Feb 25 2010Piracy: The Benefit Of Not Paying For Things

lololol.

Old, gay, shit.

fuck you JESS !!!!
im 1st

SO FUCKING TRUE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! kills the boner!

bootlegs FTW

I usually go to "Chapter Selection" and select a chapter (that isn't chapter 1) and when it goes to that, press "1" then enter on my remote, and it goes to the first scene, and I don't have to watch the FBI warnings.... although some times, they do come up before the menu does, i'm finding now that some movies just save it for the end of the movie, because everyone knows it..... just sayin

It takes me on average like 3 minutes just to eventually get to a Bluray menu. I legitimately own 500 DVD's and blurays, but I would not for a second feel guilty about pirating. Especially on discs that have advertising on them.

Ii always wonder why the anti-piracy ads are in the store bought DVD's.... shouldnt they target those to people that ARENT paying for them?

"lets waste money filming an ad against something that the people watching it aren't doing, and the people doing it ont ever see....."

it's like getting commercials for resturants that the closest location is 5 states over

this is GENIUS!

Pirates love these. Click my name.

It's sad that someone could know how to copy and paste images into a cute chart but not know enough to click the "Menu" button on the remote.

I somehow suspect though, that our dear GW would have a problem with someone copying all of his content and rehosting it somewhere and selling their own advertising.

Fuck the MPAA, long live the Pirate Party!!!....

@11

that doesnt work on many dvd

some douche-bag dvd creators prevent being able to skip the pre menu happenings

all of my childrens' "elmo's world" and seseme street dvd's force this introduction by whoopie goldberg stating that all proceeds go to funding education....every time you play it. you cannot use menu, title, ff, or skip to get past it.

disney dvds are far worse... especially with baby einstien. tossing website info and ads at you before AND after the main menu....AND AFTER THE FEATURE.

worst offender....

the "lullaby time" dvd plays this loud aggervating ad for a series before and after the feature. causing a very unwelcome inturuption to a quiet soothing lullaby dvd... just as the kid gets to sleep land (or at least ready for it) they get BLASTED AWAKE BY THIS FRIGGEN AD FOR EINSTIEN PALS.

I HATE YOU DISNEY!!!.... at least the money I put to seseme street goes to funding childrens eduation. making the intro somewhat worth it.

....sometimes I wish I didnt care enough about my kids to endure any of it

Same goes to games.

Piracy: You download game; Install it; play it

When you buy the game: You should connect to the internet (game installer should check for release date);
while installing enter cd key;
go through the activation routine(also you have limited amount of activations you can make);
and in some cases have disc sittin' in your drive for the game to able to run...;

now with Assassins Creed 2 for example, PC gamers will have to stay connected to the internet ALL THE TIME while playing game. If internet connection drops, game pauses and tries to reconnect (which will be the pain in the ass to hack btw, due to unknown portion of a code will be executed on remote servers).

..Also, if something goes wrong, you'll have to go through hundreds of conversations with retarded support-guys, to prove them that there is a bug\problem in the game.... not in your configuration\machine. =\
Fuck that. I'll better download stuff from the internet, or buy from bazaars for a few bucks, rather then
spending piles of cash and be treated like a potential criminal.

SFMBE :)

Blu Ray sucks!!!!!

Blu Ray sucks!!!!!

If you don't like how a product is presented, that doesn't make stealing it an acceptable option.

good post. thanks.

Listen up, you concern trolls. The corporations steal from us every day. They steal our democracy by their huge bribes to _our_ government (that whole "We the People" thing). They steal from us by not paying taxes. They steal from us by owning the media outlets so we'll never know what they really do.

Piracy may not be legal, but it certainly is just.

actually, if you are a pirate, you don't even need the 'insert DVD' step. you just double click the video file...

@17 - Yes it does.

Pirating is wrong, but they screw the paying consumer so much I understand why they do it

@Garet

It's not stealing, even in the legal sense. Two, yes DVD's being extremely crappy justifies downloading a copy that's not crappy, even if illegal.

People who download movies are horrible monsters. You are stealing money from very respectable honest people. If you knew how hard it is to get up every morning and drag a backpack full of bootleg DVD's down to the Chinese food place, or the Ralph's parking lot you would think twice about downloading movies illegally. you are taking food out of these people's mouths. for shame, for shame.

Randal(l)

@11

I'm surprised you don't know that that rarely, if ever, actually works. They can make it so that hitting Menu does nothing. They can make it so that you have to sit through all of that crap before the menu comes up.

Pirating stuff is all well and good until you find the copy you got is a blurry piece of shit.

the genie is out of the bottle, and frankly the corps have it comming.

At which time you wonder if sitting through a minute or so of unskippable stuff isn't a good deal for high quality.

@23

Thank you. Copyright infringement is not the same as theft.

@28

Not really since you could always download dvd or even blue ray quality instead of the crappy cam version.

It should be more flowchart like.

It totaly misses the path:
Unable to show due to various 'region coding', DRM, 'incompatible player' issues

I agree it's annoying as shit but let's face it. Those company's (Blu Ray, the other film companies, etc...) pay for that junk to be on the DVD. That money ends up in the movie company's pocket which can then afford to continue to produce big budget films for you movie junkies to watch. It's a food chain. If you get rid of the annoying little mice eventually the giant octopus will starve... what? that was the worst metaphor ever.

Fuck all you pussy ass " Pirates". If you had any balls you would just steal the damn thing from an actual store and tuff it out during the damn previews. At least when you steal a physical copy the big corps still have to pay for it and all the people who made the damn thing get paid and can feed there fucking children.

Same goes for Music and Games.

You cheap bastards.

Pirates are responsible for the decline of Hollywood.

Sure, you can justify it by saying that the studios can afford the money they lose on stolen material, but anyone who believes that is clueless.

When studios lose money, they revert to two behaviors:
1) They cut low-level jobs, subsequently making it harder for newcomers to enter the business. You really think the CEO of Warner Bros. takes a paycut when someone pirates a movie? It's always the entry-level jobs that go.

2) They rely on properties that can assure them a profit even with the existence of pirates. Hence, remakes, sequels, and generally recycled ideas. Why risk money on a project you think may be a long shot if you know you can just reboot some old franchise people already love?

Seriously, shut-in pirates are not only making movies worse, but killing video stores and theaters. As someone who DOESN'T want a future full of people isolated by their technology, that's a scary prospect.

If you're stealing a movie someone else worked hard on to make, you are an enemy of the cinema.

I pirate tons of movies but this poster is inaccurate. You can skip all trailers, etc, by hitting "menu".

I am kind of with p-Tek...

Let me ask you this:

Where would you rather see the horrible ads?
- Before the movie
- During the movie

I ask this because if we all stopped buying movies and decided we were mighty crusaders of awesomeness due to the preview/adverts 1 of 2 things would happen. Either movies would stop existing all together or they would just put the preview/adverts right in the middle of the movie as part of it the script. Count on this. They would all move on to other jobs if the money was gone. Very few really good movies would still exist if there was no money in it.

The argument that if peaople are pirating it is because they are some kind of anti-ad hero is so stupid. You are pirating so that you can get something for nothing. You're stealing. Plain and simple. If they raised the price of bluerays and yanked out the adverts...would you buy them? I didn't think so.

People worked hard to make your entertainment. The only person you are hurting is MAYBE an ad exec somewhere or a suit way at the top...and only the littlest bit. You could say that they are making profit off of the previews because they make those previews to get you to want to go watch/buy those movie too. I could see that. Still free advertising on their discs means they can spend less on TV and print ads. This maximizes profit, but also puts more funds into the production budgets this making for better (or at least flashier) films as a whole.

People can find any number of excuses to support any bad habit/crime/behavior, but the fact remains that it is a bad. Then those same people always seem to try to find like minded bad people to support them to "prove" they are right. Tribalism in the most harmful model.

No one likes being called on their bad behavior, but sometimes we have to ask ourselves deeper questions than we are comfortable with. Rationalizing away a poor decision is easy, but in the end we prove out our ilk by what we do not what we think.

@31 - THANK YOU!!

I have legally purchased DVDs that I can't watch!! Why should I buy something that I can't even play on my computer due to region codes. We're always having to swap computers around because of that shit....

They're really just asking for it - make life as difficult as possible and then wonder why people find a different method of obtaining their entertainment.

@p-teK: "Pirates are responsible for the decline of Hollywood."

Huh? Decline of Hollywood? Reality check for you: just a few weeks ago a movie (Avatar, not a sequel) broke the world record for highest grossing film ... of ALL HUMAN HISTORY. There is no such decline. Despite -- or perhaps even because of -- the fact that movies can be obtained on the Internet at no cost they're making more money than ever. So your argument is invalid. It's the same argument that begins "violent crime is out of control because kids today have no morals", even though violent crime is at its lowest rates ever, and declining.

Also @Pariah,

You have it completely backwards. If anyone is stealing it's Hollywood stealing from all of us! You see, the ultimate purpose of copyright is not to make anyone money. Its purpose is to encourage people to make stuff, achieved by giving authors a monopoly over their work. It's merely a means to an end; the end of having more books to read. Because of this, it was intended to be temporary ("limited times").

Thanks to the information age, modern works make almost all of their money within the first few years, so this temporary period should *only* be a few years, then the work falls into the public domain where anyone can use it. No more artificial monopoly. However, even though copyright terms should be shorter than ever they've been stretched out longer than a human lifetime. This is wrong and unjust. You can thank Hollywood for paying your senators off to do this ("Mickey Mouse Protection Act"). These works belong to us, the people.

I'm not stealing, I'm downloading what, according to the US Constitution, already belongs to me. Hollywood is the one stealing: stealing our liberty through corruption. They can fuck off.

@ 38

"The decline of Hollywood"? They really only have to blame themselves. Their movies suck because at some point they decided to stop being entertainers and instead decided to be intellectuals and "artists". Now there is nothing wrong with being intellectual or an artist, but if you jump that fence you have to realize that you are selecting a limited audience. This can also explain B-movies like G.I. JOEs or Spiderman 3. They think that they can tell their "cooler" version and it will be more popular. If they had just partnered with the original artists (comicbook artists), they could have made more money because it would be giving the audience what they want. Too bad so sad, but I don't need to pirate anything because I think it's unfair.

What a whiner! You CAN skip the trailers. This isn't 2001. You can't skip the FBI warning, though. Which amounts to what? 2 minutes of your PRECIOUS TIME?

This isn't copyright infringement. It's theft, morons. Plus, how long does it take to download a movie? More than the 5 minutes of previews.

I got Avatar, it's pirated, the quality is awesome, come on over and watch it with me.

Unskippable trailers? Whaa?? There's buttons called Fast Forward and Menu. There's no way that people get movies illegally b/c they can't stand the trailers and warning cards. Most people go the downloading route to get a pirated movie and if you're too cheap to buy/rent the movie, I'm pretty sure your bandwidth sucks and it's going to take a helluvalot longer to download the movie then it is to skip/fast fwd or Menu out of the trailers. So this argument makes no sense. Just an excuse to justify stealing.

dont forget that pirating and stealing movies, music and games is what started the whole fucken recession shit. So i hope your happy when america becomes completly broke and there wont be ANY more movies for you to download and steal from the hardoworking movie staff.

@36 : There are already ads during the movie. It's called product placement.
Also, unskippable trailers in DVDs are actually competitive practice between studios, not a way to fund movies to make them better.
FBI warnings and all anti-piracy stuff are highly annoying and offensive. It's like getting lectured after you done something right.
Actually all these stuff are fine : just make them optional. Forcing them does not benefit the consumer at all.

Another thing :
"Pirating" is not stealing. If I copy a movie illegally, I take absolutely nothing from the studios. It *may* cause a loss of profit, which is not the same thing.

@44 : troll or stupid ?

@46: yes.

lul wut?

I have yet to have this experience on any dvd. The only exception is one out of between 50-100 dvds I've watched that forced me to fast forward through the previews instead of hitting menu. I've had 3 dvd players, and every one of them allowed me to hit menu from the beginning, almost every dvd tells me to do that (and those that don't somehow still allow me too).

Compare this to waiting for a download for a day or two, and if you want a different movie when a girlfriend comes over you have to set up another download as well as no special features and all.

The dvd shown in the example doesn't exist, or if it does, it's a rarity, not a standard of the industry.