same programme.
Then there's the whole question of shows not even coming to Australia. I doubt that's really the fault of the American production companies... We only have five FTA channels, four commercial and three mainstream and rich enough to buy the sought-after programmes, which means prime-time 'space' is very limited - if the show isn't going to be sickeningly popular enough to have at least a third of the Australian population gizzing all over it every week then it's entirely not worth spending millions of dollars buying the rights for.
Or perhaps it is worth buying the rights for, then just leaving in a cupboard so no other network can show it and maybe showing it every now and then at 11pm to very cautiously see how it fairs (cough ROME cough).
I guess that's why I'm handing over a dozen dvds a week to co-workers, full of Heroes, Prison Break etc....shows that you'll end up seeing a spoiler for if you don't get the new episodes yourself.
Oh yeah, and I really like that Hiro guy...he's so cute!
"The current state of copyright no longer serves the purpose of making as much art as possible available to as many as possible. It needs an overhaul. Badly."
You do realize that's in the US constitution? While the original story as well as the follow-up complainers aren't in the US. Funny how you don't want us to tell you what to do with your culture, but you shamelessly borrow our laws to bolster your arguments.
"I follow several "currently airing" series. Battlestar Galactica, Stargate, SG Atlantis, Rome, The Simpsons, South Park to name a few."
All US creations. Don't you have a content industry of your own to download?
"Still, the content providers are more concerned with preventing the audience from viewing their product than making it possible for the audience to view said product."
DirectTV has this problem in Canada as well. Oh, wait! Good job on the blame game though.
The demand is there: if there was a way to get the episodes legally, I would. But at the moment, the Bittorrent episodes are a much, much higher quality than DVD, and infinitely higher than the TV broadcast -- the episodes the scene releases are often 1280x768 H.264 episodes, in full widescreen, with 5.1 audio and no ad breaks (which make up 36% of Austrlaian TV). In comparison, the episodes broadcast by Seven, Nine and Ten (the three major Australian networks) are inflated with an extra 25 minutes of ads, pan & scanned, edited down, censored, and broadcast in 480i (standard) or 480p (digital) with stereo audio.
Where does it say that any major television producer/studio HAS to sell its product to YOU?
The moment that maximising shareholder return was codified in US law. Why?
The MAJOR point should also be that australia has more ads per show than ANY country on the planet.. HEROES was almost 2 hours long for the first ep when it aired here (seriously 1min view for 1 min ad) We are, on average, at 20 minutes of ads per hour. (its sweden or norway next on the list at 17min) Also for all of us SCIFI watches - BSG, Stargate, Trek, DrWho etc, we want to watch it as it is released as well read the forums etc. Also in the 90's - did you know that they SPED UP the shows so that a 44minute show ran for 43minutes? Yeap - another minute of ads there. (channel 9 was the main user of this)And that was when they didn't choose to edit Star Trek:Next Gen to fit more ads in..(yeap that's right they cut whole scenes out!) Another example was with the Muscial Buffy Episode - they sped it up slightly (shown on channel 7) so it was a bit out of key - My Wife was soooo pissed, but loved me for my DVD copy i had got earlier (was first getting tapes sent from the states then dvds - love my mates) and all this quickly from memory while at work........
"Piracy" doesn't need to be justified. Talking about justifying it is just a means to divert attention from the real question. "Piracy" is simply people using making use of their own property, peacefully, without interfering with anyone else. What needs to be justified is laws that prohibit such behaviour in the first place.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
For me though it isn't delay, it's the fact that the 8300HD PVR that Rogers uses doesn't always record previously configured shows. Actually more often than not it is due to one of the following reasons:
1. Rogers changes the name so that it is different than what I had selected (i.e CSI rather than CSI (HD)) It appears that any variance in the name and the show won't tape. Sometimes I catch it before it happens so I can add the variance into the scheduled recordings but if I don't it's too late as you can't go back.
2. The show I scheduled to tape ends a couple of minutes later (i.e Heroes two weeks ago ended about 20 seconds before the end where Clair's mom talks to Clair's dad so you don't find out who it is (downloaded the episode the next day and watched the last 5 seconds)or gets preempted which happened with the Simpsons after the Super Bowl which I should have forseen.
3. Some shows aren't available in Canada (i.e Ghost Hunters and BSG when it was only on SciFi and SkyOne) or the HD/Widescreen version isn't aired and instead they will show the 4:3 version (Gilmore Girls)
Commenters outside Australia are probably not aware that we only have 4.5 free-to-air channels. Three purely commercial, one state sponsored (roughly equivalent to the old BBC1) and one semi-commercial that has negligble audience (sorry to afficonados of SBS, but it's true). The primary reason why the three commercial stations are so bad, now, seems to be that they are trying to do things as cheaply as possible. They have evolved to the point where they believe that their primary focus is on the advertiser, not the viewing audience, and treat the latter with contempt. Yes, sooner or later that will make the advertisers walk away. But it's a very small market, and these three are the only game in town. So they are getting away with it. It has only been over the last year or so where the smart end of their audience has begun to walk away. And you know what? The free-to-airs won't care. The government of the day here would be delighted to see the ABC and SBS vanish in a puff of smoke. The three commercial stations are parts of financial conglomerates that have pay-per-view options, so they don't care if nobody watches free-to-air. And so the downward spiral continues.
Eventually it will come to a head, and there will be some sort of rationalisation. Meanwhile, I wait for the DVD box sets to appear, and go that way. Not only do I get things in a reasonable time frame, I can control my viewing schedule (or rather, not be constrained by a schedule) and don't have to watch as much advertising as product.
I will use Scrubs as the sake of my argument in Australia. Scrubs has not started airing season 6 in Australia. Yet if I load up the iTunes store and choose the US as my location I can potentially download everything upto the current episodes. (assuming they don't have any i.p restrictions in place) Why is it that I'm not allowed to access digital content because of the continent I reside on? If I'm made to wait almost a year to watch something when I can download it off the net either legally or otherwise. Basic economic principles consumers demand products if someone can supply it then consumers will take it. Australian TV providers are slow and arrogant, Consumers are showing they want things faster. If US production companies want to grow they should start bypassing networks and distributing themselves.
"Laws and lawsuits notwithstanding, the media companies have a choice -- make some money and provide the content in a form people desire, or make little to no money and watch the people receive the content in a form they desire through unauthorized means."
Hey, that works for the Mafia. Why not everyone else? "That's some nice content you have there. It's a shame if something should happen to it."
Side point - didn't the lastest Aussie rating have our Pay , sorry, subscription service now have more watchers than our free-to-air service...
No, these people are stupid. I'm fairly sure you need an IQ under 70 to be an Austalian TV exec.
Some might try and argue that they're just evil, and taking advantage of a docile TV-watching public by treating us like crap, but the increasing piracy figures show that at least some of us aren't taking it. And the argument violates Hanlon's law.
This sig is false.
Not to mention being the source of Iocane, chosen by more Slashdotters over other leading poisons. . .
Australia tends to get the big-hit series in a fairly timely manner. We're in season 6 of 24, season 3 of Lost and season 2 of Prison Break for example.
But the not-so-big-hit shows, or the ones that are a little off-center and have a cult appeal (like scifi or fantasy) are often subjected to delays. They're the shows that, in the past, were regarded as having a "built in" / guaranteed audience -- the fans of the show would watch them whenever they were on and noone else. In the past, shows like Star Trek and Babylon 5 have fallen into that category in Australia, nowadays it's shows like Stargare and even extends to things like Scrubs. Cult appeal.
Part of the problem is that we only have 4 free-to-air networks, and we also have local content laws that mandate that the networks must show X hours of locally-produced content per day/week/month. That leaves only so much room on the schedule, so the proven hits from the US get the airtime. When the networks run out of episodes they might try something new or different, this often happens outside of our ratings periods. Pay-TV channels are starting to pick up shows that the free-to-air networks have passed by, too.
Another part of the problem is the US sweeps/rerun schedule, where networks usually air a couple of new episodes of a show then go into reruns until the next sweeps/ratings period. If we were to keep same-week-current with the US schedule, we'd likely be subjected to the same annoyances since they're not about to allow the latest episode of a big-name show to premiere overseas are they?
(As an aside, though, this happens with a lot SciFi Channel shows -- I believe they're joint-financed with Sky in the UK which explains why Sky's able to run episodes before SciFi. While we're on the subject though, a few years ago when Stargate was on Showtime, Australia got an episode before the US -- Stargate then disappeared from our schedules a week later)
The other problem is that our TV season really starts at the start of the year. The US season starts in October/November. So of course it will take time for the big hits to filter down.
The times, they are a-changing - on both sides of the Pacific, though.
Here, Channel 10 shows (or started to show) Jericho a day after its US airing. Channel 7's really not that far behind on Lost, 24 and Prison Break, and they gave Family Guy and American Dad a fairly consistent Thursday night timeslot for the last year or so which has gotten us closer to the US schedule than we've ever been. They're more behind on Heroes, but thats been on since the start of the US season so thats fair enough. However, I believe Channel 9's screwing its audience on CSI (complain to Eddie). Channel 2 isn't so bad with Doctor Who, but passing on Torchwood is disappointing. Foxtel channels are getting some things very quickly (BBC World is very fast with Top Gear, Fox 8 is around a day or two behind with WWE, and Comedy Channel gets Daily Show and Colbert Report a day later).
In the US, networks are learning not to erratically schedule reruns during a season. 24 airs 24 episodes in a row. Lost is airing episodes 7-22 all in a row. Battlestar Galactica had no 6-month mid-season break. The networks seem to be slowly trying to find ways to piss off their viewers less, and this might pave the way for international markets to get the shows in a more timely manner.
It's an uphill struggle, but there is some progress. It'll be interesting to see where it goes.
To add to this, Madman Entertainment, the (pretty much) sole distributer and licensee of Anime works in Australia, decides what to license and distribute next by collecting feedback from fans & customers and examining the rate of fansub downloads. When 100,000 people a week are downloading the next episode of series Y, it's hard to argue a case that they shouldn't put it out there on DVD ASAP.
Furthermore, they are usually very nice to small groups wanting to use their content - if you're a small club and you want to show something licensed by Madman at a members' screening, all you normally need to do is write them a polite email asking for permission, and it will be granted (on the 'condition' that you give out some promotional posters, which they will provide, at the screening, or something equally benign - in fact when I was organising such things we had people offer to pay for the posters when they missed out).
Madman has been expanding at an enormous rate since its foundation and it would be absolutely blind for anyone to say they are not profitable. Of course, they are a monopoly distributor to a niche market - but at the same time having their intellectual property "pirated" in this way hasn't hurt them one bit, because they've embraced it and found a way to use it to its full potential. And what better way to do your market research than to let your customers do it for you ... for free?/pP
"Why are you watching the washing machine?"
"I love entertainment, as long as it's clean"
Aside from the money to be raked off such delays, there should be no technical excuses preventing any network from having new episodes of any program available within a week of their US premieres, especially in an english-speaking country like Australia. There is no translation needed, and non-compressed high-definition content should be easily deliverable to any broadcast network using the internet.
Granted, the piracy concerns for Australia might be a greater threat to their local advertising economy, but they need to acknowledge user concerns when it comes to these excessive delays in viewing new shows... especially since it's next to impossible to hear about newer episodes at some point in that timeframe, which in turn will deminish the overall value of the shows to the viewers themselves.
That said, perhaps companies like Apple should be working with the networks and the Australian government to test run full-fledged internet-based television using some form of an iTunes Music Store / Apple TV device and boosting their internet backbone connection to the rest of the world to it's fullest potential, instead of relying upon over-the-air broadcasts. Then, it's just a matter of converting Australian citizens to convert over to the new system at a price that would offset the ad revenue, as well as the service itself. The 16 months that would have been used to delay these programs could then be used to both evaluate and tweak the delivery system in order to determine if such a system could realistically work elsewhere in the world, where both options are already available at some level.
8==8 Bones 8==8
Right now you can watch the 200th episode of a series that is only on episode 42 in the US.
Information wants to be free.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I have the same problem here in Denmark, if the shows are ever aired they are far far behind and as we have no HD channels here, the quality is also lots worse than what is available online.
So the choice is waiting a year and get low quality video and stereo only or download the day after the show aired in 720p and surround, I know what I do.
Resistance is not futile - www.gnu.org
Quite often if the series are shown they are shown with little concern for regular viewing. An interesting example is the Sopranos on channel 9. They might show 1 episode and then delay the next for 3 months. Sometimes these shows just don't come back. Honestly, its ridiculous here, you can't trust the networks to actually come through with regular episodes.
With one of the seasons of The Amazing Race (I don't know which one), channel 7 (the network here in .AU with the local rights to the show) aired the first episode(s) a few days or so after the US airing. But they didn't keep it up for long. One argument they put forward as to why they couldn't do it is that they couldn't guarantee that they would have the show in time to prepare it for airing (hence the need to have more time between the US air date and the .AU air date)
Not knowing how a show gets from America to Australia or what preparation channel 7 has to do to it, I can't say if that excuse is valid or not.
I don't see why everyone is complaining. They(the TV Stations) give you this stuff for free. If you have a problem with the arrangement don't partake in it - read a book or something, or you go buy the show from the Americans and you give it away for free . I think us Australians need to give back, start uploading some Blue Healers and Water Rats too
I believe it is more to do with impotent television programmers. They employ a reactive purchasing policy: when something rates well in the USA, buy it for next year. It's that simple.
You *can* download from US iTunes. You just need an American address, an email account which is not the same as the one linked to your AussieTunes account, and a US payment method. For the American address, you can use the White House for all I care (or, if this scares you for some reason, use Google maps to pick out a city/state at random and use "1234 Maple Street" with the appropriate zipcode). The email can be whatever the heck you want. The payment method is the only tricky part, and its a lot less tricky thanks to eBay. You see, lots of people who get gift certificates but really wanted cash put them up on eBay and some other sites. Buy some gift certificates from eBay (at a discount to face value), get the codes mailed to you, use them to buy from iTunes. Since you aren't inputting a credit card they won't have the computer verify your address because there is nothing to verify it against.
I keep two iTunes accounts around, one for Japan and one for the US. Thankfully they don't do geotracking or anything, and they'll both happily integrate into the same iPod/iTunes/etc.
(Incidentally, the White House address:
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
)
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Hmmm...you're right. Sorry. No offense was intended.
You'd think with Murdoch at the helm of many big content producers, the Aussies wouldn't be getting as a fucked as they are getting. Foreign delays have nothing to do with technical issues. It's all about "staggering" release dates and shit and licenses. It's dumb-dumb
Hmm... you sure that isn't just an effect of NTSC/PAL transfer? Converting 24fps film to 25fps PAL can cause a 4% speedup.
But I'm totally with you on the networks doing everything they can to make Aussie TV not worth watching. One time I missed the end of "The Closer" because it was broadcast 20 minutes late. I downloaded the show for the last few minutes and discovered that in the US it had been a special ad-free episode. Channel 9 had decided that rather than (a) show it ad-free, or (b) schedule 90 minutes for the show plus ads, it would instead (c) cut around 15 minutes out of the show and replace with ads. No wonder I'd found the ep hard to follow!
Not to mention how Aussie TV stations routinely show episodes out-of-order, mix surprise repeats in with new episodes, throw up big ad banners during the show, never start on time...
I should buy some cement.
[8]
"entire purpose of information is to be shared."
[5]
"Information wants to be free"
Oh, yeah! A whole three words, and less clear than the first. Sure you weren't a politician in a previous life?
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Why nobody has seemed to catch on to this simple fact. Standards. Censorship. The whole "protect the children" thing.
Are the laws, standards and community requirements for television the same in Australia as they are in the US? Ignoring translation differences, aren't their things that Aussie viewers do not want on their screens?
One of the biggest issues with movies is licensing for different areas. And the airplane version, which has to be the most restrictive of all. In the US you can show things that I know are not legal in Japan. I don't know about Australia, but it would not surprise me to find government regulations that affect some television shows.
O.K. Let me come out and say this. I live in Australia and I regularly download TV episodes from the States, and the reason, you cannot trust Aussie TV stations. Many years ago in Australia a show was broadcast called American Gothic. it had received good reviews and Network Ten had the rights to it. So I watched the first episode, it seemed good, I watched the second episode, it was alright, I watched the third episode... And I had no idea what was going on. I spoke to friends in Oz, seeing if I had missed something, and they too found the show confusing and odd. I stopped watching.
I later discovered the Network ten screened (and I apologise if I get the numbers wrong here, it was a while ago) episodes 1,2,13. Thirteen! when a TV station cannot even screen a TV show in order there is a problem. "My Name is Earl" was screened out of sequence last year on Aussie TV. Seven screened at US children's puppet show called "Greg the Bunny" a few years back during the School Holidays at 11:00 am in the morning, so the kiddies could see it. If any of you have seen "Greg The Bunny" you will know that this IS NOT, nor could any reasonable person conclude that it WAS EVER aimed at children. but why would a TV exec actually WATCH the show before airing it. (Seven dealt with a large numbers of complaints from concerned parents)
So now I download almost all the TV I regularly watch. But the problem lies deeper that just this. as someone earlier mentioned is that when a TV station in Australia buys the show they buy the Distribution rights in Australia. Network Ten used to own the rights for "Xena" in Australia and that caused a few problems with Pay TV.
So am I stealing, nope, I am not. am I violating copyright. yes, yes I am. Funny thing is, legally I would be better off stealing. if I stole a CD from a music store I could be caught, fined $200-$500. If I am caught SINGING a SONG whilst walking down the STREET I can be fined $1230 for illegal broadcast of copyrighted material. Also applies to "Happy Birthday" (copyrighted until 2030 as I understand) so who in Australia isn't guilty of copyright violation? When you make criminals of your population, you're population will commit crimes. It's pretty simple
Leg Godt!
perhaps, but it wouldn't be near as much fun, and you need a lot of background examples in order to get the impression across of what a clear and dangerous precedent this is for technology/humans in general. If you wait until things get real bad, it sucks to try and change it, that's why I gave examples, real world examples.
If they get away with restricting advanced tech now-even just cheap digital copies, what will they stop at? The tech to make extremely cheap digital copies is sort of like the magic 200 MPG carburetor-but it exists, it's real. That they are trying to get away with it, restricting it, crippling it by law and on purpose, is very dangerous for the future, if you care about things like that. And it is not primarily because "they" have something to lose, it is because all of society has something to lose by allowing that precedent.
Agreed.
The only point about delaying gratification is if you get something better by waiting. It's the classic marshmallow experiment. The experiment wasn't, "I'll give you this marshmallow, and if you don't eat it for ten minutes you are a good person", it was, "I'll give you this marshmallow, and if you don't eat it for ten minutes I'll give you another one." It's a measure of short- versus long-term thinking. To put it another way, if I really want a brand new Ferrari the second it comes out, and I have the means to purchase this item with no negative effects (i.e. I have high disposable income), and there would be no substantial benefit to me if I waited six month, then I should buy my Ferrari. On the other hand, if I wanted a brand new Ferrari but purchasing it would mean I couldn't buy food for the next twelve years, then if I still bought it I'd be succumbing to instant gratification.
> In the days when I used to watch them, it used to be excruciatingly poor, with cringeworthy translation errors, unreadably wooden dialog, and typos galore; most of the effort usually seemed to be put into dancing animated karaoke lyrics for the opening song, rather than actually translating the script well. I glimpse the odd screen capture on blogs and so forth from time to time, and it doesn't look like things have improved much.
:]
Depends on the series, really. Some of the older ones are just plain crap, yes. Others are quite good. Yeah, they're not always perfect (I've spotted more than a few typos, although this is far more prevalent in manga), but they're pretty good.
I don't know if they can always be blamed for the "wooden" dialog--usually, that's the problem of the anime itself, but the translations I see are at least in literate English and understandable. Some even have helpful cultural notes (the meaning of a raised pinky finger meaning that two people are going out, etc.). But I wouldn't hold them to too high a standard--sometimes they just have to make it understandable without giving you the lowdown on what "yoroshi[ku onegai [ita]shimasu]" (all those brackets indicate removable bits that go with varying politeness levels...) actually means. Yeah, at least one series did that, but the others threw in either some generic greeting or another random phrase appropriate to the situation.
Ironically, the worse (i.e. stupidly literal and actually wrong) translations are probably better if you want to learn Japanese. And I am, naturally, attempting to do so, but in the mean time, I'd much rather just watch the show. Besides, once you learn enough, you can figure out what's meant by all the random name suffixes (-san, -sama, -chan, -tan, -kun, or misc. titles like -taicho and -hime) and there's no good way to work such things into the dialog, anyhow. Unless you *like* oddities like "Kiba boy" or "Believe it!" for some reason...
Besides, if you understand enough Japanese, why not get the raw and ignore subtitles entirely?
You're right, the GNAA is somehow affiliated with them. And they do "YHTB" trollsubs (i.e. some other random video, usually when people expect a new episode, but one has not yet been produced). But the rest of the time, their subs are perfectly good *shrug*
:] If you like Naruto or Bleach, there's hardly any competition. Well, I guess there's one other group doing Naruto: Shippuuden now, but no one else was that I knew of during the years of filler.
So I wouldn't trust them (keep track of the release schedule, don't download the trollsubs, etc.), but I do watch them. Why? They have the sub out the night it's released, of course
Someone I know really well..cough... likes a lot of UK television, and I...they...get it via other means because shows like Dr Who, Top Gear etc are nearly always a year behind... plus they don't show stuff like QI or Mock The Week at ALL...
I'd pay a provider for this if they got eps that were CURRENT, played in ORDER and not bumped for some sporting event or whatever....
I know fans of US shows get a bit miffed when they show 1/2 a series then roll in some eps from previous seasons or play a series out of order... Australian terrestrial TV is a fucking shambles....
Burma?
I don't pirate TV, I just wait and watch it when we catch up (I'm in Aus btw). But it's getting to the point that it's hard to avoid all these spoilers.
..." referring to the latest episode from the US, and we who choose to watch the televised version have to go hide in a corner for 5 months while we wait to catch up.
Firstly, you have the Internet. Obviously most fiction-related websites have a "grace period" where they don't discuss spoilers of recent episodes. But when you're 5 months to a year behind, you simply can't visit any websites related to these shows (including Wikipedia articles) or you'll see months and months of spoilers.
Secondly, you have an increasing number of friends who give up, cross the barrier, and simply start downloading episodes at the same time as the US. And when your friends reach a critical mass (as they have done with shows such as Heroes and Lost), it's "did you see the latest episode of
All in all it adds up to a slippery slope of more and more viewers turning to BitTorrent because the TV networks can't keep up - whoever's fault that is. If you're going to take the stance of "It isn't the TV networks' fault because it's really expensive to get shows early," then I say the US TV producers need to realise that they'll lose viewership (or contracts) with foreign networks unless they start making it feasible to get shows at the same time, or near enough.
Network Ten in Australia is making headway here, showing Jericho at the same time as the US, the final episode of the OC within one day of the US, and Smallville (which began 2 seasons behind the US when Ch10 bought it) rocketing through three seasons without a break to catch up - currently half a season behind.
You've clearly never lived in Australia. Our 3 free to air commercial stations are notorious for incosistant programming.
At the moment the only Sci-fi on AU TV is battlestar galactica, relegated to a hideously late timeslot and pushed back by hours to make room for whatever piece of crap ran late earlier.
I wanted to watch farscape when it was playing and it was on late night as filler for the cricket. Cricket ran late? No Farscape. Basicly the whole season was played in random order on random days of the week. With AU TV you can pretty much gauruntee if you like a show it will be dropped halfway through or moved to a random timeslot with no warning, causing you to miss 3 or 4 episodes before you figure out what happened. To top it off if you are an internet user you tend to wind up finding out alot of the plots from Americans chatting about the latest episode that you won't see for 6 months.
I don't trust AU Commercial TV to provide 100% of a series at a consistant, accessable time slot. I DO trust bit torrent. Is it a bad state of affairs that the legal route acts shadier than the illegal one? Yes. Do I feel justified in pirating? Not really, but I'll do it anyway.
... why is Australian TV insistent on showing such a high volume of low-braincell American crap at the expense of home grown content anyway?
I would prefer to see the screening delays reported in the article pushed out... to infinite and beyond.
As a side note, I don't think Australian audiences would care too much for the on-off-on-off nature of the American TV schedules. Series episodes are generally shown back to back here, unlike the US schedules for, say, Lost (9 episodes in 22 weeks) or Jericho (11 episodes in 24 weeks).
None of the networks air South Park or Mythbusters the same time that they air in the U.S. In fact, the difference is about a month in both cases. Thank God for P2P.
You want to know who isn't running Firefox 2.x? They spell it "definately" and "rediculous".
Me, when you freeloaders in the states pirate the show, the bbc loses out on sales revenue in that market and the BBC demands more money for the license fee.
when YOU start paying the license then you can have the show quickly.
Australian TV broadcasters tend to keep only loosely to broadcasting schedules, so don't expect to be able to just watch one show. You'd best start ten minutes beforehand. And, of course, everything is on long delays as compared to the US, and often broadcast with weird gaps and sometimes even out of order.
Of course, they might just cancel the show if there's a football or cricket match on. Sure, they knew it'd be on weeks in advance, but they didn't bother planning for it.
To top things off, the ads are incessant and REALLY BAD. We're talking mind-bogglingly awful patronising badly-made crap.
So ... why would anybody endure free to air TV in Australia? Until the Internet became a useful alternative, I just stopped watching it. Borrowed the odd DVD from friends, bought the odd DVD, watched more than the odd CD of AVIs, but that's about it - it just wasn't worth enduring the suck.
So, let me see - I could put up with that miserable crap, or I could otherwise obtain the show and get it:
I'd pay for HD downloads of shows - at decent prices and without that DRM crap. Unfortunately, most services don't provide access for Australians or are TV-like ("you'll watch what we want when we want you to"). They're also all DRM'd or at best streaming-only. The DRM is pointless, since the shows are ALREADY available on the 'net, so it deeply confuses me as to why they bother.
Sure, it's dodgy, but until the media industry is willing to move a bit and meet people in the middle, I'll continue to use the alternative means available.
In the US we have to wait for shows like Doctor Who. The us is currently about 18 months behind on Doctor Who! And I know there is no real excuse for it! At one point we were only a week behind. The suddenly for a year and a half there was NO Doctor Who to be had!
So this works BOTH ways! I am a HUGE Doctor Who fan. So it sucks that the BEST way to see it is over BitTorrent networks.
Not only do they show 1.5 years later when they do they times they are shown are not stable (e.g. star trek shown after some sporting event when it finished) or worse entire seasons in 2-3 weeks unadvertised at odd times as a filler (e.g. Farscape) and beleive it or not the DVD box sets are usually available before or during the season being aired now and a clever purchaser can purchase from overseas.
Personally i want to skip all the middle men and just buy my DVD from the content producers with maybe a download to keep me happy while I wait for a box set and i would be happy to pay upfront for something I like
Your'e all thinking it, I just said it for you
We have broadband issues too in Australia. Imagine if Bell was still one big country, and there was no alternative phone provider in existance. And that every ISP had to take Bell to court and to the FCC every time they wanted to try and get anything done and stop Bell's anticompetitive behaviour.
And that Bell was lobbying the government and tricking the shareholders into trying to get rid of regulation any time a competitor tried to get close to beating Bell at services, claiming that their competitors are leeches and foreign-owned companies "stealing" from the economy (less than 1% are foreign-owned).
The piracy as theft argument doesn't fly in this situation. To steal something there has to be a loss in revenue. This is as much a case of piracy as aliens descrambling HBO and watching it on Alpha Centari. The media companies have decided to thumb their noses at these potential consumers. Apparently they aren't worthy of their notice.
There obviously was market for the shows in Australia and even though they had been servicing them (in a rather lame fashion) they are no longer allowing them to be customers. If they aren't going to sell them the shows then they apparently have deemed that the shows have no value in Australia. No value = no theft.
I am all for paying for media products. I have a huge collection of store bought movies. I have all of the equipment needed to do anything to a movie including ripping, copying, and editing. I don't download. I am also very much against the media companies being given any concessions of any kind. All of their actions stink of personal greed with no regard for the customer and they are successfully lobbying for more power to spoon feed their pap to us in a fashion that can only be looked at as monopolistic behavior. Until they cleanup their act and put the paying customer first they shouldn't get a single bit of government support.
Selling me a movie that forces me to watch ads before I can get to the main menu? Forcing unwanted, unreasonable, and unnecessary restrictions on the technology that I can purchase? The free market abhors these abominations so they pay lobbyists to get OUR government to ram it down our throats. Abusing the civil court system to wage a war of what amounts to a general campaign of government sanctioned derailing of due process against our citizens is the last straw.
Welcome to the future where "technology will make your life better". Yeah, everything is better and faster isn't it. Except I used to be able to startup the old VCR and start watching a movie in seconds. Now I can much more efficiently waste 5 minutes wading through previews that can't be skipped before getting to a menu so I can then start to watch the movie. Thanks, the check is in the mail... Even the packaging says to hell with the consumer. Does anyone really believe that so many DVDs and CDs are shoplifted that it requires so much packaging that they now sell special openers for them. The cost of the security devices is obviously more then the cost of the DVDs. (No! One stolen DVD isn't a $20 loss because they wouldn't have purchased it if the couldn't have stolen it. It is a 20 loss!!!)
I really want to see a MPAA executive left to suffocate under a layer of stickers that proclaims "Security Device Enclosed". I really feel that it would help secure my rights as a consumer that supports their insane idea of how a free market works.
As I type this I'm watching episode 8 of Heroes on TV, meanwhile episode 17 is at 63% on my torrent client.
You guys seem to have forgotten that here in Australia, our leading media/telco company Telstra has a sophisticated and fool-proof strategy for battling BitTorrent piracy. It involves charging $150 per Gigabyte for downloads on their 'broadband' service.... and I put 'broadband' in quotes because only in this country could 256Kbs be counted as broadband. Please, oh please will a foreign telco come over here and kill Telstra! You might need to convince their largest shareholder (the government) to allow you in first, but once you are here, it will be so very easy.
Just wait for the dvd's to be available and buy them on amazon.
Easy enough. Ignore your local market and get them from amazon.
SCIREV.NET - fanfics,reviews & more
I don't mind the adverts between and during programs. Its the adverts for their latest up-and-coming shit program which they put up over the top of the the program I want to watch which turns me right off.
Life is just too short to put up with crap like that. I have optus cable broadband and I hardly watch TV these days.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I recall being a teenager (this was over 12 years ago) reading in our local paper (green guide) that people were writing in complaining that Simpsons episodes were not only being played out of order but the TV station was cutting parts of the show out to FIT IN MORE COMMERCIALS - no I'm not joking.
and this was 12 years ago.
The days of the internet are upon us, it might be illegal but right now it's easier and better for me to simply fire up Azureus and grab the shows I want, when I want to playback when I want.
The chances are that they are available a lot sooner on subscriber satellite and cable channels. If these channels buy them first, they buy total rights to show them within Australia. The free-to-air channels then have to wait until the subscriber channel has finished before getting a shot at buying the rights.
If you want the free-to-air broadcasts to be sooner, the free-to-air channels have to outbid the subscriber channels and buy the rights first. Clearly in Australia this is not often possible.
i don't have a problem with paying for a license. i can't buy one from here in canada. the bbc won't sell access to quality streams here in north america even if you (somehow) can prove you paid for one.
i have a clear conscience on this one.
if you want people to think you know what you are talking about, just put ".com" at the end of everything you say.com
The roll-out of PayTV has been picking up speed over the last 3 or 4 years, here in Australia.
Hell, it's even reached me, here out in the "boondocks".
So, is it really any surprise that shows are being delayed longer and longer?
The people installing satellite dishes or cable come around more often than the new shows!
Don't blame me, it's usually 2 in the morning when I post
Go slap your parents in the head, they deserve it. They raised a scumbag.
Well It's worse in Quebec....
People want those series translated in "Quebec French". You lose a great deal of intonations and such. Also, cable and Sat provider here must comply with stupid laws that prohibits you from getting more than 50 % English TV channels. To make the matter worse, you can't have HBO or Cartoon Network here at all.
That means we have to wait for stupid translations or worse 'Spin offs' that are totally not like the original series.
I understand the language laws, but I have the right to have as many choice as my south neighbors.
"I've heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary." Through the looking glass and what
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
Again in my original post I said that I pay for cable and Doctor WHo is shown on the SciFi channel. I am not a ratings household, so their ratings are not changed by whether or not I watch it on SciFi (and I usually end up watching it when it is on SciFi). I'm not going to buy the Doctor Who dvds, so what does it matter?
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
I don't agree that it's anything like counterfeiting, but even if it were, so what?
How many Picassos were actually painted by El Myr? No one knows, probably no one ever will know, and it doesn't really matter.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Channel nein (9) is the worst channel. They treat their viewers with contempt. I was glad when Star Trek: Voyager and Enterprise ended, since they were both on NEIN and they would do things like not keep to the schedule, and in the case of Voyager they were about 4 years behind the US.
When you want to record Star Trek on channel NEIN, the standard practice is to let a 2 hour or 3 hour tape run in the early morning and hope it caught the show somewhere.
Channel 10 has done a fantastic job with catching up with Smallville (after NEIN seriously stuffed it up).
Most of the things in the world have little intrinsic value, rarity is what makes things hold value. When rarity disappears, investment goes away and what you end up with is something like what's posted on Youtube. A bunch of creativity that suffers from extremely low quality.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
I don't mind ads.. TV stations need to make money too. The screwing around I refer to is 'stopping a series mid-season to show older episodes, just beacuse it's not ratings period anymore' and things of that ilk.
If the stations offered the TV shows as downloads, complete with ads in them, I'd probably download them.
Not Meta-modding due to apathy.
I actually like Australian TV shows better than most of the US ones and use bittorrent to get the shows I like. I wish another season of Pizza would come out soon.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Please go on. I'd love to hear your reasoning.
It's been a long time.
You have to distinguish between natural scarcity and artificial scarcity.
The latter is not true value - it's just a sneaky form of theft.
Picasso's work is valued by people in part because of its scarcity, sure. But there's no scarcity of Picasso *prints* mind you. There was, at one time, but the market is pretty well supplied now. Since the prints are no longer so valuable, does it follow that the printers are doing something wrong, that they should be enjoined from making so many prints, to keep the supply artificially scarce and the price artificially high? Would that create value? Perhaps the economy would do better if we made half as many cars, half as many shoes, half as much food?
No, it would not. Any more than breaking windows increases wealth.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Those are material goods where the cost to produce can be recovered as part of the distribution.
Intangible goods cost to produce, but are free to distribute. Just because I can make 1000 copies of a song, doesn't make it any less expensive to make in the first place.
What is a good alternative to copyright? Do we just say anybody can use and distribute anything they find, and even claim ownership?
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
Even that is open to question, but note that songwriting does not require any great investment and never has. Recording and distribution, some decades back, were capital-intensive ventures, but even those aspects require no great investment today, so even if one accepts your contention here the argument above in the thread would not follow.
Note that they are two entirely different issues. Copyright is not needed to prohibit misattribution. Making a copy of a CD I bought, either to another CD, or to mp3s for my computer or ipod or whatever to play, comes under the heading of peacefull, honest enjoyment of my own property. Claiming falsely to have written a particular song does not.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
And it is protected under copyright law as fair use.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
Only relatively recently. A great deal of software was developed before it became established that copyright would be considered applicable to it. If you're implying that software would be lacking were it not for copyright, I disagree.
Is it? In fact, it may be, in certain jurisdictions, and it definitely is not, in other jurisdictions. And sharing that mp3 file once made is certainly illegal in most jurisdictions, yet the same argument for it's legitimacy applies.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
There have been supreme court rulings specifically stating the user has the right to time/media shifting. In fact acquiring copyrighted material is also legal (kinda a grey area). It is distribution that is illegal. That is why the RIAA goes after people for sharing files.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73