Slashdot Mirror
Why I Steal Movies (Even Ones I'm In)
Jamie found a link saying "Like a billion other people, I download things illegally. I'm also an actor, writer, and director whose income depends on revenue from DVDs, movies, and books.This leads to many conflicts in my head, in my heart, and in bars."
Because with ripped movies you don't have to deal with those annoying previews that on some dvds, you can't skip.
Oh, and its cheaper.
Very interesting read.
I want to check out his show now.
Stealing movies is not very different from stealing medicines, food or anything else. The marginal cost of these items are very low - esp. for example medicines, compared to the prices.
Just cos he is a director, actor etc. etc. doesnt make it right - just means, he (like the whole of humanity) likes freebies.
Time we find a better way to catch such pirates - maybe even put a bounty!!
This constant effort in changing our language is frustrating.
When you steal something you deprive the previous owner of their copy.
Making a copy is an offense but since it doesnt deprive the real owner of their copy its a very minor offense, especially when done without economic interest and for profit.
HTTP/1.1 400
..."I live in London and many of my favo(u)rite TV shows are American. So if I want to see the latest episode of South Park or Friday Night Lights..." I threw a flag right then. If you spend your time downloading and watching Texas' version of Days of Our Lives I have no more time for you. Personal Foul. Good bye now.
Never heard of him.
So I'm afraid I simply DL'ed a pixel-clear pirate copy which arrived in seconds. My moral justification for this? I once bought the VHS.
My greatest problem with copyright abuse by the RIAA/MPAA is simply how they nickel and dime you. Every decade or so a new format comes out and they roll around in new income without even doing anything (well, remastering is very little). That bothers me. It seems like the opposite of a capitalistic system where you're supposed to be rewarded for producing something--in this case entertainment content.
... or perhaps that's why your employer, your publisher and your industry are fighting the final format solution. You wrote this piece as a consumer of your own product and were given a brief flash of insight yet you seem to avoid trying to reconcile this view with the view from your end, from the insider's end. And that's probably because it's irreconcilable and, as you said, you "don't understand business." More importantly, you don't understand money and the desire for more money is all that runs your industry. You've got some sort of humanity and empathy for the consumer left in you. You'd need to cast that off in order to understand the businessman who is making tons of bank on you. You'd need that to understand EMI's decision to continually restrict Hot Chip's viewership.
So let's say I roll down to a garage sale and find the band Poison's worst songs of the 1980s on vinyl for two pence (that's two pence more than it's worth). By your logic, is it okay for me to now get online and download that?
I assume that with digital downloads, all of those archaic shenanigans will end
Good luck in your quest to utilize things like P2P for promoting, sharing and distributing as a tool to success. Your industry by and large will not assist you in the least and may even take legal action against you.
My work here is dung.
The author of the article makes a few good points...particularly about the creators of South Park (a show I loathe) not particularly minding torrents of their stuff on the 'net...especially since there's not really anything they can do about it.
Also in that he made a video promoting a UK band, then EMI went out of their way to limit the audience of the promotional video to only UK viewers...why limit who can see a band's promotional video? Shouldn't EMI want a much larger audience?
Everyone would a lot happier if they just stopped fighting it and tried to find a way to work with it. A good example is that back "in the day" (and I'm giving away my generation here, so get off my lawn) the television stations had even tried to make off the air taping of their shows illegal (it was for a while)...then they realized how ridiculous it was to fight it when everyone did it for convenience (plus the supreme court of the US made it legal to do so). Next thing you know, the stations were finding ways to *want* you to record their shows, knowing that they were getting more viewers if they did so. That led to TIVO-type set boxes (that they've now tried to limit electronically).
If "they" would just realize that if they tried to work *with* new tech instead of against it, they could find a much much larger paying audience.
For the record, though, I'm against piracy in all its forms. People being so blatant about pirating music and games is what's led to corporations fighting it. If I have an MP3 in my collection, then I have either purchased it electronically or have a physical media of it that I've purchased.
Just my $0.02
-JJS
Because with ripped movies you don't have to deal with those annoying previews that on some dvds, you can't skip.
If only that was all you had to deal with. You should actually read the article, here we have an actor taking the role of the consumer and being forced to deal with: DRM, paying for a license multiple times, regioning on DVDs and distribution restrictions by country. In both his own work and others'. It was a great read, the whole time I was thinking, "Finally, now you know what it's like." I mean, come on. As a software developer if I coded something that was as shitty as all that and I sat down to use it ... I don't know what else I could think of myself as except a failure. The fact that publishers in the USA love to restrict free streaming online to only the USA boggles my mind. Do they know that there are far more people outside than within? "Oh no, you'd be violating some archaic distribution deal from 1977 if a Ukrainian heard The Killers." And since we signed that away for each country a separate contract for all eternity, we're kind of out of luck. Laughably ridiculous.
My work here is dung.
Best DVD Easter Egg ever, and this really works on nearly all discs and all players. When you pop in the disc and the auto-preview garbage starts up, hit STOP, STOP, and then PLAY. In most players, this automatically starts the main feature on the disc. I found this info in a youtube vid some weeks ago. I'd credit it, but don't have the URL.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
Steam showed that halving the game's price results is more than twice the sales. Which in the end means more profit.
Not necessarily. Sometimes the publisher of a video game based on a licensed underlying work is required to pay a fixed royalty per copy to this underlying work's copyright owner. This means that whether the game costs $20 per copy or $10 per copy, the underlying work's copyright owner still gets its $2 or more per copy.
By far the most reasoned treatise I've seen about this issue. Now if only we could get the MPAA, etc. to read and understand it. Or better yet, if only I could figure out how to provide 'better than free' content without billions of dollars, and thus put the archaic companies in the position to either compete or die. I-tunes has started this, but it needs to happen faster.
One of these days I'm going to cut you into little pieces. - PF
When the law is being paid for by people who claim to represent him, his opinion matters.
Sure, the players involved all think it's real, but the whole game is nothing more than a means of squeezing an extra bit of stress reaction from the population.
TV and general media opiate is such a fantastically successful means of keeping people asleep that it will not go away until it is rendered redundant by guns, barbed wire and processing plants. The copyright thing is a means of turning everybody into a criminal, and thus gives a valid excuse to introduce those guns, barbed wire and processing plants. -Because milking the human race for anxiety is all fine and nice for the aliens, but greed and stupidity dictate the necessity for a huge whollop of energy which can only be extracted through physical trauma on a planetary scale. A couple of senseless wars here and there just don't cut it.
Have a nice day.
-FL
http://lifehacker.com/5518076/hit-stop-+-stop-+-play-and-other-tricks-to-skip-dvd-trailers-and-warnings
Very useful tip, also nice using something like XBMC which doesn't seem to honor a DVD's no-skip wishes and just let's you get to the main menu (almost) any time.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
I like the other useful tip I found for skipping those trailers and warnings: Rip the damn disc, or torrent a copy of a movie I already own because it's less hassle than ripping and encoding it.
I like to think of online DRM as something akin to a college -- you pay for lessons until you learn something.
He goes through some pretty good justifications for his "illegal" downloading.
His best justification is one he doesn't realize though. He stated that he lives in London but yet has created an iTunes account to access US TV shows because 'it's legal' when it actually isn't. The iTunes conditions of purchase say that you must be in the country of the store when downloading because the US store does not have the rights to sell a US TV show to someone in the UK. The reason being that Hollywood has likely sold the rights to the show to a British broadcaster who will be very annoyed if they lose audience (and revenue) because someone else is illegally selling the show to their viewers.
Personally I think that it is only a matter of time before Apple start using GeoIP to restrict store access....like the BBC does for iPlayer. What we really need is some sensible, international way to access content. As a Brit living in Canada I would love to be able to watch BBC 1+2 on iPlayer - and would happily pay an equivalent to the UK licence fee to be able to do so (and no, BBC Canada is NOT the same).
Don't watch DVD's on your Xbox, or on any system made by Microsoft or Sony.
Plenty of non-name-brand DVD players don't implement the 'user can't skip' feature. Mine doesn't implement that. I can skip all that crap, and always do.
I'm lazy, impatient, have a sense of entitlement AND a cheap-ass.
Plus I sometimes want to watch a movie or listen to music. It's a freakin' movie or tune, OK? How much god-damn effort do I need to put into it? I don't want to record music or make a movie. Does Fiskars have a case against me cause I'm too lazy to mow the lawn with scissors? If you want to make a movie but feel that only the worthy should see it, I suppose you can. Just don't expect to profit from the endeavor. You make things too hard, too expensive, too time consuming or require some sort of morality test for your customers to overcome, then they're gonna find another way to get it or just find something else altogether.
So, to summarize, all that "lazy, impatient, have a sense of entitlement AND a cheap-ass" really means is that I'm a discerning consumer trying to find something for the lowest cost possible. I suppose to be consistent, you'd have to also accuse someone producing a product that insists that I come somewhere to buy it at his convenience, when he's available and for whatever price he sets as "lazy, unmotivated, having a sense of entitlement and a greedy bastard". Except that we're talking a company here, so they're exempt of such accusations, right?
I am not a crackpot.
I think recent history has proved beyond reasonable doubt that independent designers can create products without being in the payroll of the big corporations.
People would want to design cars, just to show off. The fact is they are doing it right now, even without the benefit of a universal duplicator.
I just re-watched Firefly, and there are no previews, forced or unforced, on any of the DVDs.
Not that there aren't on other sets. I'm sure there are. But please, when you use a demonstrably false example, you undermine your own argument.
Poor means hoping the toothache goes away.
Speaking as someone who used to work in the retail industry, and the overall music industry, but now work in the tech industry, I think you're missing the importance of what you're interpreting his point-form items to mean.
> I'm lazy and impatient.
Aren't these precisely the reasons for two of the most crucial ingredients which all of the large scale entertainment industries are utterly failing to add to their product?
Convenience and ease of use.
People can order coffee at drive-throughs now. Why? It's convenient, and enough people were lazy and impatient enough that they didn't want to have to park, get out of their car, enter the actual coffee shop, line up, wait, choose from a menu either during or after that wait, order, wait some more for the coffee or other items to be made and delivered to them, pay, get a receipt, return to their car, and get back on the road. A drive through is far more convenient.
If the coffee shop / drive through example had never existed, an entire traffic infrastructure would arguable not exist today. Drive throughs are considered an innovation that was a direct response to customers who were impatient and busy, and who one could argue right now are lazy for using them. But they're considered an innovation.
The *IAA members who currently produce the CD's, DVD's and Blu-Ray discs in their current state lack this kind of innovative thinking. They fail to understand that convenience - especially in an era where a ton of information is very easily available - is a crucial ingredient in their product.
FBI warnings, several delays involving intro animations, menus or warnings, plus copyright notices, then trailers and previews are a nuisance. Then add in:
* DRM
* Regional coding
* Territorial restrictions for a given release
* Territorial delays in release or a complete lack of release in one or more territories
* The whole "back to the vault" scenario.
These are all considered annoyances, and hindrances to consuming the product people actually wanted to buy, and these are precisely the things that are causing people to avoid purchasing their products, but they refuse to remove them. I think it would be a huge wake-up call for even one studio to try releasing a product with at least one of these hindrances removed (but preferably all of them.) I also personally believe that restricting a work from being released in a different territory due to it not yet having a specific licensing agreement is a ridiculous concept in a world that has something called the Internet. iTunes doesn't let me buy some of my favorite artists because they aren't licensed to be released in my country. Of course I'm going to download them any way I can. (I do order physical CD's for exorbitant prices as well, but I'm probably a really rare consumer in this case.)
Even when studios do include a "bonus digital copy", it's restricted, and only available for a preset amount of time. If you try to use that copy past that time, you're out of luck. That's a stupid, stupid idea. I won't always want a new movie to remain on my iPod, and I will more than likely wish to use that feature far further in the future than they will allow. I don't know anyone who uses that feature, and I doubt I would ever choose it over ripping my own copy of the DVD I own so that I can play it the way I want.
As a programmer, "lazy" leads to better code over time because a program or script eventually does more things either I or my clients wanted it to do. As a former retail worker, "lazy" means we had to work harder to make sure people could get what they wanted more immediately, or find things out faster, especially when a store was very busy.
"lazy" and "impatient" are what labels and movie studios should be wanting to address in a way that produces a better product. Recorded music and films are the two biggest industries that resist this approach consistently, and then blame the consumer when they complain about it.
ad
Because I can! [Brainrub.com]
I never understood the fuss over being unable to skip the previews until I had to watch a DVD on a Windows computer. Turns out that for the first decade of the DVD's existence, I had been using Linux to watch DVDs, and had never seen the unskippable previews. I honestly didn't even know they were there!
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.