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TV Torrents — When Piracy Is Easier Than Purchase
An anonymous reader writes "NBC's recent withdrawal from the iTunes store leaves the millions of Apple's customers who have Macs or iPods without a legitimate way to purchase and watch NBC's content. Online media stores such as iTunes, Amazon and Walmart have never been able to compete with the pirates on price, or freedom and flexibility — as the content they sell is typically wrapped in restrictive DRM. The one advantage that legal purchase offered was ease of use. CNET looks into the issue, and discovers that with mature open-source media players such as Miro supporting BitTorrent RSS feeds, it is actually trivially easy for users to subscribe to their favorite shows. Want to wake up to the latest episode of The Colbert Report, Top Gear or any of hundreds of TV shows automatically downloaded and waiting for you? CNET offers an easy three step guide."
I simply use EZTV to find the torrents and RSS feeds, uTorrent to download them automatically with its built in RSS reader, and XBMC on my Xbox to watch them comfortably in my living room.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Fox has there shows online with less ad's then on tv and it download a lot faster then an torrent.
CNET is accused of secondary copyright infringement and sued for $486785498557474566 due to allowing people easy access to copyrighted tv shows.
...there are cases where piracy is not easier than purchase?
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
1. I have no working TV.
2. TVs with resolutions comparable to my computer are expensive.
3. I don't have a sound system for a TV.
4. I don't have cable.
5. I don't want to dick around with HDMI and whatever other crap I'd need to get a HD signal to said TV.
6. I'm at work quite often and at odd times. Tivo costs money.
TV shows have been available on bittorrent since it came about and before that they were (and still are) on newsgroups and irc.
Check your grammar retard.
Ok - I just checked on him, and everything looks fine. His water bowl is full, he's got a fresh copy of Roget's Thesaurus and he's dressed in his "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" pyjamas. Am I missing something?
If you go to www.nbc.com there's a big ol' link right there at the top: Watch Episodes. Why would you pay for or "steal" something that they're giving away for free anyway? Works great in Firefox/Kubuntu for me as well...
... to be a TV executive? Is there some kind of test you have to fail, or something?
Clue stick to head of NBC: Jobs knows what he's doing. Trust him. Give him your content, tell him to do whatever he wants with it, and go play golf or something.
Why don't NBC's stockholders revolt against the kind of mismanagement that throws away free money and turns content-distribution power over to pirates?
You can also download a whole season of a show with torrents.
I don't think most people WANT to illegally download things rather than purchasing them. However, I do think everyone has a threshold at which they'll download illegally rather than deal with the pain of buying something legitimately. For most, that pain is provided by unreasonable prices. For others, it's by formats (DRM) that force you to jump through hoops to be able to watch something you legitimately paid for. So they don't have to make it as easy as the free alternatives, because that's impossible. They only need to make it easy enough that most people will decide that their process is better than breaking the law.
Content providers need to make these downloads as cheap and easy as possible, and they will make money. The more painful it is, the more people will turn to free alternatives out of frustration. Most people that are not generally criminals will only break laws if complying with them becomes too onerous.
Right now, the providers seem to be trying to crack down on free providers and make the legitimate versions ever more restrictive. This is counterproductive, and will only push more people away.
Sure Apple, will not be able to maintain complete control of online store pricing or terms of use. Still, five bucks per episode is insane for a product of lesser quality than full movies and that is also available for free with ads. It's better for Apple to drop NBC altogether than offer something that will be ridiculed by customers.
"Flexible pricing" would be more appropriate as offering some combination of episodes and movies as a bundle, at a discount compared to everything bought separately.
Legitimate media download:
1) Get out your credit card and enter in all those pesky details
2) Enter your address and phone number and then wait for it to verify
3) Download it and watch it in the DRM-rich environment.
Illegitimate media download:
1) Search for what you want on your favorite torrent site
2) Download the torrent
3) ?????????????
4) Profit!! (by not having to pay)
Perhaps it's a protest. "Show content owners how much you value what they have to offer - by finding ways of avoiding compensating them for their endeavors!".
I'm serious. I've downloaded movies in the past. TV shows too. But enough with the ridiculous fucking denial, the self righteous indignation of "they took away our 'right' to see their content". You want to break the law to get it, do so. But let's not pretend it's oh-so-evil-NBC's fault.
That article reminds me of the dehydrated grape bricks my dad told me about. They were sold during prohibition, and they came with a packet of yeast, and a detailed warning explaining exactly how not to add the yeast to the rehydrated grape juice.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Usenet? What is this Usenet? There is no Usenet. You do not talk about Usenet.
The truth of the matter is, kids, that newsgroups are old-fashioned, slow, full of spam, and incredibly fiddly to use at all. And nobody really does any more because we're all Web 2.0 nowadays. Don't bother with it. Go back to thepiratebay. Nothing for you to see here. Nope. Nothing. Really.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
when using good ratio sites I consistently max out my cable connection. about 700k/s . And of course all commercials are edited out.
No way I could otherwise watch unsynchronized TV shows (I live in Austria), there isn't even the option of e.g. watching the Simpsons in English here (except waiting a few years for the DVD release). So much subtle nuance is lost and so many glaring errors are made in translation it's not even funny. Very frustrating. My thanks to all Americans making their TV shows available via Bittorrent.
On the 0th day, God created C
Not because it's "free" (the beer kind). But because it's free (the OSS kind).
Do I mind paying a sensible price for content? No. Do I mind the restrictions imposed? Yes. Simple as that. Yes, I can afford it. Yes, I do afford it, if the supply matches my demand. Unfortunately, usually it does not. If I cannot store it on my content providing machine and display it on my TV-enabled machine, the content is of no use for me. Simply because I cannot use it. What? Oh, I could store it directly on the machine that connects to the TV? Sure I could. I don't want. You don't provide it the way I want, I don't buy. Simple as that.
What manufacturers (not only in the content business) today fail to see is that you cannot sell things to people that they do not want. At least some people will rather abstain from having something before they are forced into unfavorable contracts or conditions. You provide it the way I want it and I will buy. You don't, I won't.
Free market at its finest.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Dear god,
Could you please have 'Joe the Dragon' reply to this post explaining that English is not his first language?
If English is Joe's first language, could you please help him out?
That would be great, thanks!
Love, Me
P.S. In case god isn't listening today, try:
"Fox has THEIR shows online with FEWER ADS THAN on TV and they can be downloaded a lot faster THAN A torrent."
Given the number of TV shows that can now be streamed directly from the networks' own web sites, why don't they take the next logical step and seed their own torrents complete with embedded commercials?
They wouldn't even have to make the torrents particularly high in quality. I suspect that most viewers would be perfectly happy with 352x480 pixel (DVD-lo) quality if it was free and legal. They're not looking for full DVD quality for archival purposes. They just want to see the episodes they missed. And yes, although the commercials could be stripped out, most people simply wouldn't bother.
Sell the higher-quality commercial-free episodes on DVD or iTunes, and everyone is happy. You're no worse off than now, bandwidth requirements would actually go down (TV torrents are invariably HD quality, with corresponding larger file sizes), and advertisers would still reach viewers. The networks could even reseed old torrents with new commercials on a periodic basis.
Usenet? What is this Usenet? There is no Usenet. You do not talk about Usenet.
Exactly. The #1 rule of Usenet is YOU DO NOT TALK ABOUT USENET.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Last season NBC & ABC had most of their shows on their website. You didn't have the flexibility of a torrent but they were great for people who couldn't watch the broadcast. As I'm currently without cable, I plan on watching Heroes & Lost this way. Other shows that I can't get this way... well maybe I'll find a torrent or crash on my friend's couch - at least until I move again & get cable.
I would like to file a bug report...
1. you have a computer
2. nbc.com has their shows available to stream, on-demand
3. enjoy.
>>NBC's recent withdraw from the iTunes store leaves the millions of Apple's customers who have Macs or iPods without a legitimate way to purchase and watch NBC's content.
Watch it on cable (pay) or broadcast (free) television!
man tunefs | grep fish
I don't have an ipod either. I also do not own a television. Is it unfair that I cannot watch most television shows because I choose not to buy a TV? Or are you saying this because you own some other video capable mp3 player that just isn't an ipod?
You can watch it right on your computer. Of course, this assumes that you have a Windows or Mac box to run iTunes on (I'm not sure how much of it will run under WINE, never having tried it), both for purchasing and playback.
(Having done that a couple of times, I began to realize just how blurry my TV is. Playing an iTunes video at full screen on a 17" monitor is considerably sharper than watching a standard 20" TV set. I suppose I'll have to start seriously looking at HDTVs soon.)
Really?
If these are shows that are broadcast over the airwaves, don't you have the legal right to receive them? If you _download_ a show that you already have rights to watch as an OTA broadcast, how is it copyright infringement?
Has this been tested in court?
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
You forgot to put ads in bold.
I use azureus and some custom mininova queries to make sure that my TV shows are always delivered in a prompt manner.
That is the problem though. You never know when the new daily show will come out. Sometimes they are released around 9pm (pacific) and sometimes as late as 4am. There are also issues when multiple groups release, or someone does a crappy job with the encoding. Groups also change filenames, making it annoying to maintain a good regex that isnt going to accidentally try to download some new 1.2 TB pack of simpsons rips or something.
I make enough money to pay for a good service, but I have not seen anything (and I am not going to duel boot or something every time I want to watch a tv show). Some sort of DVR style thing would be nice, without having to pay to get a cable line installed. Hell, you could even distribute over bit torrent so the service provider wouldn't need to pay as much to keep the bandwidth up. All that and simultaneous releases with the actual content, and I would be totally sold. I am sure that it will happen eventually, but until then I think my system works fine.
he's dressed in his "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" pyjamas
Niiiiice attention to detail there.
See kids, that's why you can't set your comment prefs to ignore the ACs. They leave all the best comments.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
A legitimate site with actual content - preferably high quality - that I could download and watch? Ads...bfd - if I'm going to watch it a bunch of times I might go to the effort of stripping them out, but I'll probably just tivo-skip with the player instead. One issue I have with torrents is that the older stuff never gets seeded, and it I want to find anything that's not hot, it can be days to get it, if at all. A content-owner seed would always be available, while the high-traffic seeds wouldn't overwhelm the central server.
They could even make the ads dynamic, changing the ad content to keep it fresh (and keep the ad revenue flowing). Of course it will never fly.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
All the things you list are no excuse for you to steal their content. Think about it: you probably cannot afford a Citroen C Metisse either, but that doesn't mean you get to steal it.
The only question here is whether your downloads constitute a lost sale (and therefore a loss caused by theft) to the publishers, or not. I believe it could be shown that people would buy at least some of the stuff they download illegaly if the illegal sharing were shut down, so they are indeed thiefs, but one might argue differently.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Bauble du Jour: $49
Time to make $49: 1 hour
________________________
= Stealing more expensive than purchasing
If you're in US. Otherwise, bittorents it is... It's funny that physical borders are off and we can travel wherever we want, but now we have to fight legal borders.
does losing NBC content mean anything to the typical ipod user?
I've had one for years and this is the first I'd heard of NBC ever having content on itunes.
the news is the same, the sitcoms are the same, the reality shows are the same (as any other channel)
Cost $49
Time to make $49 < 1 hour
Time to steal > 1 hour
= cheaper to buy than steal
I'm pretty sure Joe was just trolling for spelling and grammar nazis. Mission accomplished!
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Just remember - if the world didn't suck, we would all fall off.
It's funny that physical borders are off and we can travel wherever we want, but now we have to fight legal borders
... more consistent maybe for older shows, but I've never been impressed by Fox's servers. On the other hand, I usually pull anywhere from 2 to 10 mbit/sec out of any reasonably active torrent.
Some of us are more worried about illegal boarders but that's another story.
I dunno about Fox being faster than torrents
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
While I do think that free TV content should be freely available on the internet, none of the reasons you've given above justify downloading material illegally. Just because you don't want to spend the money doesn't mean you can steal their shit.
Our time is better spent convincing the media execs why making their content available is a Good Idea.
thank you.
No.
If I later buy the DVDs (which are actually worse than downloads in terms of quality and convenience) am I still stealing?
a 1080P is twice the price as 720P, but most people are thinking that buy the cheaper one now, buy the better one later when it's 1/2 the price. Most i've seen sold offer HDMI, DVI, and VGA ports. 3. I don't have a sound system for a TV. TVs are no more special than PCs as far as sound goes. That is NO excuse. 4. I don't have cable. That's a good excuse... but HD-TV works rather well. 5. I don't want to dick around with HDMI and whatever other crap I'd need to get a HD signal to said TV. This I know less about, however if you are able to do HD resolutions presently, then odds are you can do HD resolutions on a HDTV if you were interested in buying it, or go with an HD tuner on your PC. Near as I'm aware HDMI handshaking is only really required for presold media. 6. I'm at work quite often and at odd times. Tivo costs money. You could use a VCR or go with a more modern VCR. I've not priced HD PVRs, but i'm sure they exist in one form or another.
It's not like I don't feel for you. It would take some money to invest in the gear required to record off the air broadcasts in the same level of quality you can get pre-pirated. Pirating is easier, and cheaper. It's still a form of piracy.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
either.
Let me just correct your math there:
Buy:
Money Cost = $49.00
Time Cost = ~ 1-2 hours of working time
Misc Cost = Loss of ability to spend or invest that $49.00 in something else
Benefit = DVD box set or other "digital" item.
Steal:
Money Cost = $0.00
Time Cost = 0 as torrents are automated and can be downloaded while sleeping or at work earning $49.00.
Misc Cost = none
Benefit = DVD box set or other "digital" item, $49.00 saved, no productive time wasted, able to invest or spend that $49.00 on something else.
Result:
Buy Cost > Steal Cost
Sorry, Piracy wins again. YARR!
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
True enough. I haven't really used newsgroups myself since 2003, when the BBC put Buffy on hold in the middle of season 6. P2P'd the rest of that season, caught up to the US, and found the binaries group that had new episodes a couple of days before the US airdate.
As for other shows: popular anime is always well seeded, and comes in large blocks of many episodes so you're not downloading stuff with the intention to watch it all right now. The only time I'm in a rush is when I've somehow managed to miss an episode of Heroes (following the BBC again here - I don't want to catch up to the US with this one, I'd be all spoileriffic). And if ever there was a well-seeded torrent, it's an episode of Heroes.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
A while back I realized that every single show I watch on TV was available from the iTunes store. About 2/3 of these shows are from NBC. Some quick math revealed that if I bought every single episode of every show that I might want to watch it still came out to only about half of what I was paying for basic cable. I cancelled my cable TV the next day and have been happily buying all of my programming through iTMS ever since.
It works out perfectly for us. New episodes go on the iPod, and the wife and I either pipe them to the TV (via iPod dock) or when we're travelling watch them on either the iPod or on one of our laptops. No need for cable, no need for a DVR, and we can take unwatched shows with us effortlessly. Additionally, I genuinely like the iTunes interface and have the program running all the time anyway, so syncing requires no effort beyond dropping the iPod in the dock once a day, which I do out of habit.
Now NBC is pulling out but I'll be damned if I'm going to pay for cable again just so I can watch commercials and be tied to their programming schedule. Frankly I'm not terribly interested in buying shows from non-iTunes online stores either and then importing them into iTunes, even in the highly unlikely event that they don't raise the price. So yes, after my season passes lapse I'm going to start pirating NBC shows. Unethical? Probably. Illegal? Probably. Do I care? Not one bit. NBC needs to realize that I'm absolutely willing to pay for their programming, but I'm not willing to be inconvenienced for it and I'm not willing to sit through commercials ever.
Two huge differences:
1) Steve Jobs has a proven track record of actually being right and far exceeding the expectations for him that people place in him.
2) We don't really expect the media companies to put blind faith in Steve. If things start going south, by all means, they're justified in pulling their content. But that wasn't the case here. NBC was making a lot of money from their iTunes sales, and was contributing to an exciting new distribution medium. An equivalent analogy would be if the Iraquis really were greeting us with flowers and candy, and Bush decided to pull everyone out halfway through and let the place go to hell anyway.
So you've made your point - you want entertainment, and you don't want to have to pay for it. Congratulations, you're an asshole.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
"Decent" when it comes to news servers mostly has to do with retention times. If you set something up to poll the news server every so often and automatically download only the things you want, i.e. much like RSS & bittorrent, retention times become moot because you're pulling things off the server pretty much as soon as they get there.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I just downloaded all of the new NBC pilots onto my Tivo for free from Amazon unbox. Just because something isnt on iTunes doesnt mean there is no way to legally get it.
My question is still this: Is it illegal to "steal" something that was already broadcast, typically in High definition, for free??? I guess you could argue that some of these programs are on chanels I can't get for free, and this technically would be stealing, assuming the broadcaster did have some way of collecting revenue (there's no legal standing for theft if there's no provable loss of value or goods, and in the case of free broadcast TV, good luck proving that)
Then again, if I'm paying for basic cable (or a premium service), and thus authorized to watch these shows in the first place, again, if I torrent them, is it still illegal as I could just as simply recorded it with a VCR, DVR, TV Decoder card, or even just as simply a line-in video feed to a PC...
I thought anything broadcast on TV was covered by personal use rights, as long as it's not rebroadcast for profit or trade of goods. Operating a torrent (if I did) technically would cost me money (in terms of electricty, hardware and time) and I get no goods or money from doing so, thus no profit. It's not a broadcast in that sense and thus not illegal in my interpretation of the laws. Provided the downloaded stream is "as broadcast" unedited, and containing all the appropriate commercials.
Distributing pay-for programming to those who do not have license to receive it would of course be illegal, and distributing illegally pirated or unreleased media would be as well. However, distributing legally broadcast footage to those who could otherwise recieve it already, or the reverse, downloading content you could otherwise get legally, should not be illegal. That stated, it should not be the government (or a companie's) job to make it illegal across the board, but that it should only be punishable if one is proven to be using the technology to illegally receive content. I challenge then the government to do so, prove I have actually downloaded content that I'm not already authorized or paying to recieve.
What NBC is arguing here, as are all other broadcasters who charge for downloads from sites for already broadcast content, is that they loose revenue. Really they're arguing to get more revenue then they would have gotten otherwise. They're arguing for the legal right to bill us for something they already give us for free! Downloading edited versions of these programs (where comercials have been stripped and thus advertisers are losing viewership) is a different arguement as we may actually be talking about misrepresentation of viewership and hence lost ad revenue, but these numbers are based on surveys anyway and are grossly inaccurate as noone can tell for certain what people other than cable TV subscribers watch (there's no feedback from broadcast TV or sattelite systems to pattern viewership or neilson ratings, it's all a guess).
Their argument is that people pay for TV episodes on DVD willingly, and in great numbers. Sure. Many people will not only pay for the convenience, but it's a professionally produced media, saves time, saved disk space, saves bandwidth, and MOST importantly, the commercials have been legally removed. By itself, many will be willing to pay for TV without commercials. Again, not the argument here is not "is it illegal to download,", but is it illegal to download "as broadcast" which is not the same thing.
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
If these are shows that are broadcast over the airwaves, don't you have the legal right to receive them? If you _download_ a show that you already have rights to watch as an OTA broadcast, how is it copyright infringement?
Even though you have the right to receive them over the airwaves, you do NOT have the right to redistribute them. And since someone has to redistribute them in order for you to download them, there is clearly copyright infringement taking place.
Even if you could argue "I have the right to a copy of it because it was freely broadcast" (which you probably can't, but lets pretend for a second) you certainly can't argue that because they broadcast it freely you have the right to distribute copies.
Not that I give a fuck. I download every show I watch from TV Torrents.
"I realise this is not a very popular opinion but it's the truth, and there for needs to be said" -Bill Hicks
Hmm. Since I haven't used iTunes before I assumed you needed the iPod to watch. Did I just learn something on /. ?
Just remember - if the world didn't suck, we would all fall off.
I agree with everything you say, but in my opinion the prices for these downloads are just insane, and that's at least as off putting as the DRM. itunes sell episodes of, say, Greys Anatomy (hate that show) for £1.89. So, a twenty two episode season will cost £41.58. Well, for £34 I can have the same twenty two episodes delivered to my door.
So, for less money I can get a better product (nice box, extra features, physical copies, I can rip it to any format I want.). Why the hell would I choose to pay more for less?
"I realise this is not a very popular opinion but it's the truth, and there for needs to be said" -Bill Hicks
You can't take the sky from me...
...there are cases where piracy is not easier than purchase? When you want older stuff.You can't take the sky from me...
Yep, I only get (some) pr0n off USENET now. I get my BBC goodness via "The Box". Took about a day to get all of Torchwood series one. Though, it comes to 4.7GB for all 13 episodes. WHO thought it was cute to have it just a wee bit over 4.37, anyway?
I watch an absurdly small amount of tv shows, maybe 1 hour a week on average of new tv-only shows. Consider for a second how much all that crap would cost me, the time to set it up and so on.
One situation that comes to my mind is this:
Suppose I pay for cable and get every channel that has a show that I download with bittorrent. If I keep the show until I watch it, then delete it, I haven't done anything except time-shift the show, correct? And since time-shifting is legal, I think it would be fair to say that I am more or less playing by the rules.
Granted, most people probably archive their shows, which would certainly violate laws. Still, for the very few of us that actually care about not breaking the law, this seems like an adequate solution.
And for quite a while now I've been using tvrss.net's "Unique" feed -- which is the intersection of EZTV and VTV releases -- along with Azureus' RSSFeed Scanner plugin. Very convenient.
At the same time I also use Miro/Democracy for other vids (like the occasional NBC Nightly News), Liferea for text RSS, and another app + gtkpod for audio podcasts. Quite a mess of apps that I really should consolidate at some point.
Power to the Peaceful
I've found as an iPod user that most general TV Show and Movie content available for purchase within the iTunes store have horrible quality. I mean just plain crappy, not worth whatever they charge per episode or per movie. This can especially become apparent with some older shows. So, why make us pay for crap when we can find it outselves in a more desirable format and quality?
Remember Jobs himself is the largest shareholder (7.5%) of Disney, which owns ABC. The next largest shareholder owns less than 1%.
Microsoft Windows XP or Vista (32-bit versions)
Windows Media Player 9.0 or higher
1.5 GHz processor & 512 MB RAM
Broadband connection
It is not only easier to subscribe, but without the DRM it is easier to use as well.
Why is it that paying customers are subject to more hassles and more difficulty in use than those who do not pay? Who came up with that business model?
Why not do what valve does and encrypt it? You wouldn't need much encryption at all, just enough to stall the decrypt for a few hours. Though, seeding 99% of the show in a near unwatchable manner and suddenly have that last 1% flash at the end would pretty well do the same thing, without needing a secondary decryption part tagged on. Though it wouldn't be hard to setup a file with a quick and dirty password. In fact, even a zip password would be more than enough. Though the problem with that is it's harder.
The reason to scoop the broadcast is to be the first torrent on the market by several hours and have the commercials embedded. You could also do an RSS of that feed. So I could go to the CBS website, select several shows I want to watch, put the RSS feed into my torrent client and then by the time they air on TV I have the same thing waiting for me at home.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
I believe that it is legal to download a TV show if it is over the air or a cable tv show which you pay for (by subscribing to cable or satellite that gets that tv show). It's essentially the same thing that a DVR does, from a different source. However, the illegal part comes in when you download a cable show that you don't get on your cable/satellite or share to other people. Not that I have any qualms about downloading and sharing Top Gear :)
I blame geof's speakers.
I'll join the fray attempting to boil this down to its essence, and probably failing somewhere along the way.
For me, this has nothing to do with legal/moral/ethical arguments. I'm not saying I don't have my opinions on all of those fronts, but what it boils down to for me is control. I'm utterly sick of being forced to enjoy my media on someone else's terms. I stopped watching broadcast TV years ago because I worked nights. The absence of having to plan my time around when the station decided to air my show and the absence of commercials didn't seem so profound to me until I started working days again and tried to watch broadcast TV again. Yeah, I know about DVR's, but I don't use them because of crap like the "broadcast flag". It's just another system of control and I am steering clear.
My advice for the content providers involves far more change than they would even read through, let alone seriously consider, so I'll save it and just say, if you don't like it you can sit and spin.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7L02tCNi0I
"NBC's recent withdraw from the iTunes store leaves the millions of Apple's customers who have Macs or iPods without a legitimate way to purchase and watch NBC's content"
Uhh... since when weren't TVs a legitimate way to watch NBC's content?
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
Soon as I typed that, I expected a similar answer...
I find it amazing. I bet if there had not been so much corruption in gambling related to the mafia, there would have been less need to enforce it. Of course, there is always a few people who need to steal in order to get their kicks ... and of course as a result the government increases laws which end up ruining a good thing like the internet for EVERYONE. It is because of all the people out there that can't control themselves that we end up giving up our liberties.
Now one might say that the companies shouldn't charge for the services the spend millions of dollars investing in. They say that NBC is in the wrong for charging a buck for their millions of dollars they spend making these shows. However, I am able to be honest with myself. I am able to say enough is enough. If I am that desperate on money that I can't afford it, maybe I should be spending less time watching videos on my ipod and go get a job!
You mean if I want to watch a certain show at 10:00 AM, then NBC magically will actually be sending that show then? No? You mean TV is still a medium where they decide when shows are broadcast, meaning they are NOT a proper alternative to downloaded episodes you can watch when you want to?
Did I just learn something on /.?
And the he woke up screaming, sweat dripping from his face.
I'll kick the next kids ass that does it.
So child molestation is not a crime where you live?
If a comma is a grammatical element, then what is the name of its grammatical category? For instance, "Dog" is a noun. "Under" is a preposition. A comma is what now?
Right, that means you aren't willing to pay for the entertainment. Does this somehow justify piracy? I don't see how, but then again, I'm not an asshole.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
I use Ubuntu on my only computer, I don't dual boot, etc...
This means that whether I want to pay or not I can't.
There is simply no way for me to legally buy a watchable copy of any TV shows to watch on my computer. As an example of my willingness to pay for things I want to see on my computer, yesterday I bought webisodes 1-8 of Sanctuary (www.sanctuaryforall.com) for $6.99. The downloads are either quicktime or windows media, neither with DRM so they work just fine on my Ubuntu laptop and I am a happy customer waiting for the next episodes to be made.
That's the point, if you can't buy something, then your illegally downloading it can't cost them money, can it?
7. I don't have a computer or an internet connection.
Hey... wait a second...
"Was it a millionaire who said 'Imagine No Posessions?'" -- Elvis Costello
I don't think most people WANT to rape people rather than fucking them with their consent. However, I do think everyone has a threshold at which they'll rape rather than deal with the pain of dating someone legitimately. For most, that pain is provided by unreasonable prices. For others, it's societal norms that force you to jump through hoops to be able to fuck somebody you legitimately paid for (via dating). So they don't have to make it as easy as the free alternatives, because that's impossible. They only need to make it easy enough that most people will decide that their process is better than breaking the law.
Women need to make fucking as cheap and easy as possible, and they will be happy. The more painful it is, the more people will turn to free alternatives out of frustration. Most people that are not generally criminals will only break laws if complying with them becomes too onerous.
Right now, women seem to be trying to crack down on rapists and make the legitimate versions ever more restrictive. This is counterproductive, and will only push more people away.
Oh well. Rape it is, then!
I don't respond to AC's.
Yes, it is. If you verbalized it, you could differentiate between the meanings of the two interpretations of the sentence by the tone and length of pause between words. It's a visual form of syntax and inflection that is most certainly part of grammar
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Wouldn't they be DRM'ed too?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
If a corporation counts as a person to the government, it's good enough for it to be one in the grammar as well ;)
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
The last time I checked, they were streaming. Where are the download options?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I'm not a linguist, but I study it and write code which manipulates natural language. I have always been under the impression that punctuation has been considered a part of morphology, not grammar. I have a stack of linguistics books that would reach the ceiling, and I've never seen punctuation enumerated in any "sentence tree." As far as I can tell, from a grammatical standpoint it is treated as if it does not exist.
I have seen PLENTY of discussions on punctuation in discussions on morphology, however.
If a real linguist would care to contradict, I'd love to hear it. I don't claim to be an expert.
Not where I live. Olympic Mountains to the West and the Cascades to the East. Even with a moderately priced directional rooftop antenna multipath is too much of a problem here. Any OTA broadcasts are simply unviewable. I'm sure this isn't the only area with multipath problems.
Has anyone actually got DMCA letters/complaints with TV shows OTA? I know they happen for cable/satellite ones. How about OTA?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Uhh, try Simpsons on DAL.net, that's like 1994. And BBSes filled with GIF of the Budweiser girls accessed from 1400 baud. This has been around since, oh, before you were born.
Essentially if you don't allow me any way to pay you for something that I want (ie: other than watching ads on a tv) then it's not my problem that if I can't pay you right now. I'll pay you once you finally get something in place but I'm not costing you anything anyway by my current actions so you shouldn't care.
i watched some of those shows that way and the quality was kind of crappy. it's also possible some of it was Comcast being a crappy ISP. i'm pretty sure at least one of those two shows only has the most recent episode up for streaming, so if you are, god forbid, busy.... you are out of luck. generally commercials drive me up the wall, but the online ones don't really phase me.
i have a TiVo w/out service and sometimes miss the beginning of the season. this happened to me with Lost last year. i ended up just buying the missed episodes from iTunes because they were no longer streaming. personally i will sometimes get busy and not watch any TV for a few weeks, in that case i would have to use the TiVo to archive, or download it. i gotta agree with Apple though, even at $2/episode i only buy a few shows. i bought the first two seasons of It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia because my old cable company did not have FX. after i bought them, a DVD set of season 1 + 2 came out and it turned out to be cheaper than what i had paid. there is no way in hell i would have paid $5 for a 24 minute episode of anything (or whatever an hour show shakes out to be). in that case i can wait till the next year and just get the DVDs from Netflix.
"Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana". You may write code for it, but there's no way to disambiguate the sentence meaning without the proper punctuation. So, it may not be part of the "grammar" like you understand it, but it is part of the grammar as far as English teachers and people who read books understand it. But then again, natural language processing is eons behind what a human can understand.
Note, that to have a sentence tree, one needs a sentence, which is necessarily ended by a period. You are using punctuation in your work, it's just implicit, rather than explicit.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
I disagree.
I find no validity to the argument that a broadcaster has televised a show for free, but then somehow still expects that they're going to be able to retain the right to dictate when and how a person is able to watch.
Now, if someone was making commercial use and selling the intellectual property of the content provider, then I'd say there's a solid case that that person is committing theft of revenue. But downloading a torrent of an episode of Lost from bittorrent because you missed it and want to watch it while on the train ride to work, or whatnot, is not significantly different from recording it on your DVR for playback later in the day.
What this is about is getting people used to having their Fair Use rights to time-shift and place-shift denied, so we all slowly forget that we ever *could* watch programming on our own terms.
I don't see how a broadcaster can argue that their show, that they broadcasted FOR FREE one night previous, somehow gains monetary value because someone downloads it.
How is this lost revenue? Because of the redacted commercials? The sponsor's message didn't get to that viewer anyway if they missed the episode. Sponsors base their advertising on a speculative audience pool anyway, based on ratings from a sample, rather than actual viewing habits. Since the ratings are based on people who actually *did* watch it on television, the downloaders fall outside of the ratings pool. And if it weren't for VCRs and DVRs, most of those shows would be completely missed to begin with.
The ratings pools would still be entirely speculative even if you took time/place-shifting completely out of the equation. Remember what life was like before TiVo? Did you sit like a good little drone and soak in all that commercially goodness? Or did you, more likely, use it as a chance to go to the bathroom or get a snack? Personally, if I'm watching live TV on a non-DVR, I'll mute the damned commercials. Is that theft?
When they do finally get the broadcast flag fully imposed, clearly most shows will be blocked from DVR recording. If they didn't mind recording, they wouldn't put up such a stink about downloading. But I'll bet you there'll be other provisions to prevent you from muting the commercials too. After they've gotten us conditioned for a few years, I'm sure it'll be mandatory to watch the whole broadcast if you watch it at all. They'll probably find a way to apply the DMCA to say that muting the show, or walking away during the commercial, somehow constitutes circumventing their DRM.
I see the rig from Clockwork Orange in the near future, coming to a home near you. Strap in, or no Seinfeld re-runs for you!
Raoul Mitgong: Unhelpful.
who says it's illegal to download TV shows that have already been broadcast that i paid to watch with my cable subscription?
Can someone point me to where Fox has shows online for free? I don't see anything but clips on fox.com.
Also, FEWER ads. At least get your nitpicking right.
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
Just because you had rights to one broadcast (with comercials on a specified channel at a specified time) doesn't mean you get unlimitted rights to it. Kind of like songs being on the radio doesn't mean you get to download them for free, or songs that were played at a free concert for that matter.
At least thats how the laws work. Now if you want to argue ethics, thats different.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
No, it's not being self-righteous. It's recognizing that my greed for entertainment doesn't trump the rights of others. It's actually consideration, something you apparently don't fully understand, given your stance on collecting the copyrighted works of others on your own terms.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Nah, I'd bet it's his native language. A non-native speaker would never mistake words based on what they sound, due merely to the fact that they don't hear them spoken that much, but rather write them. They'd make a whole different class of mistakes, mainly involving omitted or extraneous articles, wrong tenses, etc etc. I'm a non-native speaker and I've seen MANY people trying to speak/write it, so you tend to notice the pattern of mistakes.
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
Fox has its shows online with fewer ads than on TV, and they download a lot faster than a torrent.
You're welcome!
How is it any different from me using say a tivo on airwave traffic and skipping all the ads?
No it just makes it silly to argue that I should pay for all that worthless and redundant hardware simply so that I am officially in the legal right. After all who cares about the absurdity of something or the ethics of it when all you need is to be within the letter of the law.
Last year I wanted to watch the NCAA Basketball tournament in HD, but had no HDTV. I bought a cheap USB HDTV Tuner (Pinnacle HD Pro Stick). It worked great with the over-the-air broadcasts on my computer. I hooked it up to a projector in a conference room at work and it was even better.
-- "Freedom is the right of all sentient beings" -Optimus Prime
A pause.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Well good for you. I simply find no point in spending effort and time to be within the technical letter of the law.
After all the only real difference between me copying a tv show from the air and ripping out all the ads versus to me downloading it is that the former takes more time to set up. After all who cares if the producer gets no money or ad views if you're technically within the letter of the law. Who cares about the ethics of it or the impact on the producer.
ABC, NBC, CBS, and CW also have full episodes online. I believe most have one 30 sec. commercial in their normal commercial spot.
I used all of them. They're not perfect, but a step in the right direction. You're usually using WMP, Realplayer, or a proprietary player for playback though. They don't want this cutting into their DVD sales.
Punctuation.
Jenny's got a new number! 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I know I watched a few of last season's episodes of 24 on Fox's 24 page on MySpace. They don't seem to be there anymore (because they want you to buy the DVD.) And the part about ads true, there was one commercial (about 30 seconds long) during spaces where they would have had a full commercial break during the broadcast.
Jenny's got a new number! 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
1. Turn on my computer
2. nbc.com
3. ????
4. Watch on iPod on train to work.
Also a slippery slope argument does not work when I apply my argument to a very specific case, specifically me and only certain types of content. Also you still don't understand the difference between theft and copyright infringment. Theft steals actual money from someone while copyright infringement only lowers their future income. My argument by definition can't be applied to actual goods because then me paying latter is not equivalent to me paying now (as they cannot sell the same product to someone else). And now I will kneecap you prior to X since you explained to me about how copying something is not theft, when I asked you not to. If you can't cope with reality, that copyright infringement is not theft in most senses of the word, then that's your own limitation not mine.
the answer lies here: time to read all of those over 9000 page long documents you signed.
Re misconception about the usage of "their":
It is not correct to refer to _a_ person as "they" or "their". If a corporation is considered "a" person, then, "their" is just plain wrong. The correct pronoun to refer to one person is "he" or "she". For example, it is incorrect to say "A person should mind their own business." The correct format is "A person should mind his/her/his or her own business" (choose one from the set in italics). It is only correct to use "their" if talking about more than one person: "People should mind their own business" is correct.
The only way "their" can be used to refer to a corporate "person", is if the corporation is actually considered a group. But then we would have to write things like, "The ___ Corporation are evil bastards" -- which should sound funny (unless you are British), because while a corporate entity is made up of many people, the corporation is itself a single entity. Being a non-human despite legal status as a person, a corporation is quite simply an "it" (remember, legal usage is a form of jargon, not standard English).
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
1a. move to the States
If it's legal to tape it, what law says that you can't watch that tape of a show (or listen to a tape of a song) over and over? If the content you are downloading is as-aired (no commercials have been removed) and you could have watched it live with current air wave broadcasts (or cable/satellite reception), what law says that you don't have rights to that same broadcast in digital form? To me, this whole thing is a bit of a gray area. As the GP stated, over-air broadcasts can't be counted in any form. There is no provable loss of viewer-ship for those shows. For instance, Alias aired on Sunday nights at one point. I wasn't home during that time period, didn't have more than a TV (no VCR or PVR), and therefore could have never watched the show. If it weren't for the availability of episodes online, I never would have watched it as it aired when I was finally able to, because I would have no idea what had gone on before. Serialized shows are particularly susceptible to this.
I'm not here to guide your moral compass. I'm just stating a simple fact. Downloading shows off the net without permission of the copyright holder is a form of piracy.
I agree, at present buying into a HDTV is rather spendy and at this juncture its far more cost effective to use a computer monitor. While typically smaller than HDTVs they usually have the resolution and clarity required.
I also agree that it's easier and cheaper to download then it is to get into the equipment required to record shows in HD quality. You are too cheap and too lazy... nothing wrong with that.
It doesn't change the fact that you are violating the copyright because you are too cheap and too lazy.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Punctuation affects the spoken words, so in effect it is spoken. It certainly changes the meaning of the sentence, as does stressing any word in a sentence when speaking:
Check your grammar retard. (why aren't you checking?)
Check your grammar retard. (don't look at mine)
Check your grammar retard. (your spelling is okay, but your grammar...)
Check your grammar retard. (god, you're such a bozo)
The punctuation provides some of that stress, and the last sentence above equates to placing the comma between 'gammar' and 'retard.'
Crap. What has my life become, that I write posts like this? (sigh)
Umm, what?
Unless I'm mistaken, NBC is that TV channel which broadcasts its megawatt TV signal through my head 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, just about everywhere across the entire country.
You know something...? It's perfectly legal to capture a signal being broadcast to you, and do just about anything with it.
So, for the price of a simple $30 TV capture card, an hour plugging it in, and installing the software, you too can record any of NBC's shows, in a format that can be played by Quicktime on most any Mac, or fed to iTunes and converted for use on your iPod. And it's FREEEE!
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Right, except this content is not released "for free" in the first place, and the copyright is retained by the owner. If you read the thread, the reply was to a guy that does not pay for cable service or even a television set. He has no means to aquire the content legally...
In other words, the guy has no content which he can time-shift in the first place. He proceeds to steal some content, then time-shifts THAT... and this makes it fair-use how?
Could he also, using your reasoning, burn a pirated Windows Vista and release it under GPL due to fair-use (hint: NO)
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
I guess ethics is really dead, after all if you won't be put in jail or sued for doing something why shouldn't you do it. Who cares if someone gets hurt or dies, after all you'll get off scott free which is all that matters. You know, a statement like that, coming from a person that admits that they break the law for their own entertainment, is really frightening. I wonder how often you break the law and for what reasons.
Well I am lazy and I admit to the piracy. As for cheap, well I buy DVDs if/when they are available.
Ethics is a more interesting question, after all legality and ethics are not equivalent. I try to make sure that I pay the owners for what I view, which is a lot more than I can say about all the people who skip ads with tivo or the like.
Personally I hate commercials, but if they offered shows even with commercials, it wouldn't be worth the hassle to remove them. Besides some older commercials are a piece of Americana. I even remember an Ovaltine commercial from the 80's that occasionally gets stuck in my head. I wouldn't even mind seeing it again for nostalgia.
Yours truly,
God.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
And for me too, except the other way around. I love the fact that I can download TV from other countries, shows that would never play in the US, at least not uncensored, especially shows like Little Britain. Censorship is one of the reasons we don't get certain UK shows in the US, besides the fact that the US stations have little interest in showing the sitcoms anyway.
Ethics is a more interesting question, after all legality and ethics are not equivalent. I try to make sure that I pay the owners for what I view, which is a lot more than I can say about all the people who skip ads with tivo or the like. You do what you can, rather after the fact, as in a given show to remain on the air requires the backing of advertisers, advertisers who base worth on ratings. In all fairness to timeshifters like tivo users, at least they record the commercials. In the case of Tivo users I believe that data is fed back to the master system.
Now whether or not internet downloads help to increase viewership is an interesting question. But like your self I too am cheap and lazy and welcome the networks to provide legit downloads.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
I suppose that would depend on his stage of learning. In this day and age it is not uncommon for a person to hear the English language spoken quite often while developing their understanding of the meaning of the words. When it comes to the understanding of written word (should it come later), however, the base of learning is of basic letters and their pronunciation which would lead to jumping to conclusions as far as which spell-checked words are correct. I only state this with the understanding that you began by positing '...I'd bet...'.
But here's how I accept legal episode downloads. 1. It's got to be free. Use product placement in episodes to make your money, networks. 2. Video must be DRM Free. 3. I can burn it to DVD-Video or [trans|en]code it to format my media player accepts. 4. And I have to be able to download it on my favorite OS, Linux. If The video has similar DRM like Apple's new Music DRM then fine just as long I can burn it to DVD-Video on Linux. And then download client works on Linux w/o WINE.
\
I would love to see NBC sue CNET for showing people how to download tv shows from bittorrent. We'll finally get some precedents which make sense.
The fact is, it's way easier to download TV shows via torrent. Easier than even my TIVO.
My local NBC affiliate gives these shows away for FREE over the broadcast airways.
I can do what I want with these shows. I can re-encode them for my phone if I like also.
I primarily watch television on my pc now anyway. I watch about three shows on Tivo now.
The greatest thing that ever happened to television was the Leaking of this fall's Shows on BitTorrent this summer.
Now we know which shows will make it and which shows just suck ass.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Steal:
For the 1,000,000,000,000th time, that is copy, thank you. The number of thefts in the history of Napster/gnutella/Azures/etc: zero.
And you forgot something: downloading from p2p is only free if your time is worthless. With p2p, you have to deal with poorly encoded/incomplete/fake files and crappy connections. If you make decent money, it makes far more sense to get a subscription on iTunes: fast, reasonable quality, guaranteed downloads. If you don't make decent money, you are unlikely to buy the media in any format in any case.
P2P was never about "free". To borrow that old line about the economy: it's about the convenience, stupid. And NBC is making it far less convenient for many people who would happily buy their shows on iTunes. They are killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.
I must not understand the full dynamics of how a broadcasting company makes money. I thought those annoying interruptions to my favorite show that try to sell burgers that will make me fat and cars I cannot afford were the one that paid for my favorite show to be made. Then, when I saw my favorite show on FX, TBS, or SCIFI and again was annoyed by a new set of interruptions that include selling me pills to enhance my johnson, burgers that will kill me, and a cartoon fox that is trying to con me out of what little money I have. I mistakenly thought that those also paid that broadcasting company and add to its profits on my favorite show. But, low and behold, that poor broadcasting company is still not making enough and must charge me more when I want to watch my favorite show from iTunes. Is it Steve Carrell that gumming up the works? He is not that funny. Just fire his ass and keep the stupid shows on iTunes! The days when I watch your shows on your schedule with your selection of annoying interruptions are coming to a close. Listen to Apple, I will not pay 4.99 for BSG. Season 3 started off strong but the only thing positive about the season finale was the remake of "Along came the watchtower".
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
All the things you list are no excuse for you to steal their content.
Don't be a tool for the industry. It's not stealing, never has been and never will be. Else the RIAA would be pressing charges of theft against downloaders rather than suing them for copyright infringement. And it's also not about getting it for "free", as it's only free if your time is worthless. It's about the convieneince. And NBC is making it far less convenient to get their shows legally.
Ah, the "everyone's doing it, or worse, so what I do is just fine" line of reasoning. Still as morally bankrupt as the day it was first thought up, of course, but hey! why let that stop you.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
The odds that the torrent is the same as the as-aired broadcast are slim to none. Local affiliates instert their own ads, as do cable and satellite providers, local and national.
So, if you watch the torrent rather than the broadcast, someone who paid to have their ad displayed to you (even though you can fast forward over it with Tivo) is not getting what they paid for.
Personally, I think internet distribution offers much more possibilities for advertisers, but I don't think NBC sees it that way.
I'm amazed he even tried. There was just so much I wouldn't have read the original comment without the replies...
...with mature open-source media players such as Miro supporting BitTorrent RSS feeds... If it's so mature, why does the OS X version crap itself after half an hour after install? It does on my computer, no matter what I do. Yeah, yeah, I know, I could go to the support forum or twiddle a bit around, I'm just saying that "beta version 0.9.0" is not the same as mature.Then there is something hideously wrong with your internet connectivity or torrent client configuration. Or, possibly you just get really unlucky with your choice of torrents, but if it consistently takes roughly a day for you via BT then I'd say there's something wrong.
That said, use what works for you.
Torrent is a fine solution for old TV shows not available in your country or area. For example, If I leave in Turkey, there is great difficulty to get the original Battlestar Galactica from anywhere. But the torrent is just one click away.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
I wouldn't watch what I cant download so that blows the theft argument out the window
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
Faster than average 10 mbps ? I'm impressed, I didn't think old networks would pull their act together on internet diffusion.
This move again highlights the lack of intelligence of the commercial media concerns. Greed, not brains lead this group. They will now introduce a whole new group to the Torrent technology. Smooth move! iTunes is easy, fast and legal. But then again, why let logic get in the way.
Yeah, but the BBC has persistently and rudely turned down all of my offers of Top Gear related money, including the one that went "Don't persecute the torrent sites and will personally send you 5$ for every episode I have so far downloaded through them." Their letters tend to sound like "We don't care about America, and we have no plans to sell or broadcast this in America, but we don't want you watching it either."
I didn't realise they did season bundles. They don't support my platform, so I couldn't install itunes to check.
Even so, that amounts to a one pound saving. In return for that one pound you get physical copies, a nice box, all the extra features, and in a format you can rip to disk and do whatever you like with.I still maintain that the pricing on itunes is straight up insane. I would be willing to pay a maximum of 50p for an episode on itunes, which makes a season cost about one third what the DVDs cost. I'm convinced that would be a fair price, because it takes into the lower value of a download as opposed to a physical copy, and the fact that their costs for a download must be far lower.
"I realise this is not a very popular opinion but it's the truth, and there for needs to be said" -Bill Hicks
English is slowly adopting "they" and "their" as the gender-neutral way to specify people and possession. For instance, "Someone stopped by looking for you" with the reply, "What did they want?"
I agree it can be abused, but we really do need a replacement for constantly staying "his or her" and "he or she" in sentences.
I don't feel any compelling need to go shell out hundreds of bucks for an HD player before the standards even settled.
OTOH, I can just let a torrent run in the backgound for a while and have HD copies of entire SEASONS of shows. Shared over my home network, played on a Win MCE PC attached to my DLP set.
Ease of use trumps spending lots of cash.
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
As another non-native English speaker, I totally agree with the point you have made. The process of learning a new language (almost)always starts with reading it rather than trying to speak it, and I mean speaking in the sense when you can converse in that language to some degree rather than learning special words/phrases for some purpose like "Yes", "No", "Sorry", "Thank You" etc. This usually makes them aware of the difference in the words which may sound very similar to each other even to a native speaker.
Ofcourse, like you already pointed out, the non-natives have different sort of problems. I, for one, sometimes mix up between when to use "I" and "Me" in sentences like "Both I and Mr. X went..." or "it was trying get him and me to sign this...". Will check up the usage rules one of these days when I am not feeling this lazy.
(I am sure that at least one sentence in this post is grammatically/syntactically incorrect)
Politicians and Pedophiles: Two groups of exploitive bastards who are most dangerous when they're thinking of children.
What, you think they can actually shut down usenet? If they can't shut it down because of all other stuff on there(kiddie porn etc) they won't shut it down because you can download tv shows.
Well, you already paid to view it via your cable/sat bill, or via those damned commercials.
If the show was broadcast during the time you had service, you had The right to 'timeshift' record it, ( via tape, dvr, etc ) so logically you have a right to get the video somewhere else, at the same level of quality that was available to you at the time of the broadcast.
If it was not broadcast in your area, or you didn't have 'access' at that time, then perhaps there is a argument.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
You probably don't have enough battery life (or a long enough extension cord) to make it to the states after you turn on your computer. I'd wait until you were here to turn it on.
New punctuation update "~" (no quotes) at the end of a line to indicate sarcasm. ~
No, i'm not saying there are unlimited rights. However, I could just as easily record music from the radio (or via streamripper from the internet) and that is also as legal as using a VCR or DVR. Once recorded, I have the right to replay that recording, in part or full, as often as I see fit for personal use.
Whether I personally record the media, or have a friend record it for me, fair use allows the transfer of that recorded medie from my home to his and back (as long as it either is not considdered a permanant transfer, or that he could have equally received and recoded the stream).
Using a torrent to get copies of eppisodes that I for some reason did not record, but could have, through a network of individuals who have agreed to record these episodes just in case others in the network wished to view them. This would be a different story if a company was providing this as a service, but in this case, we're talking about simple sharing of content we could otherwise have legally acquired ourselves. In fact, using cnet's described process, this is in fact selective in a way no different from DVRs that permit remote access to your own recorded content. It's not illegal to watch TV shows existing on your own DVR across the internet. Lets take that a step further...
Time Warner Cable is proposing DVR functionality via their own remote storage facility. The set top box simply selects the programs you want recorded. Time Warner will be recording all broadcast video on all chanels on their own hardware in central offices. Your DVR will simply connect, download a program you wanted recorded, and allow you to see it in real time, and keep it on their server until you choose to delete it (up to a storage limit) How is this technically any different than a torrent assuming you are only downloading programming that you could otherwise have legally watched?
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
what document I signed? I signed nothing to receive free over the air broadcasts... There's no legally binding agreement to recording and using for personal use those recordings. The argument that I also can't have that broadcast recorded elsewhere and dowload it over wire, even including time shifting and fastforwarding or skipping commercials, is dead. Time Warner Cable is testing (and planning to roll out) centralized DVR services where their own servers record the programs, and you can view via VoD any program you pre-selected to record. How is pre-selecting a torrent RSS and downloading this content over wire for over the air or other legally paid for programs illegal if Time Warner can offer the exact same service, but more over, as a SUBSCRIPTION, fee based service offering legally (as a part of basic cable with no other requirements or seperate subscription charges for that right). They're doing it as a business, for profit, and NBC gets no part of it, but I can't do it personally?
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
The one remaining glitch may be the affiliates. All those local stations have agreements with the networks. Probably something along the lines of exclusive distributors for initial broadcast in exchange for a cut of the advertising revenue. Downloads confuse the situation. Cutting out the local affiliates would have them screaming bloody murder.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
What about when purchase is impossible? I've been looking for War of the Worlds Season 2 on Torrent. Paramount will more than likely never release it on DVD. It was sub-par, especially in comparison to the first season, but it was something I didn't see as a kid because of all of that parental advisory crap. So, I have to resort to what's probably extremely low-res capture from VHS and piss-poor cable TV off of Torrent to finally catch up on a series that's nearly 20 years dead.
So, who decided to make you the moral crusader for the entertainment industry? Do you realize the irony in fighting for MORALS on behalf of the people who make today's music and movies?
Now, let me go ahead and document your sig in a post:
"If I convince just one reprobate pirate to stop infringing, I'm not working hard enough."
How do you expect to convince anyone of ANYTHING while issuing a blanket description of that same group as "reprobate??" Are you unaware of the definition of the word? Here, let me give you one from the dictioary. "Rejected by God and without hope of salvation." As an individual who would rather download a movie than go to a theater and battle the legions of 'tard that make up the movie industry's customer base, I feel that your description of "pirates" is offensive and unwarranted.
I would like you to tell me why you feel you have this moral charter from whatever higher power. I would love to know what you think you have over someone who simply elects that their options for the consumption of entertainment products are not satisfactory. If you don't want to post it here, send it to me in private.
Please.
And when they're broadcast you can Tivo them and use TivoToGo to sync it to your iPod or any other device. Or you can do what I did and buy an Elgato EyeTV 250 and turn your Mac into a DVR box that automatically syncs to iTunes and your iPod. Those are a few easy ways for those with a Mac and are completely legal.
What really annoys me is when the media companies try to stamp out these types of technologies by trying to push through broadcast flags, copy protection through HDMI, encrypted signals, dragging their feet on CableCard compliance, and the list goes on. I'm not a pirate, I'm a consumer. I have no problem paying a reasonable fee for my entertainment. I DO have a problem with them making it continually difficult to actually use the products I pay for. If they brought more products to the market that were easy to use, convenient, and reasonably priced they would be able to curb a significant amount of casual piracy. AND MAKE MONEY AT THE SAME TIME!
If I buy a TV series on DVD for £30 over here in the UK, someone on eBay will generally buy it for £20 if it's sold on relatively quickly. In effect, that means I get around 25 hour-long episodes for £10, which works out to about 40 pence (80 US cents) an episode.
So if they want to sell me downloadable episodes for 40 pence each or less, then I'll happily pay for them. Otherwise I'll do it my way or, if I want to be mega-patient, just wait for it to hopefully come on the BBC advert free (since I already pay for a TV license anyway).
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Yeah that and Miro has an embedded trojan/rootkit.
Oops I might be wrong.
Easier than purchase? Forget buying shows online, grabbing a torrent is easier than watching the shows on TV! I have a digital satellite receiver (100% legit and paid for) and I rarely bother to watch TV on it - if I like a show, the networks will shift the time around without warning and I end up missing half of it, or I get a garbled episode when there's a really bad thunderstorm. ...so I grab a torrent of a season at a time, watch it whenever I want, wherever I want, on any device I want, and I have more than a few that play video on the go. On my TV (which is used as a PC monitor) the downloads often look sharper if more compression artifacts because my satellite box only has composite outputs. Most of them I don't pay for other than satellite bills. Some of them I do. I just watched 90% of the first season of Dexter after grabbing it to see what it's like - after work today I'll probably run out and buy the DVD set I saw in the store a couple weeks ago that made me think of it.
The TV networks, like record labels, just need to chill out a bit, keep an eye on their IPs but not enforce them with thuggish tactics. (heh... I got busted for downloading Battlestar Galactica once... a coworker was busted for KNIGHT RIDER! Gimme a break!)
The sad thing is that if they offered legal free torrents and included a sponsor pack or something that would give them money per view, I'd watch a few ads to show my support. However when I buy the DVD I'm sure it'll force me to sit through 5 minutes of crap every time I watch it, so I'll just circumvent it and say to hell with them... hahaha
I am located in Mexico and I got a "Sorry, the content is not available for your location". They were kind enough to let me watch the commercials though.
moi
You might interested in this if you use rTorrent to download your torrents.
I don't believe in any higher power, and I don't feel I have a charter. I do it because it amuses me. You pirates trip over yourselves in silly attempts to make justifications.
And if you don't like being offended by people describing what you do, don't do what causes the description.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
I, for one, sometimes mix up between when to use "I" and "Me" in sentences like "Both I and Mr. X went..." or "it was trying get him and me to sign this...". Will check up the usage rules one of these days when I am not feeling this lazy.
I am a native speaker, so this might not help you, but your English seems proficient enough to me that I would be surprised if it doesn't also work for you. I find it easier, rather than remembering some specific rule, to instead use a test that only requires a little intuition. Simply remove the other person/people and any associated conjunctions etc from the sentence, and see whether "I" or "me" fits better. In your examples, this would lead to "I went..." and "it was trying to get me to sign this" which are both much more natural than "Me went..." and "it was trying to get I to sign this".
Hope that helps a little.
I use Bittorrent to download bicycle races, they are almost imposible to watch on tv in the USA and on directv they suck, directv puts so much advertisement that is anoying to watch anything. I can download 21 days worth of a tour (italy, france, spain) and watch with out comercials thanx to the uploaders work. I use demonoid and even if you are not a suscriber you can download 3 torrents a week (they have to be fresh uploads), since the mayority of the torrents are from european television, Bittorrent is a superb alternative to watch other nations tv.
He has no means to acquire content, because the schedules on which that content would be provided were no use to him. Hence he did not need any of the TV related hardware normally used to access broadcast, or cable television, which of course includes a PVR. However, by the power of bittorrent, he has access to the same content, in a way that is convenient for him, and avoids the purchase of a PVR or any TV related hardware, whilst achieving identical functionality for him. You could argue he should pay for Pay-tv, but then they'd come and install useless cables and boxes in his house, so he has the "moral" right to view the content, when it would still be more convenient for him to torrent it. It's just not a very strong value proposition. Hell, I know I pay more for internet than I would for PAy tv, and I'd be very happy if all my favourite shows were provided from the content provider via a .torrent link. Especially in the case of public content, or other freely broadcast content, where it is currently provided without charge, and it makes no sense for them to charge me to receive it via the internet instead of via a DVB tuner.
You can't take the sky from me...
I don't need justification. I don't CARE about NBC's bottom line. Oh, boo-hoo, I might be stealing from billionaires.
Also, I don't care about how you choose to describe "pirates." You are a sad little man who thinks that he has a "cause." Enjoy that feeling of righteousness.
Go on putting your own interpretation on my motivations, and go on believing it's billionaires you hurt. You couldn't be more wrong in either case, but like all piracy justifiers, you have nothing but weak sauce on offer.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Let's see... Networks withdraw their programming from a revenue stream (iTunes). Possible motives?
1) Want their programming to be free and are thus willing to give up income from distributors. 2) Microsoft release of Vista - DRM Edition now provides for a way to guarantee that people must pay-per-view and cannot copy or distribute copies of their programming having seen an opportunity to shut down their free streaming and go to a full pay-per-view distribution. This would allow them to charge more in a high demand, low availability market (e.g. get a bigger cut of the profits by charging more and having no third party involved as well).While I am sure that there are many other variations on the above, I believe these are the most likely.
Be as you would have the world become.
I know this is a hopelessly late reply, but what the heck, I'll keep being argumentative.
Ownership of a television set or cable apparatus is not required for reception of publicly owned airwaves. At least, thus far, and in the US. I know that licensing is or was required for receivers in the UK and other parts Europe, but in the US, the broadcast frequencies are considered public property, and are administered by the FCC as a public trust.
If you have fillings in your teeth that are able to pick up the audio portion of a television broadcast, you're entitled to do so. At least, until the broadcast flag makes your mouth an illegal analog hole, or something of that nature. The equipment is irrelevant. The networks don't release their copyrights by broadcasting, any more than the GPL broaches copyright ownership of Linux. But when they broadcast, they do so without an implied contract on the part of the receiver that the program will be diligently watched, commercials and all, and only on equipment they approve of and during the broadcast time. They can't, according to fair use, have an expectation that they can dictate terms of use to the end user. This is like the author / copyright owner of a book stipulating that the book should only be read at night, or only while wearing their patented brand of reading glasses, and threatening to sue anyone who fails to comply with these restrictions. (In fact, not a bad analogy there to DRM. If they patent special glasses that expire one month after first use, maybe by going opaque, and then scramble the letters in a way that their glasses can re-assemble the text, you'd have a book form of DRM. And probably cause just as many headaches as music DRM causes.)
Again, if they can show that they experience a direct loss as a result of people being able to watch a torrent of their show, then the law would protect them. As it is, the person who gets the torrent had the right to watch it when it was broadcast, and nothing, yet, dictates that they lose that right after the show is over. Why do they not have the right to watch a torrent of that show?
As to your last point, that's an utter straw-man argument. Vista is a licensed product that users pay for. Television shows bear no contract or license with the viewer, and they are free. You're comparing Apples to T'ang dynasty chopstick rests.
Raoul Mitgong: Unhelpful.
Thanks for the informative reply. That makes perfect sense. I follow the same rule but still mess up sometimes, specially with long sentences, when I lose track of the sentence's structure. :)
Politicians and Pedophiles: Two groups of exploitive bastards who are most dangerous when they're thinking of children.