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WW2 Vet Sent 300,000 Pirated DVDs To Troops In Iraq, Afghanistan
nbauman writes "WW2 veteran 'Big Hy' Strachman, 92, pirated 300,000 DVD movies and sent them to soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq, where they were widely distributed and deeply appreciated. Soldiers would gather around personal computers for movie nights, with mortars blasting in the background. 'It's reconnecting to everything you miss,' said one. Strachman received American flags, appreciative letters, and snapshots of soldiers holding up their DVDs. He spent about $30,000 of his own money. Strachman retired from his family's window and shade business in Manhattan in the 1990s. After his wife Harriet died in 2003, he spent sleepless nights on the Internet, and saw that soldiers were consistently asking for movie DVDs. He bought bootlegged disks for $5 in Penn Station, and then found a dealer at his local barbershop. He bought a $400 duplicater that made 7 copies at once, and mailed them 84 at a time, to Army Chaplains. The MPAA said they weren't aware of his operation. The studios send reel-to-reel films to the troops."
Anything for the troops, of course.
Nice to see the studios have been keeping up with the times.
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
Are they talkies at least?
That is the most beautiful thing I've ever heard.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Sending a bunch of crappy bootleg cams to the troops should be considered a war crime.
Get this geezer a copy of vlc and some Matroskas stat.
Howard Gantman, a spokesman for the Motion Picture Association of America, said he did not believe its member studios were aware of Mr. Strachman’s operation. His sole comment dripped with the difficulty of going after a 92-year-old widower supporting the troops. “We are grateful that the entertainment we produce can bring some enjoyment to them while they are away from home,” Mr. Gantman said.
Given that they go after ISPs for downloading, should they not go after the post office to be consistently persistent?
Would be a lovely case to see go to court! They could sentence him to community service...
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
Nothing could be better at turning the public against the MPAA. And pandering politicians would be quick to pass laws exempting this to show how favorable they are to our veterans.
“It’s not the right thing to do, but I did it,” Mr. Strachman said, acknowledging that his actions violated copyright law. “If I were younger,” he added, “maybe I’d be spending time in the hoosegow.”
The guy spent $30,000 of his own money to do it. Maybe the MPAA could sue him for a portion of the 'profits'. The best part is he was continuing to make copies, right there, while they were interviewing him. It's brought joy back to his life.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I guess this 92 old criminal will spent the rest of his life in jail. Muahahahahahahaha!
This guy was doing it for free, the iraqi's sell *tons* of dvds to the troops, for a decent profit, if they didn't have it in stock, they'd have it the next day.
Why don't the MPAA go after these iraqi's selling movies and stop supporting terrorism... :)
back to the future: where hawkeye and hotlips were still current characters...
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
did what corporations couldn't or wouldn't because of few measly lost dollars, which would have brought in millions worth of good will.
Here's an idea maybe we should have a send the troops a bootleg campaign. Imagine 1 million bootleg dvd's being sent out lol..... The MPAA cry would be heard in every corner of the world Khaaaaaaaaaaa....
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
the place where a mother can go bankrupt in the trial for download a cartoon for their kids, and a man can make whatever he wants because he took a job when he was 16, 70 years ago... and we applauded... awesome...
And only sent 1/3 as many. Or spent 3 times as much.
Selfish bastard.
No, not him.
The studios send reel-to-reel films to the troops.
Did you send them vinyl records too?
Maybe a few laserdiscs?
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Good for Strachman! I don't think even the MPAA is stupid enough to go after him. If they do, I think there will be mass abandonment of the MPAA! The motion picture companies would not want to associate themselves with such behavior.
And it costs the studios thousands of dollars in lost sales for every bootlegged DVD -- or so they tell us. But, you know, if it's for the troops, it's fine. Bullshiat.
Its probably so they can be paid anytime a soldier watches a film. If they sent them DVDs, they'd get distributed among the troops. The film snob in me wants to say film is a chemical process that even the best digital projection couldn't match and the MPAA wants our troops to have the best...but I know that has nothing to do with it.
I just got back from a deployment to Afghanistan, and I can tell you that sometimes the only way to get to sleep is by watching something that will get your mind off of what's really going on. My favorite was light comedies and sitcoms.
I didn't know about this guy. We got most of our movies over there from local vendors who would sell pirated copies (that's legal in Afghanistan). The MPAA is getting the Customs Service and DoD to crack down, though. We used to be able to buy whatever we wanted from the locals and bring them home. Then when I came home from Iraq in 2008, we were allowed to bring one copy of each movie/TV show, and that was fine as well. This time when we were coming home we were told that we could only bring one item, period. Which was fine, again, because now we're ripping the movies to our hard-drives, anyway. I wonder how long it'll be until the MPAA gets the Customs Service to look at all of the content of our laptop hard drives on re-deploying back to the U.S....
If you were lucky enough to be stationed at Bagram Air Field, then you had a PX where you could by legit movies for full price, but for most of us stuck out at various FOBs scattered across the country, the local guy was all we had. Hopefully the Pentagon Pukes don't listen to the MPAA and take that away from us, or we'll be in a world of hurt over there. This deployment sucked pretty bad. Not sure what'll happen if the next one is even worse due to those greedy MoFo's in the MPAA...
Bring on Fight Night. .... RADACTED...... it's the USMC!
And in The Red Corner! Weighing in at minus 128 pounds 3 ounces, or at least that's what their accountant said, it's the RIAA.
And in The Blue Corner! Weighting in at
Ding Ding!
"The studios send reel-to-reel films to the troops"
As if this were not proof enough that the studios and the MPAA are out of touch with reality.
Can we get people across the country to start shipping copied discs to our troops? And then proclaim it proudly?
What are these reel-to-reel movies the movie studios send to the troops? They can hear the audio but they can't see a picture?
Arrest the un-American terrorist-supporter!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I know what you are saying, however from a practical aspect film is an awful choice for any war environment since it degrades so easily... Hell film gets scratched and fades in air-conditioned theaters with a trained projectionist running them. I wonder how long reel to reel film lasts in a tent in the desert (dust, sand, heat)?
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
The thing is, he didn't download anything! He actually bought street bootlegs (of cams and leaks) and copied those. While I am not happy about money being given to the bootleg scum, I think it's funny that CSS was completely useless here.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I will contribute to this legal fund if the MPAA moves against this American.
God bless him!
If you're going to pirate, do it on a big scale. It also helps that he's 92. By the time the MPAA collects from him, it'll just be a claim against his presumably small estate. Go get him, girls! The current laws are heavily skewed in favor of those who distribute content but new technology has made the distribution an almost trivial portion of the process. What we need are new laws that favor the content creators and the content consumers and just give a tiny fee to the middleman distributors (aka MPAA members) who don't actually provide anything useful anymore anyway. This story really highlights that. Here are the thousands of military people who are hungry for the content and there is the mountains of content that would make their lives better with the only obstacle being a lot of laws and rules that 'Big Hy' blasted right by out of compassion for those who serve.
$27,000 each then times 300,000 - would feed a lot of lawyers...and still less than half of the estimated $18 billion in piracy...obviously, they still have to find the other 2 guys..
Nice to see the studios have been keeping up with the times.
Yeah, it's a joke, but it's also awfully revealing about how behind-the-times Hollywood's business practices really are.
And while Mr. Strachmans movies were given to soldiers as a form of charity, studios do send military bases reel-to-reel films, which are much harder to copy, and projectors for the troops overseas.
They're not sending the films out with patrols. They're showing them at base theaters which have more technical support and equipment than anything Main St. can rustle up. Of course, DVDs can be used to entertain small groups or individuals but that would give people more options than what is good for them.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
So, based on the MPAA model for determining damages, doesn't 300K bootleg DVDs represent something approaching the GDP of many small nations? I mean, I haven't done the math, but 300K, times $10 on the shelf at Walmart, means that these companies lost somewhere over $200B.
Considering he received flags, which have a monetary value, he was getting revenue from this operation. This is a criminal enterprise of epic proportions.
This 92 year old man, a patriot, who supported hundreds of thousands of troops who were serving their country...must be the absolute scum of the earth.
But seriously - as long as I can make it patriotic and for a great cause, I can get away with something that has quite clearly crossed the line into "This has got to be illegal, no matter how you cut it"? Doesn't that suggest something is wrong with the law in the first place? What if I was making bootlegs for crippled orphans?
Take it to the limit, everybody to the limit, come on, everybody fhqwhgads.
...piracy caused terrorism. That is what the MPAA said
This just proves my point if you copy and mail them riaa has no clue and can't do much about it. Oh let me guess they are going to put him in jail for the rest of his life for "Helping out our troops in war". Way to go USA, "aint that america for you and me".
Anyone that is against what that man did is a terrorist and should be labelled as an enemy of the US troops.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
... that they're still the greatest generation. That's awesome.
thank you for what you have done, and I am glad you are safe enough to type this
This man is a hero.
Why is it that most of the people that I encounter seem to have been shat from the Sphincter of Mediocrity?
Most (but not all) locations have built up MWR facilities and have access to projectors or a dedicated movie theater. It's not like the MPAA is sending black and white silent films or anything. That said, usually the movies they showed were usually at least 6 months behind the times so not a lot of people really cared.
When I was there, the hottest commodities in the underground movie trading market were usually bootleg cam vids of the most recent releases.
This would be a great chance for the MPAA to stand up and say "We cannot condone pirating videos, but to show our appreciation for our troops, we're going to send 500,000 free DVD movies to the troops". Then in the fine print, it will say "And all 500,000 are copies of Pluto Nash that were gathering dust in a warehouse".
When old guys who tend to be "conservative" are doing things like this, the battle is over. I'm picturing an Iwo Jima like flag planted over the smoking, bombed-out corpse-strewn wastelands of the **AA orgs.
The old guys are relaxing and smoking a J when that flag is properly planted too. You google around, you see plenty of people with gray hair smoking pot. Same deal. The DEA and the **AAs just haven't got the memo yet, so watch out; but they are dead, Dead, DEAD. As soon as a Gen-Ys get into power, so fucking DEAD.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Let's see: According to the DMCA, at $150,000 per offense, times 300,000 DVD's, this would be $4.5 x 10 to the 10th dollars, or roughly a $45 billion dollar penalty. Did I do my math right? Can he take it out of his social security check at $40 per month for roughly the next 100 million years or so?
and send them to my son when he was in Iraq. He said they got passed around a lot. They liked the latest TV stuff even more than movies.
Yeah, it's a joke, but it's also awfully revealing about how behind-the-times Hollywood's business practices really are.
Hollywood distributes movies both digitally and on film. Not all theatres have converted - in fact only a small portion of them are fully digital. So this is a matter of Hollywood serving their customers - if they stopped film distribution, then most cinemas would close their doors.
Now that Kodak is bankrupt, and the future supply of film stock is uncertain, converting cinemas to digital may speed up - but it is still a very expensive process, and most local theatres don't have the cash to do it.
I'm all about sticking it to the MPAA, but just FYI, from a purely legal standpoint, "because it's legal over there" is not a sufficient defense. American citizens abroad are still subject to the laws of the United States. This is how we prosecute people who go overseas for under-age prostitution just because it is legal in whatever crap-hole of a country they visit.
I guess pirating movies and tv shows does aid terrorists after all!
May as well deploy your cryptologic nuke right now and go with a hidden volume truecrypt file named pagefile.sys with some personal files and a sparsely populated porn folder on the decoy volume.
Don't worry. Somebody in the military-industrial complex is working on an adapter so you can watch the film on your laptop or mobile device while cleaning your weapon (as one of the soldiers in TFA stated). There might even be a steampunk version.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I think it's funny that CSS was completely useless here.
Only here? :)
back to the future: where hawkeye and hotlips were still current characters...
One episode before I go to bed every day. Currently on season 5, episode 11 - The Colonel's Horse.
...I have ever heard in my life.
People, we need to take a lesson from this great American. Not only has he figured out how to stick to the MPAA, he figured out how to do it while looking like a fucking HERO. No jury in America would convict this dude.
Bravo!
It brings a tear to my eye. It's so beautiful in its utter simplicity. Why the hell didn't *I* think of this?
Soldiers of freedom: We must follow his example. I want the troops FLOODED with bootleg DVDs. They must never be without the latest movie or TV show.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
"You're old and it would be a PR nightmare to prosecute you. Let's break the law! You can be the face!"
Don't be so ungrateful. You're fighting for the freedom of the corporations as well.
(Man, that was low.)
Now, all the guys who haven't bought a DVD or CD in 10 years can associate their behavior with the philanthropic pirating of a sweet old man. Next up, the feel-good story of a therapist ripping porn DVDs to distract sub-Saharan militias from raping villagers.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Hollywood distributes movies both digitally
I think you'll find the cost & throughput ratio that comes with mailing DVDs to Iraq and Afghanistan to be pretty good, compared with the digital delivery alternatives. Latency's a bitch, though.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And the US Military is guilty of receiving 300,000 counterfeit disks. It isn't as if the guy had an address book of a lot of soldiers to distribute disks to directly.
And if the military accepts reel-to-reels from Hollywood when DVDs or better-yet downloads will do, that's gotta be another crime right committed there. And thus a quandary to consider.
But if I was the judge, Mr. Strachman wouldn't even get a slap on the wrist from me because those soldiers deserve everything we can give them; while reel-to-reel is idiotic in 2012, in a war zone. But those chaplains, oh they'll have Hell to pay for distributing discs with IP far and wide.
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
However, latency of air-mailing region 1 (USA/Canada) DVDs to the Middle East is often less of a female dog than waiting for them to get a proper release in other regions.
Just stupidity by the movie companies. Just send movies over and write it down as a public relations move. Hell, if I were running one of the big movie studios, that's what I'd be doing. How many soldiers in a combat have the option of going to the theater to watch the movie. I'm pretty sure it's none. Setup each remote base with 2 or 3 projection systems and free movies, and reap tons of positive press from helping soldiers' cope with their situation.
If you DON'T pirate, the terrorists will have won!
It's too bad that overly-literal tendencies and skill in programming and IT tend to be correlated.
Almost as soothing as a south park episode. :)
So - ACTUALLY do it for the troops!
For every digital work, if you send a copy to a Troop, with the postal receipt to prove it, what happens? Does he only escape because of some combination of being A, a Vet, B, 92, or C, having spent so much?
Suppose it's like a buck to mail a DVD in a compact mailer - is that a new copyright loophole? Or without those statuses above do you get crushed in flames?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
They know exactly what they're doing. They're just greedy fucks who realize that giving away DVD's means lost sales. By giving them reel-to-reel versions, they know that the distribution remains controlled, as there is approximately zero chance that the R2R version will be copied.
Let me stack two of your D's on top of each other to make a B as in Both, and B as in Bipartisan. The Sonny Bono Act and the DMCA were passed in both houses through unanimous consent procedures.
In what universe could that possibly have a positive result for them?
...or should we form a committee to do it or something?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
"Digital distribution" from Hollywood to movie theaters isn't over the internet -- they're sent on hard drives. (Remember, the movies you see in theaters are much higher resolution than the ones you see at home.) That's still a lot easier than sending reels of film around, though.
The EFF needs to file a suit against Mr.Strachman on behalf of the MPAA!! The law is the law, you know ;)
If the mpaa is really sticking their noses in to that extent, I think I might like to get in on this then. Any idea where one could send DVDs? I only know couple guys who were in the Army decades ago.
I noticed the same in 2005 and 2007 returning from Iraq... in 2005, a light, cursory search by a couple Marines. Nothing invasive. In 2007, we had to travel to Kuwait to have some pogue sea-bees strip search our shit, like we were criminals. We had to go through explosive detectors (we were in combat 2 weeks prior, carrying explosives) and empty out our pockets- as if one of us, after surviving Fallujah, would want to bring down a plane on our way home. That pissed me off. We couldn't bring any ripped movies back with us, and were threatened with laptop searches.
If you pirate movies you support terrorists...
:D
On the other hand if you support the MPAA you're against the troops and for the terrorists...
Won't someone tell me how I'm supposed to feel?
This is at least true in Baghdad: US personnel can purchase pirated movies from merchants right in the greenzone.
I find it hard to believe that the MPAA and RIAA would care to shut down any stream of R&R to the troops that allow them to sit comfortably in their air conditioned offices.
Because as any corrupt government has found, you don't alienate the army. (or a soldier who might come back with mental issues..)
They're not sending the films out with patrols. They're showing them at base theaters
Well, that's great, then. Any of those troops out there at some God-forsaken FOB can just catch a ride back to the main base for their movie nights out. They don't need entertainment in their little tent camps. They have the Taliban for that.
BTW, I'm not picking on you. It's not your idea, and I'm sure you're right about how it really works. I'm a retired Air Force guy, and if I understand correctly, most of us in-country are still pretty much base-bound. If so, this cartoon characterizes the inequities of campaign life: The REMFs get all the good stuff, the guys at the pointy end pretty much get the shaft. And the guy who was the subject of TFA did what it takes to fix this one little inequity. I hope he doesn't catch the shaft himself, since 300,000 counts of willful copyright infringement probably exposes him to something like 300 death sentences.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
The studios send reel-to-reel films to the troops.
Proof just how technologically ignorant they are.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Aww, poor you.
Right--because it's much better to supply digital media and buy every military base expensive new digital projectors than it is to send them film that they can use on existing equipment with no additional expense. If an approach is working, then any change in that approach should go through a proper ROI analysis. Old approaches may be used for too long, but the flip side of making a change without thinking through the implications is worse.
"Digital distribution" from Hollywood to movie theaters isn't over the internet -- they're sent on hard drives. (Remember, the movies you see in theaters are much higher resolution than the ones you see at home.)
Not really. If the digital projector is only 2K, then it's basically the same as Blu-Ray (2048x1080 vs. 1920x1080). If the projector is 4K, then you can get more resolution on the screen. That said, the original (either film or digital) likely does have at least 4K resolution regardless of the projection system.
And, the reason the movies are shipped on hard drives is because they are just a series of JPEG 2000 images, one for each frame. This is essentially like using MPEG-4 and specifying that every frame is an I-frame, which bloats the file size for very little gain in quality.
Court-Martial may need lead to lots of solders have to go on the jail / prison health care plan for life as dishonorable discharge = no VA and solders have pre existing conditions that lock them out of older plans and it's very hard to get a job with a dishonorable discharge
I doubt they were worried that you would bring down a plane just for kicks, but it hasn't been terribly uncommon for troops to return home with a few "keepsakes", like live grenades, that Uncle Sam might not want you to keep on your nightstand. It's nothing personal, and you can blame the troops who came before you if you really take issue with it; they're the ones who kept pushing the envelope until somebody with stars decided that having you searched was the only way to ensure operational security.
I was a Comm troop deployed to an airbase in Pakistan in 2004. While there, the OIC for the Comm flight (Officer in Charge of all communications) thought it would be a brilliant idea to order the "morale" servers shut down. These were essentially just file servers that people had dumped music and movies to as they cycled through, and were pretty much the only access to entertainment we had at a rather isolated base. He was on a kick for going to JAG or IA, and figured shutting down some copyright infringement would be a good point for his transfer and for his oak leaves. What actually happened was even the base commander was pissed, and at a commander's call a couple days later, (aka an official, in uniform, at attention kind of meeting), when he got up to speak, he was booed. Thinking back on it still shocks me to this day. If a single airman ever booed an officer in a commanders call, there'd be UCMJ action, no question. But an entire base of airmen spontaneously and unanimously booed him. It would be akin to the CIO getting booed at a shareholder meeting or press conference, where the board can legally imprison any attendee they care to.
(In the end he stood up and promised a "legal" solution to the problem would be deployed within 24 hours. Myself and my co-server types looked at each other, decided he was talking out of his ass, and just turned the regular servers back on at the appointed time).
Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?
Thank you for your service, and yes, I really mean that.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
at least hosted on US servers
whois -h whois.arin.net 50.116.96.245
OrgName: WEBSITEWELCOME.COM
OrgId: BO
Address: 11251 Northwest Freeway
City: Houston
StateProv: TX
PostalCode: 77092
Country: US
RegDate: 2011-02-16
Updated: 2011-06-09
Ref: http://whois.arin.net/rest/org/BO
every spammer ive seen here is hosted in the US
seems like the new haven for them
... once I reach the "what the fuck are they gonna do, sue me?" age.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
He needs to be fined, heavily.
I think that 1000x the amount of profit he made from this patently illegal, immoral, and unAmerican operation would be fair.
He's going to find out he just doubled our national debt. Intentional copyright infringement = more than statutory damages.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
To give him back his money. I'm not even American and I'd pay.
If they're 4K projectors (4096Ã--2160) yes, but there are a lot of 2K projectors out there (2048x1080) which is only about 7% more resolution than HDTV 1080.
Actually if you read the law, we dont prosecute them for the act, but for the INTENT. They arent arrested for having sex with under-age girls, they are arrested for attempting to leave the country with the intent to have sex with underage girls.
Good-bye
and for exactly the reason stated in the article: "And while Mr. Strachman’s movies were given to soldiers as a form of charity, studios do send military bases reel-to-reel films, which are much harder to copy, and projectors for the troops overseas." They are trading free product for publicity. Do you expect them to trade free product that can later be reused at the cost of a sale or rental or streaming fee?
Not Quad or C-format video, then...
they served in fucking afghanistan!
the "got back from a deployment" part is the main thing. The details that occured are probably something that i dont agree with, but the signing up to serve the country, and do what your told by superiors during this deployment are things that, even if you or I dont see it directly, have an effect on our daily lives. The people that are out there doing this actually are doing a great thing for the rest of us that are sitting comfortably in our air conditioned cubes. Thanking someone for their service, regardless of their personal reasons for signing up, is just something that I do. I do this in airports, and I also do this for firemen and police officers who are directing traffic. Maybe it makes no difference, but maybe someone who is putting up with a lot of shit that is actually making my life easier can feel a bit better, or less shitty, about what they are having to put up with.
please, with all the heart felt sincerity that you dont believe possible from my first thanks to the soldier, take all of your judgement and cynicism, and shove them deep up your ass while shutting the fuck up! and have a nice day
Fuck the troops on Iraq. The benevolence of America’s “troops” is sacrosanct. Questioning their rectitude simply isn’t done. It’s the forbidden zone. We may rail against this tragic war, but our soldiers are lauded by all as saints. Why? They volunteered to partake in this savage idiocy, and for this they deserve our utmost respect? I think not. As a society, we need to discard our blind deference to military service. There’s nothing admirable about volunteering to murder people. There’s nothing admirable about being rooked by obvious propaganda. There’s nothing admirable about doing what you’re told if what you’re told to do is terrible. George Washington warned that the biggest threat to the young United States was in keeping and deploying standing armies.
http://buffalobeast.com/?p=10792
http://anti-imperialism.com/2011/04/04/why-i-still-say-fuck-the-troops/
Just like the forties.
The news doesn't seem to have filtered down to them that there are more convenient ways to consume movies these days.
Much better rendition of that comic, that I found somewhere.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Let's not forget the troops. You know, the guys that are used to godforsaken conditions, are well-trained in the use of explosive, firearms, and various other such things, and will probably be coming home sometime in the not-too-far-future... possibly with PTSD.
Yeah, you probably don't want to piss them off.
This Hero should get a medal of Honor!
First, fuck yeah. I love seeing the MPAA in this position because of how they've bought laws that excessively favor them and then use their warchest to exact retribution that _far_ exceeds the crime in going after people who steal (shhh... freetards...shhhh) their content.
But what I don't like is this whole thing where because this guy did it for a "good cause" we _have_ to let him off. Oooh, we can't challenge the whole "anything for the troops" thing, or "ooh, WW2 vet" sacred cow. Bullshit, the law is the law. What if he walked down to the local Target and started stealing shit, and then paid out of his own pocket to send it to the troops? Again... shhh...freetards. We all know, he isn't "stealing", right? Let's pretend we're all adults and know that deprivation of income is tantamount to stealing and that while information "wants to be free", we don't have to let it.
Of the two, fuck the MPAA far outweighs the other so I love to see this.
Prepare for MPAA to make the biggest dick move in the history of history, in five... four... three...
The studios must be making a bundle off of the IM complex sending stuff to the guys on the ground that they have to discount on DVD.
The MPAA said they weren't aware of his operation. The studios send reel-to-reel films to the troops
How could the MPAA not be aware of this guy copying thousands of their movies? I can't believe his ISP didn't rat him out to the Mafiaa. It's a nice thing he did for the troops. It's a shame the movie industry could not have done the same with their reel to reel tape thingys. Who uses reel to reel? Maybe the mpaa still uses them because their DVD's are too expensive.
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
You can rip, steal, borrow, any movie you damn want. Thats my stance, as a US citizen that thinks our soldiers have done more than enough to earn whatever they want.
You've earned it. Glad you're back.
You actually can, because anyone that volunteers to join our military, has already done enough to deserve every US citizen's respect, especially those that wouldnt dare sign up for the job.
I agree 100%.
I challenge the MPAA to file suit against him. He sent 300,000 DVDs which were probably watched by several times that many people, and it's all verifiable. Contrast that to file sharing suits where an individual user might be sued for making a few movies available to be downloaded a relatively few times from which MPAA has claimed huge losses from each individual user.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
...for they will save us all from ourselves and this pirating scourge. NOT! Hooray for the common man. Hooray for ingenuity. And Hooray for giving succor to our troops. The RIAA can go suck... oops, sorry.
Nothing to see here -- move along now...
If it's not a VFX-heavy show, the film prints might be mastered from 2K footage.
I'm an army guy, so I have a different perspective. EVERYONE needs some entertainment/escape, but nobody's catching a ride to somewhere else for a friggin movie. That's why reel to reel doesn't make sense. The soldiers most in need don't have access to it. Soldiers usually have laptops. In Afghanistan, there are no copyright laws anyway. You can buy pirated movies through local shops by the truckload. They'll even let you bring back your pirated movies through customs as long as they are for personal use. ie, you can't have a bunch of copies of the same movie.
If you really want make a soldier happy, you have remember that they might be at a tiny outpost with a platoon of young men all deployment. They might not have seen a female for months. Yes, send porn.
I really hate responding to an AC and an obvious troll...
But here goes.
The guys and gals that actually went there and did the work weren't asked, they were told. They are just ordinary folk themselves, doing something really, really not fun because they have to, not because they want to. Whatever your opinion of the propriety of their orders, it's not right to treat them as if they decided it would be fun to leave their friends and family for a few months and go get their legs blown off in a hot, dirty, unfriendly place on the other side of the world.
Got a complaint about the orders? Go talk to the people that issued the orders. Start at the top. The buck should dang well start there.
WALSTIB!
It's not illegal in Iraq or Afganistan to make copies of copy written movies. In fact, troops are allowed to keep and import one copy of each pirated material they obtain overseas. Now, Mr. Strachman having made the copies in the US did break the law. Sad thing is though, those copies he made can come back to the US and be completely legit. ... Hopefully, the MPAA will simply leave him alone because the material could have just as easily been obtained from the "Hajji Shop" for $3 a disk.
Select from tblFriends where interesting >= 4;
they served in fucking afghanistan!
And? What exaxtly does that detail, and why should it be lauded?
The details that occured are probably something that i dont agree with, but the signing up to serve the country, and do what your told by superiors during this deployment are things that, even if you or I dont see it directly, have an effect on our daily lives.
Yes, it has an effect on our daily lives. You assume that it's a positive one.
The people that are out there doing this actually are doing a great thing for the rest of us that are sitting comfortably in our air conditioned cubes
No, they are not. They are risking their lives in a pointless imperialistic endeavor that benefits no one except the masters of industry.
please, with all the heart felt sincerity that you dont believe possible from my first thanks to the soldier, take all of your judgement and cynicism, and shove them deep up your ass while shutting the fuck up! and have a nice day
Please, with all the heart felt sincerity you refer to above take your naive credulous militarism and shove them deep up your ass while shutting the fuck up. And don't have a nice day, military apologists like you have the blood of innocents on your hands.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
They don't need entertainment in their little tent camps. They have the Taliban for that.
That gave me a mental image of taliban dancing cabaret...
You can look up the phone numbers for all the NationalGuard and Reserve armories in your state via google. Give one a call and let them know you want to start sending care packages to deployed units. They'll know who is gone or leaving soon and how to get in touch. Usually the FRG/FSG (family support group) poc will be the best person to talk to. That way you can lump yours with theirs and prevent a duplication of effort.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
I believe my attitude about a great many things will be: "Heh, fuck you!"
You're a bad ass. Team America - Fuck Yea. The Taliban also served in Afghanistan. If "service" is your criteria, do you thank them also? I'm not supporting the Taliban, but "service" should not be the criteria for thanks.
On a related note...if you feel safer and more comfortable because we're sending people halfway around the world to kill others...in our quest to control our interests in the world...then just keep smoking the good stuff.
I've been thanked for my service as well. But there's nothing I've done that merits that kind of thanks.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Will be the next headline. This is clearly a vicious, dangerous criminal who's putting hundreds, nay thousands of people out of work in Hollywood! The MPAA will be forced to sue the man for everything he's got and get him jailed for the rest of his live.
I'm sorry for being a complete and utter tool in this regard, but aren't there prostitutes around? Perhaps not at the tiniest post, but I could imagine some entertaining local girl catering to the crowd?
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Business as usual in China and no one in the US gets life in prison for it.
[gt] pinky [lt]
meh filter
It isn't Vietnam. The culture is different. And you wouldn't want to touch a local if you had the chance. Most of locals don't exactly live up to our hygiene standards to say the least. Most prostitution is of our own soldiers. It depends on the level of discipline in the unit whether that will happen. But combat units usually don't have females. My company did have a few females that were medics and other odd jobs, but transferred them out to avoid problems. Definitely the right call.
Sounds about right. Each imaginary ticket sold (ie, person who watches a movie) is a donation to the war effort. Tax write-offs galore. The celluloid reels and fixed seating capacities of whatever auditorium is used merely provide proof of the magnitude of this donation. It's the gift that keeps on giving.
$
Hey guys, we should follow in his footsteps! We could pirate movies and give them away for free to those in the military, but this guy already has it covered. No, we’ll do one better - we’ll pirate movies AND video games, music, and any other easy to pirate goods. But why stop there? We could give away to those with less than fortunate circumstances. We’ll give it away to those with leukemia, the poor, single mothers from abused households, people with clinically diagnosed depression, and the list just goes on and on. We’ll be generating so much good will, no one could possibly be upset with us. Content owners will practically be begging to shake our hands saying, “Wow, how come we never thought of this before?”
2K resolution at 16:9 is 2048x1152 not 2048x1080.
Sounds like even more tax write-offs to me. Ship your old worn-out reels to the troops, blame degradation of valuable film on the environment. These MPAA crooks have no shame.
$
Is no one thinking about the mass scale of law breaking here? These are people sworn to uphold the laws of the country, and yet everyone here (and there) is using all sorts of justifications for something that is essentially breaking the rule of law. If they cannot be expected to stay within the rules for something as trivial as a few movies, can they really be trusted to hold up the rule of law when the stakes are much higher?
What kind?
base theaters which have more technical support and equipment than anything Main St. can rustle up.
Not that this is very important to the topic at hand, but as a former member of our military that spent 5 years overseas, I can tell you that the base theaters pretty much all suck, the sound is awful and the projection is worse, and we went off-base wherever it was possible to watch movies instead. Of course, it's not possible to do that in Iraq or Afghanistan. Just don't tell me about "technical support and equipment" - even if we had it, it sure didn't go into making our base theater any better. Those places blow.
I've learned that they're worthless, so I don't read AC comments anymore.
"Yes, send porn." .... ..
What kind?
Interracial, rape, hardcore, fake, rape, soft, butt, bush, bald, ginger, stocking, straightforward
What kind of porn/war do you like?
No offense taken, it's a legitimate question. I was in Iraq for two tours. When we left the FOB (Forward Operating Base), we were in enemy territory. I could not imagine a Marine or Soldier going off to get his jollies in his down time. The chance of being abducted and getting your head cut off on video was too great, not to mention the inevitable IEDs. But all this aside, almost all the locals had exotic parasites. Our medical staff were constantly treating them. Again, I have known plenty of dumb Marines in my day, but I cannot imagine anyone dumb enough to go out, risk his life and come back with worms or worse. But I do remember in about 2008, they busted some female Sailors or Air Persons for running a brothel on the base. They got caught trying to take a seabag full of cash back home and couldn't explain where it came from.
It would be fairly trivial to set up, and the studios would have an incentive to donate DRM'd disks instead of having thousands of bootlegs floating around Afghanistan.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Here's a Guilty Gear themed play by play of how that argument went:
Heaven or Hell!
Let's Rock!
Destroyed!
fuck that old man, dvds, mpaa and the military.
you have to be one dumb son of a bitch to join the military
LC was a pompous ass and your LC quotation has no relevance for what you're saying.
"Use simple words instead of needlessly complex ones" (the essence the message of your quotation) does not equal "hyperbole" (which is what you're lambasting).
You dick, you.
Do you really think that George Washington or Thomas Jefferson couldn't have had someone quietly disappeared if they wanted to?
I find it easy to understand. The laws they have lobbied for have punishments that are *way* out of proportion to the harm. Steal a single DVD, you're charged with petty theft. Download a bittorrent of the same movie (and leave it seeding for a while) and you can be charged with 1000 counts of distribution and owe many tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
"Yes, send porn." .... ..
What kind?
Interracial, rape, hardcore, fake, rape, soft, butt, bush, bald, ginger, stocking, straightforward
What kind of porn/war do you like?
I think we all know what kind you like...
Well, willful copyright infringement (willfulness is the actual standard; here it basically means with knowledge or recklessly without knowledge) is a very low standard (basically any direct infringement case worth suing over will qualify easily) and is only relevant with regard to statutory damages. Willful infringement merely raises the upper limit of the damages that may be awarded from $30,000 to $150,000 per eligible work. So not more than statutory damages, just potentially higher statutory damages. (Or the rightsholder could opt for actual damages and profits, but it wouldn't happen in a case like this -- only where one member of the industry sues another does that have more potential for big awards)
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I would have hated porn. I prefer to remove the thought and stay busy. Seing hot naked women doing the nasty would have made is far more difficult.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
If they can take a child and a grandma to court why not this chap? Would love to see MPAA take on Big Hy' Strachman in a court case. I believe the right quote would be "let the hilarity ensue" if it does.
And why not? Sure, the 92 y/o veteran spending his own money to support troop morale overseas is a lawyer's dream version of a sympathetic client. But the 92 y/o veteran part of it isn't essential! Anyone spending their own time and money to support the morale of troops overseas is going to be a sympathetic client.
With a large number of people openly, blatantly doing this, it can force the MPAA's position into the public spotlight. This is an election year, and this kind of popular sentiment is the sort of thing that can catalyze legislation --incumbents love the opportunity to pander to popular sentiment, and the support-the-troops angle is such an appetizing bonus that's it'd practically be like wrapping a proposed bill in bacon. Or a flag.
Step 1: a bunch of people do exactly what this guy is doing.
Step 2: online discussion ensues. (This guy is already popping up in my aunts' f/b feeds, so it's not much of a stretch.)
Step 3: the more organized and well-heeled of we the unwashed masses bring this to the attention of our local legislators.
Step 4: the legislators jump at the opportunity to draft various bills proscribing legal relief for this kind of activity.
Step 5: Bills are debated, compromises reached, bill opposition gets demonized in the public eye.
Step 6: MPAA takes a very serious blow to the legal structure that has propped them up for far too long.
Before the flames start, take this into account: I started selling photographs in 1967. I worked as a cinematographer at the Lake Placid Olympic Winter Games. So I know a little bit about this.
Other than Kodachrome (RIP) digital vs film is basically a push, and in many ways digital is superior. The film image is composed of tiny grains of silver (thus the expression that a photo is "grainy") which are very analogous to a pixel. If you've ever sat down in the first row or two of a theater you can actually watch the grains swim around on the screen. Unless of course the fact that your hand is down your date's pants is too distracting. Kodachrome is a wholly different process, but it was never used for motion pictures -- movies are shot on color negative film not positive (or reversal) like Kodachrome. The reason has to do with post-production processes, specifically striking release prints to send to the theaters across the country, and not the image. Home movies and TV stations used reversal because there wasn't really any post-production.
Digitally, we can manipulate those pixels pretty much individually to get color balance or hue and saturation that we want. With film, we use lots of lab tricks.
Oh so it merely raises it from $9 billion US as a penalty to only $45 billion US. In other words the penalty they can try to extract will equal a substantial cost of the war itself. Yeah, its totally reasonable as a penalty :P
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Talk about being obsolete, trying to introduce this romantic metaphor into the War on Terror. "We all gathered around Tom, there in the foxhole. With the ceaseless mortar fire above our heads, no one thought we would make it through the night, let alone for the 162 minutes it would take to watch a pirated copy of Avatar on Tom's laptop."
very little gain in quality
Not when your screen is several meters high. Gradient banding becomes VERY evident there (4:2:0? Hell no!), among other things.
Hold on to your seats and check to see if my math is correct. I believe there is a $100,000 fine and/or 5 years in jail per offense for illegally copying a dvd... SO...that would be $300,000 X $100,000 = $30,000,000,000.00 and/or 1.500.000 years in jail. Which would you choose? I bet even if they did get that money from the Vet, they would still claim that they lost money from piracy. The next question, can the troops or the person who received or distributed the movies be fined also?
OBVIOUSLY this man is a moral derelict and in fact, an economic terrorist. I demand that RIAA go after him with everything they have, in fact, I think they're COMPELLED to unless they want their inaction to be used as evidence against them in some future trial.
I want RIAA lawyers on this yesterday. With that many pirated movies and his advanced age, your average RIAA lawyer will barely have to lift his nose up off his coke mirror to get him sent to prison for the rest of his life.
Also, seize everything he's worked for his entire life and give it to the Hollywood moguls.
We need to make an example of people who think they can flout the law like this.
Or maybe send DVDs. Costs less to produce, costs less to ship, and can be used by individual soldiers or shown in common areas with existing briefing equipment.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
I think I may start skipping the comments and reading the articles now. Seriously
simple, fast homepage with your links: http://www.ngumbi.com/
Right. That's certainly fair, women having to pay the price for men not being able to control their urges.
Saddam was removed because he was playing spite with the US by taking euros, instead of dollars. Oil was simply the (massive) product underneath.
Reel - to - reel is MPAA / Hollywood's little way of saying f- you to the troops. Hollywood is totally perverse in the military way of life.
In Afghanistan, there are no copyright laws anyway.
Local laws don't matter. Just ask Richard O'Dwyer. It's interesting though that there's still no www.thepiratebay.af server; it's only $250 for 5 years
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
Right--because it's much better to supply digital media and buy every military base expensive new digital projectors than it is to send them film that they can use on existing equipment with no additional expense.
When I worked with the military 15 years ago they had digital projectors out the wazoo. AFAIK, they did not have or use any 35 millimeter projectors. You may find this hard to believe but the US military is very advanced technically. They actually find it useful to use digital presentations to communicate with the troops.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
Do not underestimate the bandwidth to Afghanistan of a 92-year-old duplicating DVDs in his New York apartment.
"But I do remember in about 2008, they busted some female Sailors or Air Persons for running a brothel on the base. They got caught trying to take a seabag full of cash back home and couldn't explain where it came from."
Hehe, I remember that; funniest shit I heard all deployment. I give them credit for trying though. Seriously, this WW2 vet probably kept up morale more than anything (save for a can of stateside dip / smokes). Living in the desert for 7 months at a time really blows goats. So he gets a personal thank you from me.
Exactly. Just the same as oppressive dress codes and micromanagement of our time logging at your typical office, those rules are in place because some jerkass had to take advantage of the lax rules to the point that the bosses *had* to put a stop to it. And the rule has to be enforced equally for all employees or you are in line for a discrimination suit.
That moron who took a two hour lunch along with three 30-minute smoke breaks, or the one who showed up to a meeting with bankers in cutoffs and flip-flops, or the returning vet who just had to wave around that captured Afghani assault rifle (with a fully loaded clip)... they're the ones responsible for more oppressive rules, not the top brass.
It is likely to be substantially less than that. Statutory damages are calculated per work, not per infringement. Unless he copied 300,000 different movies, some of them will be the same and not get counted twice. Had he only made 300,000 copies of the same movie (better have a lot of replay value) it would only be one infringement for the purpose of calculating statutory damages. You may want to look over 17 USC 504, which is the relevant statute.
Anyway, I don't recall saying it was reasonable.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
They should make a movie about him. And send it overseas to the troops of course.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Alright. Thanks!
As opposed to women paying the price for being stuck hanging around men who are unable to control their urges?
It's called mirroring or proxy servers. The military could if they were so tied to spending billions of stuff they can throw away, burn or blow up, by a handful of petabyte servers and make available free to service personal for streaming, all the content available.
The military ie government is in the position of not paying per stream but per content and ensure even 1 DVD can be legally watched by thousands of military personal 'nearly' simultaneously by ensuring that only one person is watching a particular milli-second of content at the same, thus ensuring only one copy is available for viewing at one time.
So in this case slack backward government and military. RIAA/MPAA types just being the self serving psychopaths we expect them to be, nothing new.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Yeah, you can.
I don't really understand what my wife went through when she had our daughter, but I'm thankful to her and appreciate what she did, you stupid fuc*!!!! Similarly, I could mention my father, my mother, every real friend I've had, combat veterans, and a bunch of other people. Just because I can't quantify it or understand it, doesn't mean Im not thankful or appreciative.
since these weren't studio dvd releases, no sales were lost. soldiers were in foreign countries where they couldn't have attended the movies in person. it's the right choice not to sue the old fart.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
This vet sending the DVDs to the soldiers in field needs an award of somekind, probably to the extent a a soldier returning from field today who achieved great.
This 92yo guy has been very essential to the war effort by keeping up the morale of the soldiers by providing a glimpse of normal life.
My respect goes to him, for taking care "of his own" without any kind of need to do so. He's a good guy, and world needs more people like him.
Unfortunately, at the current regime it's more likely he will be sued.
Umm the guy is already dead. He is 94??????
You need to have a look at truecrupt
I'm also an army guy. Here's my perspective: the garbage DVD's you can buy pirated locally are often filmed by someone sitting in a theater with a concealed video camera, so you can hear the assholes in the theater talking and coughing and yaking on their cell phones, recorded along with the film, and frequently a blurry figure will pass in front of the image as someone walks in front of the guy with the camera poking out of his jacket... but even more often, the DVD's that had 5 or 9 movies on them also came with a healthy dose of VIRUSES or other malware. After seeing what happened to a buddy's computer,I wouldn't put anything like that anywhere near my laptop.
So it's good to hear someone was making clean pirated copies and sending them out, because you're right, it's not like every little POS FOB has a movie theater.
I second that. Sent from New Zealand.
Yeah, it's a joke, but it's also awfully revealing about how behind-the-times Hollywood's business practices really are.
Hollywood distributes movies both digitally and on film. Not all theatres have converted - in fact only a small portion of them are fully digital. So this is a matter of Hollywood serving their customers - if they stopped film distribution, then most cinemas would close their doors.
It's nothing to do with formats, it's to do with how people consume their media these days.
Hollywood wants people to get up and go to special places on a timetable they decide. Meanwhile the people have screens in their own houses and prefer to watch when they feel like it.
Same with music: People don't want CDs that they have to sit in a special place in the house to listen to. People want the ten latest songs in a small device they can carry with them.
This is why "pirates" are prospering - they give people what they want.
Obligatory comics and GIFs
No sig today...
I generally agree with you, but absolute rule of law means this guy doesn't get a free pass for his actions.
Unless... he gets sued. Public outcry. Sh*t hits the fan. Copyright laws are changed. But I doubt that would happen.
So when's they MPAA going after these gun-toting thieves? (Remember, copyright infrigement is apparently theft). Maybe that wouldn't go so well - perhaps after a "War* on Drugs" in America and "War on Terrorism" (or was it the "War on Common Sense"?) in Afghanistan and Iraq, we can finally switch on our TVs at night and see newsreel of a war on something worth killing - the MPAA.
Hey, a guy can dream. And it's a pretty nice dream :)
* Yes, I know, not a real 'war'. Meh.
"This is essentially like using MPEG-4 and specifying that every frame is an I-frame, which bloats the file size for very little gain in quality."
Or essentially like using MJPEG.
They are risking their lives in a pointless imperialistic endeavor that benefits no one except the masters of industry.
fwiw, I thank service-people whether or not there is active fighting under way (e.g. since long before iraq++ ).
Their service is a worthwhile thing in its own right.
Now the policy which focuses and aims that service is another thing entirely; very different.
It makes perfect sense to me why Ron Paul gets more than twice as many donations from military staff as the other republican candidates.
(hint: this is a an attempt to influence policy.)
*shrug* Maybe humans are, in general, simply not smart enough to shape a mental model where those concepts are different and distinct yet related. *sigh* If true, that would explain a lot. (And if true, then getting upset about it is like getting upset about plate tectonics.)
because they're going to turn his story into a feel-good movie about an old veteran who spent his pensions legally purchasing thousands of movies to send to troops overseas which reinvigorates the financially straining movie studios who go on to make The Perfect Movie that's so encouraging to the weary troops who watch it that it helps them finally win the war and bring peace to the entire planet. I won't give away the ending, except that it involves a 3D CGI USO show in a stadium housing every troop cut to show them cheering wildly at each celebrity cameo and performance that lead to world peace, approx. time 8.5 hrs.
Just be sure to keep this comment in the archives so I can sue for copyright infringement after they make it.
And, the reason the movies are shipped on hard drives is because they are just a series of JPEG 2000 images, one for each frame.
I suspect that the reason they're shipped on hard drives is that they find it easier to track a physical object, and they're worried about copyright infringement if they start to send them over the Internet in a way that may or may not have security holes.
Come to China/Thailand/Indonesia/Vietnam/Cambodia/Malaysia/Taiwan. Copy-protection free DVD for USD 1, or USD 0.50 if you look like one of us ;-)
I suspect that the reason they're shipped on hard drives is that they find it easier to track a physical object
An optical disk that can hold 50GB is also a physical object, and would give excellent quality even at 4K resolutions using a lossy (but still high-quality) codec.
and they're worried about copyright infringement
If they are worried about infringement, then sending what amounts to a lossless copy of the original master of the movie to hundreds (or thousands) of theaters where the projector is likely run by a teenager with decent computer skills seems like the last thing they want to do.
They don't need entertainment in their little tent camps. They have the Taliban for that.
That gave me a mental image of taliban dancing cabaret...
This is just one step away from a Bugs Bunny cartoon.
Firemen are fine, up until they game the pension system. Soldiers get a pass, naturally. But cops? No. Those fuckers could have stood up to the prison industrial system a long time ago, and put an end to it. They are the one group of ordinary citizens who the politicians would not be able to ignore, but they sold us out. And for bitter dregs. Fuck the police!
Social Credit would solve everything...
That's not a handbasket. That's a bucket: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUiutKkMeiA
Watch out for the fat guy in the purple t-shirt.
Social Credit would solve everything...
thank you. the law and the law enforcement are not the same thing. This applies to pretty much every aspect of life.
Or, more likely, they're being authoritarian douchebag assholes because they can, and because no one feels like stopping them. Like how OBL is dead and you have a greater chance of dying from a fall in your bathtub than from a terrorist attack, yet not only have we not gotten rid of the Patriot Act, we've got even worse laws now (NDAA) and a spiffy new NSA domestic spy center going up in the Southwest.
Maybe advanced magic prevents MPEG-4 compression artifacts from being just as annoying as MPEG-2 compression artifacts, but it would seem shortsighted to devalue what is supposed to be the premium movie viewing experience (digital projectors, in a cinema) by using consumer grade compression. I see enough melty faces on standard definition DVB-T broadcasts that I remain skeptical about the invisibility of MPEG-4 compression, especially when the result is blown up to huge proportions and the film has lots of special effects. I am not going to a cinema to look at blocky crap where the compression algorithm ran out of bits for the breaking waves or rushing water or full-on special effects.
Anyway, all of that P- and B-frame stuff is just to get the bit rate down to the point where a movie fits on a nice, cheap-to-produce piece of optical media sold to individual households. The economic equation is totally different for the media that is used to exhibit a film to (hopefully!) many people, and it's not like making a physical print and shipping it around was very cheap either.
-Snorbert, somewhere in the antipodes
Right. They'd have probably been raped, since men are the only ones who can't control their urges.
I'm the real Vorokrytin P. Winterbuttocks.
I challenge the MPAA to file suit against him. He sent 300,000 DVDs which were probably watched by several times that many people, and it's all verifiable.
Bringing copyright infringement charges against a 92 year old man providing entertainment for troops in a war zone. If the *AA's think SOPA and such brought an outrage...wonder what they would think about a jury acquitting said 92 year old man helping out US troops. The news gets out and spreads against them...won't matter who owns the copyright or how they attempt to spin it. Not too hard to not buy junk music or stay away from cinemas. Even worse is when parents/grandparents refuse to take the teenagers out to the movies and older young adults quit patronizing as well...all because a 92 year old man sent movies to troops in a war zone.
Anyway...with the way the justice system moves...he could very well die before any judgement is rendered. As long as he dies penniless...0+0=0
Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia. - Charles M. Schulz
How do soldiers in Afghanistan make your life easier? I must be missing something here.
Exactly. This is very well documented, admitted to by the perpetrators, and clear numbers of viewers. And they can probably sue US Army chaplains for the piracy too. US Military budgets should be easily able to cover a few hundred billion dollars in damages for the movie industry.
The fact that some see it as partiotic, does not make it legal or take away the hundreds of billions of dollars in damage suffered by the movie industry.
, this cartoon [mudvillegazette.com] characterizes the inequities of campaign life:
OMG that so tells the truth. As a Marine stationed in Okinawa (as many of us are at some point in time), I visited the Kadena air base e-club one night and ended up hanging out with some Kadena airmen (SPs). I went back to their barracks and the luxury surprised me. They had carpeted floors, all the alcohol in their rooms that they wanted, common rooms with those glass vending machines with slices of pie spinning around in them (freshly made pies, not pre-packaged, last 100 years pies by hostess), and said that paid maids to clean their rooms for them. I was just schocked. So this comic made me laugh. Thanks for that.
On the entertainment note. When we slept in tents that housed 10 or more of us at a time (when deployed to the field), we had one tv in the tent for which we all watched whatever movies we had to play on them. So, having a lot of DVDs to choose from would be a good thing indeed. There typically is not some full screen theatre in which to enjoy; at least, not in any Marine Corps I've ever been in. This is while deployed in the field and doesn't include permanent bases for which such services may exist but such services were typically on very permanent bases for which service men/women's familes also lived.
they send the 8mm reel to reel. so it can't be easily copied. it has the annoying ghost logo image on it saying what studio sent it and stuff.