Yes, I’m talking about the 1986 movie with Amanda Plummer and Oliver Reed. Technically, the Tom Hanks movie was Cast Away - I don’t know if they chose that title for effect or just had bad spell checking.
I was also talking about the 1972 version of Sleuth with Laurence Olivier not the 2007 remake with Jude Law. (Michael Caine appeared in both but he switched characters, playing the younger man in 1972 and the older man in 2007.)
Awesome movie. I actually stumbled on it one night in the pre-VCR/DVD/etc days.
You want to see another great Michael Caine movie, check out the original Get Carter from 1971. Caine plays a ruthless British gangster.
Gonna hijack this thread to ask a question: when I bought my first and so far only smartphone, an HTC Incredible, the dude at Verizon was praising one of it’s features (something that is, according to Verizon Dude, available on all Androids): free music. There are several apps that allow to search for and download individual songs. The music quality is crap: different volume levels, songs starting it ending at the wrong time, etc. How legitimately are these apps? Does using them count as illegal piracy?
With the rare exception (which I acknowledge as a moral failing), I will only download something if there’s no way for me to legitimately purchase it in a way that benefits the creators. Books that have been out of print for ten years, and that I have no way of getting without paying for a ridiculously priced used copy? Yeah, I’ll download that. “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers The Album: A Rock Adventure,” which has been out of print since before I graduated high school, and is only available for $70 used? I’ll download that, too.
I’ve noticed, however, that these instances have become rare and rarer. For instance, I remember that about five years ago, there were a lot of tabletop gaming licenses where you couldn’t get most of the books unless you were willing to pay ridiculous prices on eBay. Now a lot of them are available for download legitimately. So, where five years ago I might’ve downloaded the Cybergeneration corebook, now I can get it online as a legal download. (That particular instance doesn’t really apply, as I own a physical copy, but you see my point).
Semi-sidetrack, but speaking of computer games, I’m amazed at how many really old games which I seriously doubt anyone is making any money off of you STILL can’t get for free (eg DOOM). wth?
The entire ID catalog is on Steam and has been for some time, plus ports are still being made for various systems and devices. Lately more and more old games are being re released on download services like GOG and Steam, so most of the major old computer games and series (XCOM, Ultima, Wing Commander, Duke Nukem, etc.) are available for purchase at very reasonable prices.
With ex-pats in China, it is very common to download movies and TV shows. While I do download a few things for myself, most of my piracy is of kids cartoons for my 4 year old son. Almost nobody packages season long DVD packages of kids TV shows. The business model is to watch it live (can’t), watch on Netflix or similar (won’t work out of USA), or buy a solitary DVD with only 3 or 4 random episodes but missing majority of episodes.
Also, there is something very gratifying about hooking up an external drive to the TV and having a large quantity of shows, seasons, and episodes available immediately. Wrangling through a mountain of disks does not appeal to me.
I’ve been downloading ever since pre-Internet days (remember BBS?) and currently have around 2TB of content sitting on my drives. Only around 1GB of that is music–the rest are movies and complete television seasons.
If you’re wondering if I feel sorry, the answer is HELL NO. The movie and recording industries are among the sleaziest, money-grubbing rackets ever and they routinely try to screw over creators and customers alike. Just look at how they use shady accounting practices to cornhole people out of their cut, like the creators of Forrest Gump and Babylon 5. And when the record industry is not suing grandmothers and 13-year-olds for hundreds of thousands of dollars, they also cheat their artists–just look at this article on techdirt about their own brand of unethical accounting.
Just wanted to mention for anyone else out there who’s a reformed illegal downloader who does feel some guilt about it, I often use the iTunes months 69 cent specials to replace songs I originally obtained in a less legitimate manner. The songs on special are often the sort of thing I thought “I’d never buy this CD” about back in the Napster era – one hit wonders, hits from past decades, songs from movie soundtracks – but 69 cents is a lot less than the cost of even a used CD and cheaper than a regular iTunes download too. The artist can’t be making much off the sale of these tracks, but it’s presumably more than the nothing they were making on illegal downloads.
Anything I wouldn’t be willing to pay even 69 cents to legitimize gets deleted.
I have a lot of tv shows downloaded. TV is a free media paid for by commercials. I have no problems dl something broadcast into my home. If I’m not home to see a show, then I dl and watch later. Just like I used my VCR 15 years ago.
The majority of my music is stuff I ripped from my cd collection. I paid money for those cd’s.
Guess everyone knows Demonoid got taken down?
Cable is free in Arkansas?
Also copyright laws are entirely out of whack. Things shouldn’t take nearly a century to fall into the public domain. It’s hard to feel guilt about downloading something that shouldn’t still be under copyright but because Disney keeps paying off Congress still will be until long after I’m dead.
You don’t need cable to watch tv. We have this thing called an antenna. Upgraded a couple years ago for digital tv.
Yeah I’ve downloaded tons of stuff in my day. Usenet, IRC, FTP servers, P2P networks, bittorent, file hosts…
I don’t feel bad about it. I’ll start respecting copyright the day it becomes effectively enforceable.
That being said, I don’t download too much anymore. There’s just way too many free sources of entertainment to be had with Youtube, Pandora, Last.fm, etc. I’ve been finding a lot of original content on Youtube to be more entertaining than most movies and tv shows.
Which won’t get you these things called cable channels. You do need cable to watch those. Almost everything on the major networks is utter garbage IMO.
Either way, it isn’t “free.”
I actually started a thread asking why copyright lasts so ridiculously long. Apparently, like most of modern history, the blame lies with the Germans.
I once bought a music CD at Wal-Mart. When I got home I realized it was a censored version. So I downloaded the uncensored versions of the songs that I liked.
My parents bought a copy of SotS somewhere down south. I think it was some kind of roadside shop. They probably stopped to buy peaches or pecans or boiled peanuts or something.
I’ll admit it, I do it. Mostly with books. I read 'em and delete 'em, and tell myself it isn’t that much worse than checking the book out from the library. If it’s something I want to keep, I buy it.
In college I was a MASSIVE download whore. That was the early 2000’s, which as said, were the glory days of Napster, iMesh, Scour, KaZaa, Grokster, Limewire, Morpheus…and several others. In addition, I went to school at a very tech-savvy school, and someone had written a cool script that searched and indexed files from all the shared computers on the network (well, all the ones on the regular network student’s connected to and weren’t PW protected.) Since downloading from the internal network was a LOT faster than externally, it allowed for a lot more downloads.
Entire seasons of TV shows I didn’t even care to watch, albums from people I didn’t know of, etc…and a lot of games. Since there was such a large network, it was easy to play online games over it, even if the pirated copy was banned from FULL online play.
But, I’ve reformed. It’s been almost ten years since then, and I’m older, wiser, and more importantly I have money to buy things now.
However, there is still one thing I illegally download, and that’s the occasional single episode of a TV show. If I miss it when it airs, and I forgot to DVR it, I see no difference in my downloading. If I did use a DVR, I wouldn’t watch ads, much like the downloaded episode. I’m paying for satellite service, and I don’t download shows from networks I don’t pay for, so from a moral perspective, I see no harm.