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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
“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."
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...
Which, of course, is why they won't go after him. But I wonder if inaction in this case would work against them in future cases?
It is unwise to ascribe motive
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?
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...
"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.
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; }
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.
Do you seriously think that the general public would actually stop their precious movie-going habits just because the MPAA does something unpopular?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
They'll probably try to write off all those "lost sales" as "donations" on their taxes and get a nice fat donation themselves from the taxpayers.
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?
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.
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? :)
...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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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?
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!
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
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...
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.
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.
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...
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?
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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.
$
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.
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.