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MPAA Chases Uploads, Ignores Open Sales of DVD-Rs?
rbrander writes "Go to TVBoxSet.com and find a remarkable sales site for box sets of TV shows, including not only surprisingly cheap deals, but offerings not found elsewhere. For example, they have a set with all ten seasons of 'JAG'. The problem is that the production company is only up to season 4 so far. Google "tvboxset" and find every link below the first is to a complaint or news website complaining of the scam. Those who do shop at the site get a product that appears to be a DVD-R recorded off of cable. The really odd thing? They're still in business! A story at the Montreal Gazette about the scam is six weeks old. Now what's in it for the content industry to beat up private citizens with $220,000 judgements or scrambling to get DeCSS sites shut down within hours, while corporate scammers openly sell pirate DVDs for months on end, unopposed?"
"There's been a new venture in home video market - instant DVDs. They are out in stores before the movie is finished!"
A season of X-Files, presumably bootleg, is $56. I think I'm in the wrong line of work. Anyway, perhaps the reason they aren't being pursued is that they may not be in the US. If they are in, for example, Russia, allofmp3 has shown how much fun suing them can be. Single mothers with Kazaa, on the other hand, tend to be easy to pick off.
If the purpose was to go after infringers in order to recuperate lost sales, they wouldn't be going after housewives or children who pirate for personal use, they'd be going after commercial pirates. Y'know, the people that the ridiculously high penalties were created for?
Instead the MPAA's purpose is to create an environment of fear. This is presumably so people will forget their fair use rights and give them up so the MPAA studios can put even more DRM on their products.
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
/ This is a home pirated version of \
| Clippy. Please turn to your local |
| Clippy retailer or a professional Jolly |
\ Roger-compliant pirate. /
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cpu0: Microsoft Clippium ("GenuineClippy" ChromedMetal-Class). Paperbinding, lockpicking, fish-hook-hack support.
Personally, I believe they're getting off scott-free because TVBoxSet.com is a company, but P2P networks and their filesharers are not. It's easy to compete against another company (like TVBoxSet.com), especially one which allegedly offers questionable content; on the other hand, with P2P, how in the world does a company compete against free? I may be wrong but I can't think of a business has yet figured a way to do that (Microsoft is presently trying to answer that question as it pertains to GNU/Linux and FOSS). Seems to me that , correctly or not, they don't percieve a much of a threat to their bottom line coming from TVBoxSet.com as they do from some kid with a torrent client.
This space for rent!
If we really must use your poor analogy, it would be more like:
"I got caught speeding 10 miles an hour over the limit once, and got 15 years in jail for it. In the meantime, there's a guy who's running around hitting pedestrians all over the city. They know exactly who he is and where to find him, but they haven't even given him a ticket yet."
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
The payouts they can get for one copy of a given film or TV show being shared over BitTorrent are higher than the payouts they can get for many illegal DVDs of the same film or TV show.
Holy cow - 278 episodes of Carol Burnett!!! This guy deserved to get ripped off.
In fact, shoot him. We'd be doing him a favor. The judge would surely accept this as a mercy killing.
Wah wah wah, stop making pathetic excuses, speeding is wrong and you know it, if you can't do the time don't do the crime. Moron. And stop making stupid arguments like "speeding isn't theft", you didn't PAY for the right to drive 10 mph over the limit so you STOLE it, that's what STEALING is. Thief.
Oops, sorry, my slashbot implant seems to be malfunctioning slightly today...
Why in the world is this insightful? I own my own small business that is incorporated even though I'm a 1 man show, and I try to uphold the greatest ethical standards possible. I truly believe that the vast majority of rich people become rich through ethical means, and a horrid amount of hard work. All you hear about are the greed is good crowd just like all you hear about with professional athletes are the ones who are arrested and who do stupid things. I incorporated because I didn't want someone to slip on the curb outside, crack their skull open, and sue me for everything I own. The most they can get from me is the business, but not my kids college funds. Does that make me an evil person?
Most companies are full of good people, run by good people who try to do the right thing. Just because publicly traded companies are sometimes forced by the shareholders to do things that aren't cool it doesn't mean business is bad, or even that big business is bad.
They have been running them 'out of town' MP3Sparks was once AllOfMP3. TVBoxSet was formerly DVD-Series. Based out of: Strawinskylaan, Amsterdam 1143 XX Netherlands From they're own FAQ: "Is my order SECURE? You bet! When placing an order, Dvd-series.com uses..." It would appear someone forgot to update the page when they "moved"!
Most of the time, it's not that they are run by evil people, it's really just what happens when a (very) large group tries to think. It all becomes reduced to the lowest common denominator, causing the decision-making to be more selfish and more short-term, and replaces the ethics of an individual with a poor substitute, which is a need to follow any regulations and avoid legal liability. If there is to be a coherent organization, then there is simply no other mentality that a 10,000 person team could share other than "is this in the interests of the company?" with good employees separated from mediocre employees based on how much they care about that question. It's the effect that this singular focus has on any group consensus reached (either by being a decision-maker or by losing your job if you don't play along) that can be perceived as evil, although really it's amoral.
If you really look around you'll notice that most of the harm done in this world is not done by deliberate malice; it's done by people who have good intentions and fail to consider the full repercussions of their actions. No totalitarian government ever arose because "Do you want to live in a fascist police state?" was put to a vote. Even when this is the intention of a leader, it's always sold as a way to protect public safety, stop terrorists, etc. so that naive people can support feel-good measures with foreseeable negative side-effects while patting themselves on the back for how good their intent was.
The GP painted with a broad brush but your attempt to defend the good name of giant multinationals (the main cause of that perception) in terms of your personal, ethical, hard-working, money-for-kid's-college-funds-and-grandma-and-apple-pie one-man operation is not a valid comparison.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
If you read the summary, you can see that TVBoxSet are up to season 10, while the production company has only produced up to season 4. I'll bet that the MPAA plans to ditch the production company, and source the episodes directly from TVBoxSet. Just think of the money they'll save: No scripts, no cameras, no sets, no production costs. This is the future - literally. Why should I (as a network) pay millions of dollars to Castle Rock or New Line for a new series when for $150 I can buy residual-free DVDs of the series before it's even written?