Dear Fuckwads (AKA Anti Pirat Gruppen (Anti Piracy Group)),
I fucking hate you. I would like to take your fucking organization, wrap it around my fucking knee and shove the Eiffel tower up where the sun can’t fucking reach!
Yesterday I went to the fucking cinema and put down my hardearned good fucking cash to see the Soder-fucking-bergh movie Ocean’s Twelve. Now I enjoyed the fucking movie alright, but fuck me over and call me a girl’s name if you didn’t once again place a large intimidation ad in front of the fucking movie?! What the fuck?!
Here I am, paying money to see the movie, and you’re telling me not to pirate it?! Where you born in a stupid-tree? Did your mother not like you? Does your cat not like it when you stroke it in its special place?! Whatever the reason, you do realize that you’re provoking me to download movies right? You do realize that by now I’m getting sick and fucking tired of going to the cinema, paying money to see movie, overpriced-Coke, overpriced-candy, overpriced-popcorn only to be fed your fucking bullshit, 20 minutes of trailers, commercials? Oh and most of the movies are half-assed remakes of golden classics anyway!
Seriously, I know you like your job and your position of power over eager teenagers, but when I become emperor of the world you’re fucking FIRED!
Oh, and one more thing: When you’re trying to be intimidating by having a silent (uuuhhhh) black background with white text following all the colorful and loud trailers, try not to use MS Comic Sans as your font. Take some of the money you’ve taken from dorm rooms across the country and hire someone to do your PR and throw out your Powerpoint license.
You fucking morons, thank you for making the choice for piracy so much easier.
Kind regards,
Michael Heilemann
Related
Ban Comic Sans
Comic Sans Appreciation Society
The Curse of Comic Sans
Totally agree, bought I Robot for my dads for Christmas and at the start of it is a 8 minute commercial about piracy and downloading movies… hello idiotic film company I have bought the fucking DVD!!
Nice.. I coulden’t be more in tune with your opinion. How was the movie though? I’ve heard some very different reviews.
Whilst I agree, the anti-piracy thing is a joke. It’s not only a joke, its bloody annoying. Everytime I play a DVD I have to watch the anti-piracy rolling credits. I can’t even skip it in DVD player OSX!
I do have something against your comment. I don’t like the commercials, but I do like the trailers. They’re always fun to watch and in some cases – the trailers are better than the films! Commercials are also annoying.
I have an unlimited cinema card for a year, I see quite a few films. I have just learnt to put up with the anti-piracy
True Toby, trailers can be okay. I’m merely protesting against the 20-30 minutes it takes from the time where the movie officially starts, and until it actually starts. Sure trailers are nice, but they’re still just ads…
It’s like buying a Disney DVD (where the 10 or so trailers auto player before you get to the menu) you’re basically paying money to be indoctrinated…
That’s not even all! I wasn’t allowed to take my laptop into the cinema…. at the same fuckin movie! They said it was a rule of the distributer of the movie and the reason was that I could make a copy of the movie with my laptop or something….
Now I now my powerbook has great powers, powers that go beyond the imagination of most of the people, but come on! It still can’t copy a movie from a large cinema screen…. jesus. Morons.
And the movie sucked btw. Amsterdam was cool though.
Ulrich, I was well entertained, though it wasn’t quite as charming as the first one.
There’s nothing comical about piracy :-)
I agree. Trailers and ads are annoying and unnecessary. And I like your new writing style…17 instances of fuck…nobody can beat that!
There is nothing comical about piracy :-)
P.S. If I use the single-quote character in my comment, I get an SQL error, and the ability to SQL-inject.
Yep, I fully agree… Some people should be frogmarched onto a tarmac in the middle of nowhere and shot in the back of the head simply because they deserve nothing better…
Actually, there’s a Swedish version of the anti-piracy commercial on I, Robot too (not 8-minutes long though). It is the first time I’ve ever seen such a thing on a Swedish edition movie. Fucking annoying!
I could take aaaalll of what you just describe, however much and loud I might complain, but the fucking cinema-talkers can just die, go to hell, and then be anally raped by Saddam Hussein and Satan in some sick and twisted love triangle.
Cinema talkers … I don’t even know where to begin. Empty headed 13 year olds with mobile phones going off, drunken, unshaven men who insist on talking to their drunken, unshaven friends, or women who spend the entire intermission complaining about how bad the movie is and yet do not leave when they have the chance, only to continue complaining when the movie continues (yes, Ms. Blond and Ms. Brunette during 13 Days those 4 years ago, I’m talking to YOU).
Roughly 50% of all times I go to see a show, I have to ask someone to stay quiet. I don’t get it. Do these people not realize others are watching, and perhaps even enjoying, the show they are ruining?
To me, that is one of the major reasons I download or rent DVDs instead of go to overpriced shows at the cinemas. At least there, in the comfort of my own home, I can get to actually watch the movie.
I agree that there is nothing comical about piracy, the comedy is just in the way the record companies and movie studios have decided to combat it.
I haven’t been to the cinema as much as I would have liked, and therefore don’t have any strong feelings against the anti-piracy ads there. What burns me, however, is the record companies.
Since it came out I have kept away from CD compatible music disc with copy protection, occasionally looking at them at the store and noting the big red mark next to macintosh. In september, however, some of our friends bought maroon 5 – songs for jane for us which (according to the icons) didn’t support macs and had preripped audio for Windows. When I popped it into our eMac I was greeted by two cd icons, one containing the preripped music (in some weird format) and one containing the cd itself (as a series of aiff files as most mac users know audio cds). I opened iTunes and imported the cd without problems, played the imported songs without problems, and have now transferred them to my iPod (without problems). Maybe “macs are not supported” means that there is no copy protection on macs?
Fortunately, several record companies, including Sony, have gone away from copy protection, which for cds will hopefully go the way of the a-track.
Sorry to fly off on a rant about music in your Anti-piracy in theatres entry, but it’s still Anti Pirat Gruppen so I guess it’s close enough.
Is shall say one thing: http://alienlovespredator.com/index.php?id=57
Watching a Video or DVD in the UK is so great as well…
Very catchy… NOT!
You can’t skip it on your DVD, but ‘for some reason’ pirates are able to get rid of all that crap. There’s a plus to downloading a copy from the internet, see?
Oh oh, not good! Better warn the WP crew if this is standard behaviour. This can be resolved by wrapping string variables in the mysql_escape_string() function.
I second Stewart’s comment. I can’t understand these supposedly “impacting” adverts about anti-piracy when you have bought the DVD! Do they think that when people rip the DVDs they rip that bit too?
The movie industry can suck my nutsack.
I completely agree with your post. The anti-piracy trailer in the beginning of movies are often just annoying. I especially hate the one where one of the special effects stuntmen are talking about how by pirating a movie, people are taking money from hard working stuntmen like him.
I don’t claim to know anything about how the movie industry pays stuntmen and special effects technicians, but I’m almost sure they’re not payed on a royalty system. They get paid a certain amount for doing a certain scene. No matter how well the movie does in the theatre or on dvd, I don’t think they get any MORE money.
Please correct me if i’m wrong.
I totally agree about movie previews – thought it’s actually been some time since I’ve seen one of those ‘I worked hard on this movie, and do you want me to starve? Don’t priate this movie’ things.
I hate going into a movie and seeing 20 minutes of previews. Some of my friends like them – I do like seeing a few of them – but enough is enough!!!
same thing here in Portugal: a 30 second ad telling you that movie piracy is a crime. And selling dvd’s for 30 euros isnt???
Michael,
You bring about a valid point and I agree with you but at the same time I think one should acknowledge that most illegal film copies come from 1 of 3 ways: someone sits in the theatre with a video camera and tapes the whole flick, someone patches in a computer to a digital projector system and simply has the movie feed onto their hard drive, or they rip it from a DVD.
In all three cases, you have each copy impregnated with those annoying anti-piracy movies. Granted, if someone is going to do piracy better, they should just cut out the anti-piracy bit, but most won’t. Thus, the APG has their slow bludgeon-you-with-a-rubber-hose campaign being distributed with the pirated material. (funny aside: A friend of mine saw that ad so many times with all of his legit DVDs and in a movie theatre, he actually wanted to go and download some illegal flicks just for having pissed him off)
Ultimately, the best would be to target the pirates with the ad and leave hard-working legit buyers as you and myself alone to enjoy the flick. I don’t think that’s possible in the end, but everyone has to dream.
Denis
In the new Wired magazine, there’s a great article on Bit Torrent and how the MPAA are gunning for it’s creator.
The good thing about trailers is that they give you some slack to get to the movie a bit late and not miss the feature!
Denis, there are a few things in your view that’re entirely skewed, let me just fill out the blanks:
While it is true that people do take cameras into movie theaters and film movies, nobody cares about those. They suck, nobody wants to waste their time with them. Their ‘credit’ within the underground so to speak, is very low.
The other two ways are valid methods as such, but if you think the anti piracy stuff stays in the versions leaked onto the Internet, then you’re wholy wrong… These people are very meticulous and not just some random college guy ripping and encoding his copy of Dude Where’s My Car?
Aha, you hit the nail on the head man. And, I wholeheartedly agree with you.
Aha, that made me laugh.
This is similar to the whole software activation thing. Pirates get around it so the only people who it drives to the edge of insanity are the people who just spent £5000 on 6 copies of Quark Xpress and can’t get them activated… I love Apple for not sticking activation in the Mac OS, as windows gets more restrictive in this regard less vaguely intelligent people will use it, I mean, pirates can get around the activation, it just pees off the guy who paid for a copy like a moron.
Film trailers don’t annoy me as I never see films at the cinema anymore but I don’t see how these ‘don’t pirate this film’ will stop people, if anything it’ll increase piracy in my opinion raising awareness: no such thing as bad publicity. Everyone knows piracy is illegal but maybe if we stop waving ‘piracy piracy free free’ in everyones faces it might actually slow theft. I don’t know.
DVD ‘not permitted’ things do annoy me, thankfully you can skip that with the ‘jump to last played’ or whatever it’s called after you’ve watched it the once. Who the hell reads those anti-piracy messages? Certainly not pirates unless they want a good laugh.
The current UK anti-piracy adverts really seem to be trying to play on the current ‘fear culture’ that we seem to be experiencing. I’m reffering to the ‘look out, terrorists are everywhere’ sort of thing. In this case it’s “Video-piracy funds terrorism, and will destroy our society!”
They need to get a grip.
Fear is one of the most effective control mechanisms ever used by world governments. It got Bu$h reelected didn’t it?
I’m a professional photographer and I walked into the movie with one of my gear bags (this is London) and the guy says, can I see your bag, so I knew what he was getting at so I lifted it up for him to see. So he says I need to see inside it. Why? I ask (long queue forming behind me now). In case you have recording equipment. I said that it was a digital camera (D-SLR) so he wants to see. I get it out. Anyone would have thought he’d found the Osama of film piracy. Manager comes over. Sorry sir, we’ll have to take that while you watch the film. Not happening I said (it’s worth £6k). I can’t let you into the film then sir. I try to explain that 29.97fps for full motion video is not within the capability of the camera nor have I any interest in piracy. I refused to give up the camera, they refused to let me in. I demanded a refund and they told me to go to the booth – there were 20 people in the queue. From my look, he knew I was not to be fucked with now so did a refund quickly. I got the camera out, took a photo of the morons and then sent it to 20th Century Fox with a 2 page letter nominating them for ‘fucktards of the month’ and thanking them for the enjoyable movie experience. I didn’t use profanity but the letter was dripping with contempt. Know how they responded? They sent me two free movie tickets and a smarmy response. I returned the tickets with a ‘thanks but no thanks’ and said that I’d prefer to download the movie from the web, at least I’d be able to drink beverages of my choice, eat snacks of my choosing and not have to put up with the attentions of their retarded staff who are incapable of exercising any degree of discretion. I’m sure they’re gonna investigate me.
I just read an advert in my local video rental shops leaflet that says
I should think that was the least of the problems for those immigrants smuggled in my people traffickers.
LOL The anger is thriving well in you, my young apprentice Michael. Looks like you will transform in time for May 19th
So you went to a Nordisk Film cinema… I saw Oceans Twelve(And enjoyed it too) in Cinemaxx. Are you talking about the pre-movie silly anti-piracy short film?.. didn’t see any there(!)
Mukiwa: That’s just plain ridiculous!
I saw a poster in my local supermarket a couple of months back warning the public of the need to ‘stay vigilant and report anyone you suspect may be a terrorist’. How much longer is this going to go on for!?
I hate it when you buy a CD, unwrap it, and find that one of the stickers insists on leaving a bunch of nasty glue on the case that just won’t come off no matter how much you scratch at it.
I hate that.
I agree with your main point – the movie industry needs to focus more on making the theatre/DVD experience better for us than for their advertising execs and lawyers. That said, a lot of the other commenters seem to have problems either with individual theatre operators or with other people in general. Maybe a few CAT scans are in order.
I am feeling you here.
To add insult to injury, Comic Sans. It is the typeface of the hoi polloi, however.
Unfortunately, now I live in a much larger city, I cannot wait until the movie absolutely starts before I wander in, or else I won’t have a seat.
Back home in South Bend Indiana, USA, it was a breeze to do so.
j.
I got the marvelous anti-piracy ads last summer in London be4 iRobot and Spiderman 2.
To my big surprise the ads have made their way to Italy too. This being the home of counterfeit products in Europe, the move is quite bold and quite stupid too…
I share the POV of who paid for a movie (at the local multiplex or on DVD) ad just wants to fu**ing see it…
I have to agree with Vincent Grouls, they are trying to get normal people to think piracy is bad, because most people dont see any issues with it. Thats why they have to brainwash you before the film. I allways laugh when they come on becuase its such BS.
Again what Mukiwa said is bollocks, when AOL said “oh were going to give out nightgoggles so that we can catch pirates who try to video tape harry potter”, Hello AOL, why dont you look in the factory, or when test screening copys go missing, tards, nobody cares about shit pirated films.
Michael, this topic is something we are going to have to accept for the future. We can piss and moan but it wont change until the kid down the road who has a dodgy copy of Shrek 2 is fined out of his college funds by the multi-billion film companies.
We rightly so should except a lot for the phenominal amounts we pay to enjoy the luxury of sitting in front of a huge screen with the company of a couple o’ hundred others.
Mukiwa: Your as good as a dead man, insulting the film industry like that! Very funny story though, well worth the death! (jk)
I am much more annoyed by the length of the ads at this point. There was easily 5 or so minutes worth before I saw a single preview when I saw Ocean’s 12(last film I saw).
I am wondering when people will say, “enough is enough.”
I said that when ad #1 showed up on the screen. How anybody finds a single ad acceptable is beyond me.
Those ad slides they’ve shown before the previews for years are fine enough, though they used to have trivia and some interesting little factoids. Now it’s just half-assed trivia and ads to local businesses.
Also… Ocean’s 12 was such a piece of shit. Astoundingly disappointing.
Heh,
I don’t go to the theatre any more. Noisy, stupid people with all the brains of pea soup, loudly shouting “i know this bit” or “he’s gonna die, I swear, I’ve seen this bit” yada yada..
I have a large widescreen TV, kickass sound system & I can drink all the beer, vodka, espresso coffee, and eat all the shit I want.
My DVD player is pleased with a feature labeled “digest” which was orginally designed for VCD’s, to access VCD menu’s and crap like that. I’m in love with the digest remote button, I want to have it’s babies.
I hit that button, and whammo bye bye stupid fucking anti-piracy ads and hello DVD menu.
And yes, were I a hardened DVD pirate, some git rambling about how piracy is bad, will really make me want to repent, mend my ways and join a become a monk. Making people who have purchased a DVD sit through anti-piracy ad’s makes zero sense to me.
Downloaded DivX movies are the best.. no overpriced cokes and popcorn and no fucking trailers and/or moronic ads.. :evil:
Hey – I just wanted you to know, your blog does that nifty definitions-on-mouseover tool-tip thing, but it has it wrong on DVD’s. DVD stands for Digital Versatile Disc, not Digital Video Disc. The reasoning is that DVD’s can be audio, data, or video.
For an industry that have immense power to change public culture and perception, they seem completely ineffective when it comes to movie pirating. The best message they can do is “err… pirating is BAAAAD mkay?”. Really, they’re not trying very hard are they? Kinda reminds me of those evangelists that preach loudly in public places, not only are they unlikely to convert anyone, but they’re just ridiculed. How long until these guys reduce themselves to a side joke? Let’s hope we won’t have to wait long.
On the DVD warning issue, here’s one solution. Copy the DVD (which, I assume, you have bought legitimately. ‘Cause pirating is BAAAAD mkay? :) using DVD Shrink. That program allows you to replace parts of the DVD with different video or images, so you find the warning video and replace it with a still image. When you play copy it would then display the image instead of the video.
we get an ad on rented dvds and at the movies with grungy writing and grungy appearance, oviously trying to target teenagers, saying “you wouldn’t steal a tv” “you wouldn’t steal a handbag” movie piracy is illegal….
the australian anti piracy people are so much smarter (this is the part where i roll my eyes…..)
i agree completely with ya all.
and if showing the ad’s in movie theaters & putting them in DVD’s was not enough, they are now showing it on bloody HBO !!!
WTF !! who moron in his right mind will rip retarted movies from HBO !!! they are just killing the fun of watching movie, more like throwing their own fuckin axe on their own fuckin foot !!!
I agree. Hitting out at piracy by doing what they’re doing is not stopping the hard core, none of the people I know who download movies have stopped, despite even my suggestions.
And the studios made more money than ever before at the box office last year.
As for Ocean’s Twelve, well, it sucked, big time (it even caused me to switch into American vernacular there, did you notice?).
Actually I agree with Denis comment about the trouble with guys with videocamera in the cinema – that by making the antipirate statement, at least they are made aware…not that they or any who dl gives a crap anyway…but just for the principal in it.
That said I really hate anti-pirate crap and unwanted commercials. Like you said yourself Michael: Disney DVD’s. I like Disney movies. Actually I also like the newer Disney movies…even the sequels to some movies. But I goddamn fucking HATE I’m forced to watch 3-4 trailers for some other Disney-related stuff, I probably already own (I’ve got a large collection). Every other company at least makes a menu-option called “trailers” where you can CHOOSE to watch them or not…and I often do see ‘em.
Ohhh…don’nt even get me started about the cinema, but just for the hell of it a short list: crappy placement in cinema, disgusting chairs/floors, annoying idiots with cell-phones/talking/women with large hats, commercials (would it be THAT wrong to give a rough estimate when the movie starts?), having to fight over the arm-rest with the person sitting next to you (does’nt apply if it’s a good-looking chick – which it never is), smelly persons, prices at cinemas in general. And so on and so on…in short I really hate the cinema.
On a lighter note: just counted my dvd collection, and I’m finally own 500 dvd’s…yes I’m a nut :-)
From someone “over the pond” here in the UK, I agree with everything you’ve said. It was only last night my wife and I went to the cinema. There was a notice that the sweeted popcorn was broke, there was no 7-up or pepsi, you couldn’t have sweets because the weighing machine had broke, the gents toilets were being cleaned so had to use the disabled and BEFORE we even watched the film, we were told about reporting anyone suspicious who we may think is copying the film using mobile recording equipment!!
It’s a disgrace what happened to Mukiwa as well, I myself was asked to leave on one occasion because I had a normal digital camera and I was told that I may be taking photographs of the new Star Wars trailer! I mean – come on!!!
So yeah, totally agree with you, it sucks, although I don’t call it piracy when I download a movie, I simply call it better entertainment ;)
I just read somewhere about how ineffective those movie ads are and supposedly will be pulled because companies like MPAA are wasting their money.
Word.
As for the topic at hand, I think my roomie had the best laugh when we went all the way to Chicago (Chicago being 6-7 hours away) to catch this Bollywood flick. The guy brings along a DigiCam (or whatever they are) and is all set to record the “Cam Print” when, before the movie begins, the bigshot actor cast in the flick itself comes on and says “Insist on the originals; end piracy now; it’s frickin’ killing the industry…” and so on.
So what would you do? Grin from ear to ear and shoot the gaudy prophet’s message as a part of your print. And send this to people for nice big laugh.
Piracy my ass. It’s existed in some form for a long, long time and I think the only way to “fight” (or in American lingo “declare war” on) it would be to find a healthy median where you, as a business, can co-exist with it. People eventually will figure out they don’t want to be told anything.
Michael,
Make no mistake I agree with you in regards to my last comment. Most rippers of the underground piracy movement are exceedingly meticulous at making the best quality renders of pirated movies with certain codecs (I believe there is a lengthy article about just this in Wired this month).
I don’t think there is currently any method of disseminating that cheesy message about not pirating to only the pirates without getting the legitimate customers, as you and I, caught in the crossfire. It’s unfortunate, but is there a way around it?
As for “people traffickers” and the like, it’s possible but (me being in NYC) I think that a lot of this comes from the genius who went to the movie theatre with a $800 camcorder in his crotch, and passed it along to all of the street vendors through some network in the more innocent underbelly of Chinatown.
Ultimately someone should figure out a healthy median to where the movie business can co-exist with all the folks that want easy movies via the PC. Jobs/Apple said they don’t see a video iPod happening, most likely due to movie companies’ fear resulting from the tumultuous fight against the parasitic piracy movement. It seems EASILY apparent to me that there should be a wise company to legitimately conjure a solution that satisfies both users and movie companies.
We got those kind of campaigns over here too (minus the comic sans)…
You’d think people were watching a monty python skit since they’re all laughing their balls off at the pathetic ad.
I think the most interesting aspect of all this piracy is that movies are being released onto DVD faster than ever before. This gives us the ability to essentially “boycott” the theaters with respect to the notion that we will be able to watch the movies, in the comfort of our own home and legally, relatively sooner than before. Therefore, if you feel strongly about this, as I do, you can always just catch up on movies with a month or so delay. There are surely a long list of movies you’ve been meaning to watch anyhow.
Above all, however, I think the most aggravating part of piracy and the movie industry is the fact that the quality of most movies is despicable. It’s one thing to be heckled, annoyed, overpriced but good — but the quality of movies are pretty damn low. The girl and I only usually catch movies that are playing at the independent theater (such as Closer, Life Aquatic, Kinsey, I (heart) Huckabees and Garden State). I thought these were all fantastic and I didn’t really have to heed to the masses and idiots who must catch Van Helsing and company on opening night.
wow, loads of commentary to digest. But essentially people are being constantly faced with this pit of double standards, sure I’d buy DVDs if they weren’t priced somewhere in the stratosphere, if the actors playing the (big) roles weren’t earning the GNP of Guadeloupe, I’d go to the cinema if popcorn (its CORN, it retails for, well, peanuts ;) ) wasn’t marked up by 3000% (yes, I plucked that figure out of the air, but it’s a lot), if a cup of sugar syrup and fizzy water didn’t cost the price of a meal. I’d give the film industry more if they’d pay the workers they (indirectly) hire to manufacture all the merchandising plastic crap a living wage, if they’d go more for plot than sfx, this all started happening well before pirating took off in a big way – I believe pirating is a reaction to all this crap we’re forced to put up with. Technology is a double edged sword for the film and music industry, and the more they react by hiking up the prices (to combat piracy? who does that punish?) the more people are going to download, because the risks become proportionally smaller – especially if its for a personal collection, and not resale (this starts to sound like drug culture politics somehow)
Well, the stupid copy protection on CDs (which doesn’t stop me copying the CDs I PAID FOR but DOES make it a PAIN IN THE ASS for me to LISTEN TO THEM) means I won’t buy CDs any more. I used to buy 100+ a year. Smart move, RIAA.
Now I spent a fair amount of money on some Simpsons DVDs, which I could have just as easily copied from my friend who has every Simpsons episode ever made in AVI format. I put it in the player and IT CALLS ME A CRIMINAL, AND I CAN’T SKIP IT. Well, you can forget the money I spend on all those DVDs. That’s the last one I ever buy.
I’d buy DVD-audio discs if they weren’t CRIPPLED (“copy protection”).
What is wrong with these people? You’d think they WANT to fail and lose money. They’ve lost my custom. I don’t see any alternative to copying any more. Not because I can’t afford CDs and DVDs but because copying them is more convenient!