I bought The Incredibles on DVD from Amazon the other day (great extras, just wish there was even more!). Upon opening it I found a note, which in no small terms explained to me that copying DVD’s is a felony, piracy, illegal and bad for African children.
What The Fuck?!
Why is it that every time I pay money for a piece of entertainment, I must be pestered with this bullshit? If I were to go and download an illegal movie off of the net, would I get the same pestering? No, you’re damn straight I wouldn’t!
Of course, according to that note, 90% of all illegal movies are camcordered off of the screen in poor quality… I think someone needs to help MPAA find better torrent sites :)
Here’s a handful of ideas:
- Stop telling people who pay for their movies not to pirate.
- What’s the point of telling people who buy the movies that ’90% of pirated movies are cam’s’? Why should they care, after all they just bought the movie, didn’t they? Isn’t that like telling everyone who buys a pair of Levi’s that: “Did you know, that if you’d travelled to the far east and stolen a knockoff in a warehouse somewhere, 90% of the time they wouldn’t be quite as good as these…”
- Get you facts straight. If 90% of all movies are cam’s, I’m an African-American rapper from the East Coast, yo.
- Forget about DRM. It’s a cancer of the brain. Whoever first got the idea should be shot. Then the next guy who got the idea, and so on. And whoever first implemented it is then to be hanged and gutted. Then the next guy (because we all know that only men are this stupid!). I stopped buying CD’s because of DRM.
- Stop fucking hassling me and provide me with a digital distribution method worthy of any p2p client out there. I’d gladly pay to save the hassles of analog media!
Indeed, i’m not paying for the printing on something to tell me piracy is bad. For starters as you said, you’ve just paid for the DVD so why the hell put that in there at all?
Chris
You have a point here Michael. Why buy the DVDs and get beaten up over people who aren’t? Some would say they are pushingg us to the limit without realising we might go away easily and torrent the film minus those anti-piracy warnings.
I was going to buy The Incredibles the other day, are the extras really that good?
This is the trend, nowdays: despite what the Law says, thou are guilty until proven other wise..
Why did DRM stop you buying CDs? Are you boycotting major labels until they stop being losers? Or are you just refraining from purchasing those annoying CDs with copy protecion rubbish on them?
I totally agree, there is nothing more insulting and irritating than being treated like that when you’ve actually bought something.
Just like you said, it does nothing to help the problem – that the industry itself needs to change in order to survive. There’s a new media here, and it’s not just useful for cheap commercials and trailers, it’s a serious alternative for distribution and sales.
DRM will never work, except as a means to push people towards piracy.
David Brent, you can download the extras as well :) You can even get a complete DVD image.
Michael, I agree with you on the digital distribution thing, except I’d add: But I wont be made a fool of and be charged the same or more for something that gives me fewer possibilities than the physical media (like iTunes, to some small extent).
Small Paul, as a rule I don’t buy CDs with DRM, and if I am absolutely forced to, I make a point out of distributing the rip I make.
I am sick and tired of an industry that thinks that they can keep the status quo, even though their world is crumbling. Specially since that industry has so much money that they can make politicians see things their way.
The lame attempts at digital distribution they are making right now are so halfhearted. And the relative lack of interest is being used as an argument for stricter legislation; The industry points to their DRM-crippled crap products and claim that people are still pirating like crazy, even though there is a perfectly “valid” (which seems to be the media industries word for “crippled”) alternative to pirating.
I see the music industry kind of like an association of scriveners that think it’s reasonable to charge the same for a gutenberg-press printed book as a scrivener-written hand-copied one, simply because “that’s what people are used to paying”.
Scriveners had to face their (near) extinction when the gutenberg press came, and I think the music industry is going to have to face the same change with the internet.
I find this debate rather funny in an oh-so-true kind of way.
First off, piracy is so prevalent these days that there’s a “90%” chance that you’ve done it too. Yeah, you! The person reading this right now!
Is it bad business to brow beat your clients about piracy when they’ve just spent their hard earned money in an honest way to support your business endeavours? YES! Stop doing it!
Is it also ironic that we, who have that have given into the devil in the torrent, are getting mad at being chastised for something we know we’ve done in the past? YES!
Welcome to the Middle Realm, everyone. This is where black and white don’t exist. There is only grey here. In this limbo we discover that the big corporations are thieves and so are we. We bitch at them for calling us thieves when we’re giving them money and they bitch at us while receiving it for the other times we stole, all the while pocketing more of our money on anti-piracy tariffs.
Welcome to our morality.
Small Paul, the DRM on the Episode II soundtrack prevents the CD from being played in a CD-ROM drive (IIRC). When that album came out, I only had my computer to play it with…
The whole idea of DRM is so ludicrous that I just can’t get myself to shelve over money for an inferior product. (Not to mention that most DRM schemes actually break the red book standard! So you’re buying an audio CD which isn’t actually a true audio CD!)
Whenever they’ll stop putting stupid ads or warnings or notes like that one, I’ll start buying more original products. I’m ready to pay for quality content. Not annoying stuff I do know so well!
If I have to choose between free (and absolutely not cam-coded quality) content or paid physical medium…well… I want the following conditions:
1) to be able to backup it and make many copies of it.
2) to read/watch/hear/play what I’ve bought without beign annoyed by all those stupid warnings (the ones you cannot skip in movies are sooo bad!)
3) to have a nice CLEAN package: in Italy there is the SIAE sticker on every CD or DVD you buy. On CDs it’s usually located just in the middle of a tracklist and in DVDs it’s usually located on movie still frames! I hate it soo much!
4) to stay on my own. I don’t want to call any software activation centre… I don’t want to register by phone any products… I don’t want to be contacted nor contact anyone!
5 if it is a game) if it’s technically possible to crack the game to have a no-cd version of the above game, well I want an original no-cd game in the first place!!!
I just want a goddamn clean product! Stop!
That really sucks Michael, how did you handle that one? It saddens me to see companies risking the quality of their media products such as an audio CD just to protect themselves against piracy. Live with it and lump it, I say.
Wow, too bad I am a sucker for real DVDs!
It’s an infinite loop there. They wont stop till you stop, and you wont stop until they stop!
well then. They’re welcome.
let the loop continues.
That DVD would probably cost $10 less if the stupid copyright notices and the fcuking annoying piracy commercial wasn’t on there…
My local Blockbuster handed me a copied video tape of a really old movie a while back because “the original they had was bust and they could no longer acquire the original”. Hmmm…
David, I just didn’t buy it :)
Well, actually they’ll stop once they’ve lost enough money :)
DRM is pointless.. if one is armed with a cd-writer, simply changing ‘sessions’ allows one to play the audio track, of course.. I never said that. :)
I can understand ‘if you copy this, you suck’ messages on hired DVD’s.. that I can at least skip past, and if nothing else is a more sensible location.
Putting such messages on paid for content to me smacks of complete stupidity. I just fracking bought the thing, why the hell would I then commence copying it?! It’s one of my current, long-term pet hates.
I avoid a lot of DRM’d commercial music, by simply not purchasing it. I’ll use independent music websites that allow one to purchase high-quality downloads of the CD (after checking out the mp3 versions). I’ve found quite a few places that keep me busy, and have my partner fretting over the CC bills :D
Mind you, anyone who’s heard my podcast knows my feelings about the RIAA, so no surprises there :)
I thought for a moment you had bought the CD before finding out about the DRM. Lucky you read the small print eh?
Maybe, because they cannot control the pirated media, the hit the median and take their anger out on us!
Even if I gladly acknowledge the pain DRMed CDs are, I still believe the most annoying part of this crusade against piracy is the 4 minutes spot I had to suffer before the projection of Hitch, last Friday night at the Theater.
I can stand the poorly conditions movies are shown nowadays on the big screen : bullshitting MPAA stuff at the beginning, or cut off credits at the end. Add to this the 500-pound asshole eating (very loudly) 2 tons of pop-corn in 2 hours or the cell phone of the bitch next to you ringing 12 times in the same time and enjoying a movie is becoming to be a nightmare…
I felt the exact same way recently when I watched a film in a theater. Before the film there was a short segment saying that you shouldn’t pirate films and that it costs the MPAA millions of dollars a year and so forth. I sat there thinking to myself, “What good does it do to tell me, a person who just paid to see the movie, to not pirate?”
DRM is such a rediculous idea. How does taking functionality away from a paying customer sell more records?
Someone is going to have to explain to me why I’m supposed to feel sorry for a huge corporation with huge profits that’s making a little less than they could be making.
Do I download music? Yes. Do I buy music from artists that I like? Absolutely, as long as I have the ability to play on whatever device I choose.
I bought a cd here in Canada and was greeted by a small card saying how glad they were I bought the cd. I trashed the card after reading it, but basically it was an upbeat thing telling how many people profit from me actually purchasing the cd. Funnily enough, they didn’t mention record executives at all.
I too refrain from buying any cds that have DRM on them. I have, however, received a few as gifts and found out that when they say “macintosh not supported” on the back, it is because you can rip it like any other cd while only the pre-encoded tracks show up on windows.
Hurray for Macintosh!
Jonas: I think record executives get paid enough as it is.
I’ve recently taken to purchasing independant music directly from the band or from small labels. I feel like I am contributing much more to the artists that way, rather than lining the pockets of record execs.
You know, I’m really curious to know how much the MPAA and RIAA spend on “anti-piracy advertising” and legal procedings. I bet you all the money they claim to be losing is going into one of those two things!
I get confused why people do this, as anyone who buys a DVD, and has a look at this small leaflet or peice of paper, and reads the title or even the first sentence will immediately throw it away, or put it back in the case.
I normally read things that come up on screen on a DVD or VHS, such as something about illegal making of movies and TV programs. But, I simple, don’t care when I read something like it.
I guess it’s a problem in our society today.
I run a music review website, so I don’t normally have to worry about DRM’d prerelease cds, but ever once in awhile I do. I always laugh and sometimes mention in the review that even the prerelease for-review-only cd was DRM’d. I know they want to keep people from releasing the music to p2p sites, especially if the album is not out yet, but come on. Review people work in the industry that the RIAA says is being so vastly hurt by piracy.
Once Apple (or some other forward thinking company – but my bet is on Apple) comes out with a pay-per-download movie service, you will start to see the DRM crap slow down. Like some have already said, we are willing to pay for quality content, and the iTunes store is a great example of this.
Ponder this, have you ever heard of a record company, or a band having to call it quits because of piracy? Seen any news stories about people in the music industry getting laid off because of piracy? I haven’t.
Bands generally generate their revenue from concerts and venues anyways. Often, piracy can really help a band get publicity. The only thing that really pisses me off is when a band’s album gets leaked and it’s really poor quality or just a demo, and everyone gets bummed by it. For instance, The Mars Volta’s ‘Frances the Mute’ was leaked in horrible quality. Thankfully it just created more buzz, but still, it can kill an album release.
Plus I said generally generate, which has to be one of the best accidental alliterations (there’s another one, I could write for a newspaper) that I’ve ever come up with.
LoL
Your an egotistical, snobbish brat who wastes massive amounts of words and internet real-estate bitching and whining about things that are just stupid. Oh, and please cease your over-use of American catch phrases – you’re not American and you’re not coy.
Also, let me point out that I fully realize what I’ve stated here is purely ad hominem, therefore a rebuttal written in epic verse declaring such is not needed – not that you would have delivered one anyway, right? Ha, right…
P.S. When dealing with the English language, your typesetting software should be told to introduce double-spaces in between sentences; that makes things more legible.
I have the need to slap someone’s face with a large trout
So, Anonymous Coward, what dialect should non-native English speakers speak/write in to make you happy? British English? Australian English?
If you are from the States yourself, and indeed we will never find out since you are an anonymous coward, then I hope one day you’ll realize this isn’t “your” language, or the Brits’ language, or the Aussies’. With the luxury of never having to learn a second language, native English speakers gave up the right to determine how the hell is should be spoken.
Oh, and please cease spelling “You are” as “Your”. It makes you look stupid. But then again, perhaps you are, yo!
I think it’s going to be a long time before we see widespread, legitimate on-line movie watching. Firstly, DVD-quality video would be quite large, which means long download times. Not even broadband users can stream DVD-quality video and audio in real time. Secondly, not everybody wants to watch movies on their computer. I watch them on my PC now, but only because the TV I have right now sucks. Back when I had access to a widescreen HDTV hooked up to a really nice sound system, watching DVDs on my computer didn’t even occurr to me :)
Also, I know several people who buy DVDs and then promptly pirate them for all their friends and family. I fucking hate that shit. A personal backup copy or two is not the same as making copies for all your cheapskate friends and family.
But if studios want to severely cut down on movie piracy, they need to have a good look at their own staff. I’d bet that most of those pre-release high quality DVD rips come from a staff member at the company that made the DVD or the DVD manufacturer. And with more and more color timing being done digitally, I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the pre-theatrical-release rips come from the IT staff at some of the post houses that do digital color grading.
Sean, I agree with you regarding the source of leaks (undoubtedly internal or semi-external such as press screeners, award screeners). But I don’t see the lack of broadband as such a big problem if the correct system was set up.
People nowadays, thanks mostly to Netflix and Blockbuster, are used to ordering a movie a day or two in advance and then get it through the post. I think the underlying benefit of this kind of system is that people have a somewhat longer horizon for “how soon is soon enough?”. I’d be happy to subscribe to the same system, only for downloaded movies … heck I’d even accept reasonable DRM measures, as long as it was convenient.
Imagine a Netflix system set up for downloads. You set up a queue of movies, but only the frontmost will download now. When it has downloaded, it will start downloading the next movie in line, until three movies in total had been downloaded. Once you start watching the first, the fourth movie will start to download.
Regarding your point on watching movies on the computer, I’d prefer a high quality TV too, but that’s what Media Center PCs are for, right?
I’m egotistical? How about leaving ‘ad hominem’ comments that by their very nature are egocentric? You’re an idiot.
And ‘your’ is spelled ‘you’re’ or ‘you are’. At least I can excuse whatever poor grammar and spelling errors that might make their way into my sentences with my nationality, what’s your excuse?
Ah, nevermind. the mere fact that you left three paragraphs behind rather than went on your way says all I need to know I suppose.
Sean, I don’t watch movies on my PC either (I did while I lived in Scotland though), but how about consoles, Tivo and as Bjorn says, Media Center PC’s?
I watch lots of movies on my Xbox, and the streaming quality of quicktime trailers are actually quite good. (Xbox Media Center has a script for scraping Apple’s Quicktime site). I’m on a 2.5Mbps line, which is plenty to stream video in that quality.
There are of course other concerns in terms of digital distribution (bandwidth, storage, uptime blar di blar), but it’s probably still be cheaper than current analog distribution.
Most people don’t leave their PCs on overnight. And a dual-layer DVD holds how many gigabytes? Even if you stripped out the extra features like director commentaries, alternate endings, and “Making of…” featurettes, you’d still have a multi-gigabyte download to contend with.
As to Media Center PCs, erm, no thanks. I can get a DVD player for less than $200 that has component output for video and optical output for audio. How much for a Media Center PC with the same capabilities?
Michael, well, I don’t consider the quality of the Quicktime trailers on Apple’s website to be that great. Sure, maybe for streaming video, but they don’t compare to DVD or the upcoming HDTV-resolution formats (Blu-Ray and HD-DVD).
I mean, compare the quality of the Sin City trailers they’ve been showing on TV to that of the Sin City trailer on Apple’s website. Ick.
The only nice thing about on-line distribution is that my friends won’t be able to borrow my DVDs and never give them back >:(
Sean, true enough, you won’t get the same quality, but I’d be happy – and I believe most consumers would – to exchange a slight loss of quality for a gain in convenience.
Additionally, DVDs are mpeg2 compressed, I believe. Whatever compression they use, it isn’t MPEG4, which could offer DVD like quality within the gigabyte barrier.
Whatever, we’re talking beliefs here. All I know is I would subscribe if such a system was set up … and that’s really all I can attest to.
again, i’m embarassed to be american… when will america stop thinking it rules the galaxy? shrug. walks over to the corner of the room and weeps
Sean wrote,
I don’t know, you can already get full DVD images. It only takes you three or four days to download it on a 2 Mbps line, and that is on the not-so-good-as-it-was-intended-to-be BitTorrent. If you’re on FTP servers the download rate is extremely high. A dual layer DVD can contain up to 8.5 gigs which is only double the amount a regular DVD can hold. I wouldn’t mind downloading a 4.7 – 8.5 gigs movie for a fee but obviously with today’s internet speeds (damn you BT for holding back the UK internet speeds) this is not to be a common practice.
ps, is it Iceland where you can get 24 Mbps internet on the streets? Must be great 8)
Then again, Mike, have you read your site? I didn’t know you speak Jive! Binary Bonsai, Foo!
Skip the step, and go straight HERE!, sucka!
Firstly, id like to say how equally amusing and confusing it is seeing “David Brent” posting comments, can you do us a dance? ;-)
And also “P.S. When dealing with the English language, your typesetting software should be told to introduce double-spaces in between sentences; that makes things more legible.” – not really, looks awful when text is justified and generally pretty poor anyway – its an old typewriter hang over. And why? I dotn under stand where the comment came from.
Is anonymous coward and old friend come back from times long ago? Scarier times.
Iceland’s fast speeds are great – but they pay a huge premium for out of country traffic..
Basically everything in Iceland doesn’t count to bandwidth limits, but internationally does.. and that mounts up quickly.
So… not as good as it sounds.
Bjorn: I don’t consider waiting days for a movie to download to be convenient. With Netflix the round-trip wait is about 3 days, but I get 3 movies at the same time (no waiting for downloads to finish) and they’re DVD quality.
And once Blu-Ray or HD-DVD take over, forget it. Why bother spending days waiting for a less-than-DVD quality movie to download when you can get an HDTV-quality movie in less than half an hour from a store/rental place?
Personally, I fucking hate compression artifacts. It bugs the shit out of me when a gorgeous movie is marred by shitty compression because the halfwits mastering the DVD didn’t do it right.
If you’re waiting days to download a movie, you definitely need to stepup your connection. I’ve share a 2.5Mbps with my neighbor. If movies were one GB, it would take about an hour for me to get a movie, meaning I could stream it. Let’s assume that we’re dealing with MPEG-2 (DVD), then it would take me 4 times that, so I start the download two hours ahead of time and get a message when enough has downloaded for me to start viewing it.
Looking at any DivX or Xvid DVD rip today, done properly by ‘pros’, I can hardly discern the quality difference on my TV, and they’re 700MB; that’s like 45 minutes of download.
i don’t think the distributors mean to harass the buyers. they just want to get the message out and they don’t know better. bad media positioning. they simply don’t think before they act!
why not post fake torrents and p2p files with this warning rather. that would be appropiate. if i were to pirate The Incredibles and would download a file with just a warning message i would probably think over my pirating habits.
I buy all my movies and I’m just as annoyed about the notices and ads about all that illegal movie stuff and whatnot. The worst part is though that on newer DVD’s they show a small infomercial at the start of the movie, that you CAN’T skip over. That pisses me off and it doesn’t change anything.
If people want to do pirated movies and other stuff, they will. There’s no stopping digital pirates. They can make life tough for pirates, but they’re fighting a losing battle.
“Hardly discern” does not mean “unnoticeable”. Like I said, I hate compression artifacts. They pretty much ruin the whole experience for me.
And what about director commentaries and the like? Audio tracks other than just vanilla stereo?
For the record, my download speed is 3mbps down, 400kbps up.
And, for the last time, what about Blu-Ray and HD-DVD? A high-quality HDTV-resolution movie isn’t going to fit in less than a few gigabytes, no matter what.
Sean > working with MPEG-4 shit all day long, I have to disagree with your arguments : Compression artefacts are nearly inexistant in whatever.264 or XViD properly encoded video, as long as they are (inexistant) in the source. Multipass processes and moving ABR have pushed the squaring-dark zone artefact of earlier MPEG-4 into history.
As for the audio tracks : some container types exists (OGM, MKV…) that allow chaptering, multiple multi-channel audio tracks. Sure one is loosing the menus and such most of the time, but MPEG-2 DVD are often far from perfect anyway.
Take the american Anonymous Coward jerk for instance : he has to watch NTSC or FILM DVD. Most of (if not all of) them are still release in an interlaced format. And what the fucking point of avoiding artefacts if the frames are interlaced ?
Overall, even if a HD stream requires 5 times more bandwith than a DVD (assuming Prog-PAL vs 1080p), MPEG-4 codec (based on H.264 algo for instance) can unnoticeably compensate for that !
I still believe that such services as MovieLink are following the right path and will eventually overcome regular DVD renting companies since more and more people are awfully lazy (I am) and just don’t want to move their asses to the store
.
Sure, some container formats might support subtitles, but how many on-line movie services are going to distribute their movies in OGM? And what about DTS or DD 5.1 audio?
As to interlacing: televisions are interlaced. It’s part of the NTSC standard, and as far as I know PAL is interlaced too. So it doesn’t matter if the DVD is interlaced or not, since the TV you’re watching it on can only display an interlaced signal.
If you are talking TV : you score a point. When it comes to HDTV, the interlaced argument is difficult to avoid. As for the sound, MVK or AVI or OGM for instance are very happy with AC3 audio channels !
I buy CD’s and DVD’s off of ebay, copy them and resell the the originals (often for a small profit). Does this make me a bad person, because the distributor, artist, exec etc. doesn’t see a penny from me?
Dead on, why pay for cds when they won’t work in your cd-rom drive or whatever anyway? I’ve stopped buying cd’s because I wasn’t able play the last two I bought.
That’s actually a tough question to answer Poolcue. If you kept the original and sold the copy then I’d have my mind set that you are pushing the line, but since it’s the other away around I am not really sure if that makes a bad person. That’s just my 2 cents I am sure there are a lot of people who would automatically say that you are doing something wrong because you’re right the “distributor, artist, exec etc. doesn’t see a penny from [you].”