They’re seats in some movie theatres that rumble whenever the bass in the movie soundtrack is sufficiently pumped, so you “feel” the movie. I saw ROTK in rumble seats, it was awesome.
I bought more movies when I used to download. Going to the theater to see a mainstream movie is a 4-6 hour ordeal for me and since I work and go to school full time, I don’t go out and see many movies. I don’t watch enough movies to consider Netflix so I just watch the art films at the closer theater instead.
I stopped because it got harder to find stuff and they were cracking down on websites. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize it was also illegal to download tv shows from ‘basic cable’ channels. And now I have no acess to LOST and I might get sued. ><
Is illegal filesharing hurting the movie industry?
No
Is illegal filesharing hurting the video industry?
No
Ahough it’s cheaper to make your McDonald’s or KFC meal at home, but more convienent to buy it.
I think it is hurting the industry because before Kazaa no one ever pirited anything… ever…
Please, we spend $21.99 on a DVD that cost 25 cents to make. Then they act like they are losing money because no one is buying thier shitty movies. The only people complaining about thier movies being pirited are the people who make shitty movies that no one sees or buys.
By Laigle
Yes this is true, except it has nothing to do with people downloading it off the internet and seeing it early. It has everything to do with Ebert and Roper. Who, you know, see movies early and review them for a living?
I have a friend cough who downloads movies all the time. He doesn’t try to justify his behavior – he recognizes that he’s pretty much breaking the law. He basically views it the same way he views speeding. He might get caught, and if he does, he’ll gripe but still pay the fine, because he knows he deserves it. But I digress…
Finding movies is generally pretty frickin’ easy. Well, perhaps I should be more specific. When you’re trying to find a movie that’s in the theaters right now, you’re pretty much consigned to the fact that you’re going to watch a bootleg version, complete with (generally) poor sound, occasional people walking through, audience coughing, etc. There are exceptions to this – movies up for Academy Awards and such, which have been distributed as “screeners,” can easily be found online in really fine quality. Maybe not true DVD-quality, but really effin’ close. Similarly, movies which have been released fairly recently on DVD, or even are within a few weeks of DVD relase, can be found very easily, and are nearly always of very fine quality (again, near-DVD quality). Older movies which have been released on DVD in the “distant past” are harder to find, but are still really good quality.
Moreover, there are sites which maintain lists of “proper” releases, and other sites which rate the quality of these releases. There is a surprisingly rigorous ettiquete about naming conventions, so unless someone deliberately changes the name of the files, you’re pretty much going to know ahead of time what you’re getting.
I’m rambling, but the point is that my friend feels that depictions of “Downloading isn’t worth the effort!” are simply not true. It is very possible to have a near-DVD quality copy of a movie in a little over an hour. Moreover, my friend finds arguments of “I wouldn’t have watched it if I had to pay for it” equally unconvincing. Sure, my friend has seen a number of movies he wouldn’t have ordinarily rented, but he’s also seen some movies he planned on renting, but frankly, it’s easier to download than to go to video store. Cheaper, too, naturally.
My point with all this is not to advocate any stance, but rather to provide an honest evaluation of the “scene.”
Added in preview: Additionally, it is possible to download not only DVD-rips, which are generally 700-1400 MB in size, but also “copies” or “clones” of the DVDs themselves, which are about 4+ GB in size. My friend doesn’t know if such files contain all of the extras of a DVD, because he doesn’t have a DVD burner and so doesn’t download such files, but he thinks that you can pretty much get everything on a DVD with one of these files.
Anyways, continue with the discussion of morality, and feel free to ask any other factual questions. I’d start an “Ask the Illegal Movie Downloader” thread, but I think the administration would frown upon that. Hopefully, they won’t frown too much upon this post. If so, they can delete it and tell me to shut my piehole, and I’ll do so without hesitation.
Except your average movie downloader is not that savvy. They’re using Kazaa trying to find part 3 of 4 of Anchorman and coming up with nothing.
File sharing movies is easy if you know how to do it. The number that know how to do it (and don’t go to the theater and actually are impacting sales) is small, small, small.
You may be right; I may be overestimating the savvy of would-be pirates. On the other hand, you mentioned the movie Anchorman. Here are some results (necessarily vague) when I try to look for copies of this movie:
A search of one protocol doesn’t give any hits…
A search of a different protocol gives about 100 hits. Granted, some of these probably don’t work, but that’s still 100 hits.
A search of a third protocol gives 13 hits.
A search of a fourth protocol gives around 75 hits.
Additionally, some of these protocols count the number of people who have downloaded a file. I’d say you can divide the results of these counts into quartiles: the first quartile has 0 completed downloads, the second has dozens of completed downloads, the third has hundreds of completed downloads, and the fourth has thousands of completed downloads. I’m not going to do tallies, especially when some of these hits are certainly dead or duplicates, but I’ll just say this – I found about 200 copies of a movie that was released in theatres seven months ago. Take from that what you will…
YES!
Please go watch movies in theaters and buy dvds.
Buy original games as often as possible.
Watch all the commercials on tv.
Pay all your speeding tickets. Don’t hire lawyers to get you out of it.
Don’t steal from movie studios, game companies, tv channels and the government at large.
Now I know some of you are angry and resentful and think all these powerful organizations are abusing you because they’re greedy and they know they can get away with it. However, you may be wrong. Plus, the law is the law.
I also know that sometimes, the law may not be in the interest of the majority. but you know, at one point or another, the majority of voters were pro-slavery or pro-segregation or pro-women-shouldn’t-vote-because-they’re-stupid.
On the flip-side, I don’t care if you get your music for free and never buy a cd again. No money is needed for good music to thrive so I don’t care if the RIAA members go bankrupt.
PS: Quixotic78, one movie proves nothing, try looking for Interstate 60 and you won’t find squat. (except for emule but that’s so slow it doesn’t count). Filesharing isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
The RIAA is basically comprised of 5 companies: BMG, EMI, Sony, Universal, & Warner…strangely enough, only Warner is American, which is odd, considering one of the "A"s in RIAA stands for America…anyway, the MPAA is made up of several companies, including several of the same ones that make up the RIAA too. I haven’t looked into it much, mostly because I’m lazy, but I’m pretty sure some of these own some of those and so on…basically, the RIAA and the MPAA are largely the same - so if the RIAA companies were to go bankrupt (which they won’t, because they’re all large conglomerates and many of them own lots of other crap too), the MPAA would probably tank as well.
I admit that when my …friend… used to download movies, Kazaa light was still the coolest thing on the block. And my friends have hard drives full of mistitled, half missing, ugly ripped, subtitled-in-Thai, corrupted, esoteric codeced crap, and thats the stuff they managed to find and not get kicked off halfway through a download. I hear it’s a lot better these days, but I wouldn’t know because I can just send twenty bucks to Netflix and get easy painless access to all the movies- popular or not- that I could ever need.
Now, what I really DO think will suffer from downloading is television. Watching dowloaded episodes of the Simpsons and Southpark is a timeworn tradition, but now watching the Daily Show almost daily is common over the net. Hopefully television, like movie rentals, will find a way to keep competative.
???But why bother when you can watch syndicated reruns on cable twice a day? ??? I dont’ understand why people would bother to download a show they can watch with a lot less trouble with a cable connection and a VCR.
Then again, I’ve still got a dial-up connection …
Not to beat a dead horse or anything, but there are copies of this movie out there too (and not just on emule, which my friend doesn’t even use). Using the same numbering scheme I used for Anchorman, I found 0, 2, 2, and 5 copies using four different protocols.
Good point.
Quixotic78: Drat and double drat! You made a liar out of me.
I surrender.
Piracy was common place in Usenet binary newsgroups long before Kazaa.
Shhhhh… we don’t want ‘them’ to find out. 
I can think of a few reasons:
[ol]
[li]You might not have cable. Someone who only likes a couple shows on TV might want to save $40-$50 a month by just downloading the episodes.[/li][li]You might not live in the US. Some shows like The Simpsons are available in other countries, but the 4-times-a-week version of The Daily Show is only available in the US and Canada, IIRC. (There’s a weekly version on CNN International.)[/li][li]You might have missed a recent episode, or you might be looking for a specific older episode that won’t be repeated soon. If you want to watch the highest rated Simpsons episodes of all time and skip the boring ones, waiting for them to come on each day will take forever, since they’re spread out over many seasons.[/li][/ol]
If there weren’t downloading going on, there wouldn’t be the extensive extras that make DVD packages so popular.
The MPAA is much more worried about bootleggers than downloaders.