Piracy is Killing them!

[Skuzzy]

You guys cannot own DVD players with progressive scan outputs?  Wierd.  But if the MPAA/RIAA are controlling that, then why is it we can get those items legally in the U.S.?
Can you guys buy DVD players with HDMI or DVI outputs?  If so, then you get progressive through those interfaces.  It just requires a monitor/television with the appropriate input.

How the heck did the MPAA/RIAA get so much power outside of the U.S.?

[DREDIOCK]

Originally posted by Skuzzy
Internet distribution?

Right.  No way in heck am I going to download a 40GB+ film when the HD-DVD format is available.  Heck, I do not have the patience to wait for Aces High to download, nor do I want my home Internet connection saturated for those long periods of time.
I can go to the store and buy the DVD faster than it could be downloaded.

 

Skuzzy still on dialup?

Musicwise
The only copyrighted material I typically download is music I already own on CD to begin with. Easier to make a CD with a mix of songs from different albums that way.
Or really hard to next to impossable to find stuff on CD
Tom Lehr "New Math"  or "Poisoning pidgeons in the park" is a good example. .

Another would be if and when I can ever find it is a rendition of  "Peter and the Wolf" Narrarated by Boris Karloff.

Not exactly something your usually find in your local record store

Also. how many times am I supposed to pay for the same peice of material I already own?

Movie wise I agree with Skuzzy. With the price of DVDs so cheap these days it just makes more sence to just buy the damn thing.

[Siaf__csf]

It's called globalization Skuzzy.

For some rediculous reason they think progressive PAL is the end of the world where progressive NTSC is good for children and grownups.

[Nashwan]

How the heck did the MPAA/RIAA get so much power outside of the U.S.?

They create the content. They usually only allow that content to be sold on disks containing CSS protection, and region encoded. CSS "encryption" and regional coding rights are owned by the DVD Copy Control Association, who only licence the technology to "approved" companies.

Without buying a licence from the DVD Copy Control Association you can't make a DVD player that will play the vast majority of DVDs. The DVD Copy Control Association can decide not to licence the technology if the player doesn't fit their standards.

Thankfully their control of the market has largely broken down in some parts of the world. For example, DVD players for the European market can usually be made region free very easily, because manufacturers have found if they don't make their players "hackable" to region free they won't sell.

[Thrawn]

Originally posted by Mini D
No, I didn't see it. It wasn't much of a point anyways.

I WIN!

[Gunslinger]

Originally posted by Skuzzy
You guys cannot own DVD players with progressive scan outputs?  Wierd.  But if the MPAA/RIAA are controlling that, then why is it we can get those items legally in the U.S.?
Can you guys buy DVD players with HDMI or DVI outputs?  If so, then you get progressive through those interfaces.  It just requires a monitor/television with the appropriate input.

How the heck did the MPAA/RIAA get so much power outside of the U.S.?

I think they may be looking to the future.

Read a good article about Internet2 today.  Said it is so fast it would only take 30 seconds to D/L a DVD quality copy of the Matrix.

[Sandman]

Originally posted by Gunslinger
I think they may be looking to the future.

Read a good article about Internet2 today.  Said it is so fast it would only take 30 seconds to D/L a DVD quality copy of the Matrix.

I have news for ya.

[Gunslinger]

Originally posted by Sandman
I have news for ya.

ummm yea...that's the same article I read!  

Researchers at Internet2 once demonstrated they can download a DVD-quality copy of the popular movie "The Matrix" in 30 seconds over their network, a feat they said would take roughly 25 hours over the Internet

another interesting read (not about internet2 though)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/12/new_file_sharing_lawsuits/print.html

TThe Register » Internet and Law » eCommerce »
Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/12/new_file_sharing_lawsuits/

New wave of lawsuits to hit 'illegal song-swappers'
By Charles Arthur (feedback at theregister.co.uk)
Published Tuesday 12th April 2005 12:34 GMT
The record industry is targeting nearly 1,000 people in a new wave of lawsuits against alleged "illegal song-swappers" in actions in 11 countries in Europe and Asia.

Following its first year of legal actions in Europe, which resulted in 248 people paying fines or facing "sanctions", the International Federation of the Phonographic Industries (IFPI) said this morning that it will bring lawsuits to four new European countries, specifically the Netherlands, Finland, Ireland and Iceland.

Japan is also joining in the fun, becoming the first Asian country to take legal action against people who use P2P services to trade the record business' wares without payment.

Those found guilty by a court, or who settle with the IFPI, are likely to face compensation payments of thousands of pounds, or euros. Or hundreds of thousands of yen.

The IFPI claimed that the first round of European lawsuits, which began last autumn, have already seen illegal file-sharing fall by one third in Germany, where CD sales have dropped precipitiously in the face of widespread CD-burning. "The number of music files downloaded there fell to 382m files in 2004, compared to 602m the previous year," the IFPI said in a statement.

John Kennedy, the IFPI's chairman, said: "Today, people across Europe can be in no doubt that uploading copyrighted music on to file-sharing networks is against the law, affects jobs, investment in music and livelihoods, and carries the risk of financial penalties. We have spent two years raising public awareness of this, and ignorance really is no longer an excuse."

However Julian Midgley, of the Campaign for Digital Rights, thinks the lawsuits are a bad idea. "The CDR has always stood up for copyright law," he said. "But we will say that we aren't convinced that the record industry is going about keeping its buying public on its best side. There's still plenty of evidence that the people who are using file sharing services buy more music than they would otherwise. And it's obvious that suing your customers isn't likely to make them happy." He said the money being spent on lawsuits could better be used providing more - and cheaper - services like Apple's iTunes Music Store.

The IFPI is also extending the range of P2P services it targets, so that it's not just users of KaZaA who are in its sights, but also those of what it calls "newer" file-sharing services such as eDonkey, eMule, Bearshare, OpenNap, DirectConnect and BitTorrent.

Pretty much everyone who uses such services is now a target of the IFPI. Initially, it is chasing what it calls "uploaders", who let files on their machine be available for download by anyone else using the services. The largest case it has settled was a French man with 56,000 tracks - "equivalent to more than 5,000 CD albums" - in his music library. However people who have "uploaded" even a few hundred tracks are in the spotlight in the latest legal cases.

We wondered whether that didn't mean that the IFPI is targeting people who have large music collections, and are thus in a sense already its best customers. The IFPI disagreed. "The default settings of the file-sharing software makes all your files available, but you can change that," said a spokeswoman for the IFPI.

The IFPI is happy that its strategy - of going after those who make big libraries available, rather than download - is working in a 'softly softly' manner, especially as broadband - the technology it sees as assisting evil file-sharing - spreads. The lawsuits have had "a noticeable effect on file-sharing figures despite the growth of broadband penetration," it said today. "Overall, the number of infringing music files on the internet dropped from its peak of 1.1bn in April 2003 to 870m in January 2005, a drop of 21 per cent. In the same time period global broadband penetration grew by 75 per cent, from 80m to 140m households worldwide."

Last month the British Phonographic Industry won settlements (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/03/04/bpi_fileshare_settlements/) from 23 Britons accused of distributing copyrighted music over file-sharing networks. Three cases are still pending, and expected to reach the courts sometime.

The IFPI's latest assault brings it in line with the US's RIAA, which has filed more than 900 lawsuits, though it made what many saw as the strategic mistake of targeting both downloaders and "uploaders" indiscriminately, leading to bad publicity when one of the first turned out to be a 12-year-old girl. ®

[Vulcan]

Originally posted by Skuzzy
The RIAA controls the content of other countries DVD's?  That is news to me.  How did that happen?

EDIT:  Trade-offs.  PAL video quality should be better than the NTSC quality of the U.S. DVD.  A world standard has been needed for a long time, but I cannot see where the RIAA is to be faulted for that either.

Sorry Skuzzy, sometimes I refer to the RIAA/MPAA collective organism in my rants.

[Vulcan]

Originally posted by NUKE
Internet disributation?? You mean internet stealling. Would you pay to download movies on the internet?

Stone age? lol!

Don't know bout your country, but right now in mine our main telco is building a network that will deliver anything up to 1Gbps connections to the home/business. Part of the network is already up and running.

Over those connections they will deliver IP, VoIP services, TV services, and Video on Demand services (also known as buying a movie off the internet).

and we're just a little backwater island at the bottom of the pacific.

[-tronski-]

Originally posted by Siaf__csf
RIAA is not at fault with dvd's it's MPAA and other distributors who created the region code system.

It's main idea (I think) is to ensure income for movie theaters in countries where movies are displayed later than in the US. That means 6 month - 1 year of delay before content is accessible on dvd even if the movie premiered 2 years ago in US.

The PAL-NTSC thing is true to some extent. Most people would trade the minor improvement of PAL to DTS sound and extras any time. Just as I'm doing when I'm ordering an ntsc version and play them through my hacked dvd-player. Other nice 'features' include no progressive outputs for dvd players (they say it gives 'too good' visual quality to hometheathers) etc. that can be hacked away. Same applies to standard vga and component outputs....

I personally prefer PAL discs to NTSC, but your correct in some regards R1 releases are more tricked out with regards to DTS, extras etc. But I think thats more  market demand than conspiracy.
Also with big releases (Spiderman,Starwars etc) those discs are released globally at basically the same time - but in general some regions do get releases faster than others...but the american R1 isn't "always" the first - but that again is usually market driven. But thats the great thing about amazon.uk, amazon.com etc etc

Originally posted by Skuzzy
You guys cannot own DVD players with progressive scan outputs?  Wierd.  But if the MPAA/RIAA are controlling that, then why is it we can get those items legally in the U.S.?
Can you guys buy DVD players with HDMI or DVI outputs?  If so, then you get progressive through those interfaces.  It just requires a monitor/television with the appropriate input.

How the heck did the MPAA/RIAA get so much power outside of the U.S.?

Perhaps it a european thing, but in Aus you can buy progressive scan DVD players, and most DVD players sold here are region free manufactured by the better companies. My 2 DVD players (1 a recorder) are Pioneers and came region free out of the box.

It used to be when players first came out on the market, stores weren't allowed to advertise if a player was region free - but most stores also supplied region free codes with R4 only  players (A couple of years ago my brothers Akai player came with codes that took 10 secs to make it region free). I think only Sony still refuse to make their dvd players region free.

 Tronsky

[Skuzzy]

Internet2 will not happen in our lifetime.  It has been rolling around in various forms for almost 7 years now.  

Speed of the connection is irrelevant to me as it pertains to downloading something.  I prefer to buy the DVD, even if it took 10 seconds to download, because after the download, you have to burn it to disk, then make some labels.
All that time ties up your computer and is a pain in the butt as far as I am concerned.  Nicely packaged DVD's are under $20 U.S.  It just makes no sense to go through the hassle of a download when it is so cheap to purchase.
I have a 15Mb by 2Mb /second connection at home, but still find it irritating to wait for a 50MB download.

Again, wait until the HD-DVD (or Blueray) DVD's hit the streets.  No way in heck will I even consider downloading a 40GB+ movie.  That is just nuts.

Oh, and those wonderful 1Gb/s connections cannot be sustained from any server right now, if more than 8 connections to the server are made.

[Jagr]

On the topic of PtP "Piracy"..

When Napster hit the scene, I was almost a "non factor" in the CD market..  I rarely bought commercial CD's and wasn't all that into buying CD's at all..  I certainly didn't buy CD's for a song or two I might have liked.

The PtP exposure changed that quite a bit..  I sampled tons of groups..of all kinds..and in my own experience I ended up purchasing about 20 CD's in a year whereas the year before I had purchased 1 single CD.  If I found a group or songs I liked I always ended up getting the CD eventually..

Maybe others found their experiences differed..but in my case it was a win win for the money grubbing lawyers who call themselves the "recording industry"  They really should call themselves the "licensing industry"..the recording title should be left to the artists who don't have law degree's but have talent..

[Gunslinger]

Originally posted by Jagr
On the topic of PtP "Piracy"..

When Napster hit the scene, I was almost a "non factor" in the CD market..  I rarely bought commercial CD's and wasn't all that into buying CD's at all..  I certainly didn't buy CD's for a song or two I might have liked.

The PtP exposure changed that quite a bit..  I sampled tons of groups..of all kinds..and in my own experience I ended up purchasing about 20 CD's in a year whereas the year before I had purchased 1 single CD.  If I found a group or songs I liked I always ended up getting the CD eventually..

Maybe others found their experiences differed..but in my case it was a win win for the money grubbing lawyers who call themselves the "recording industry"  They really should call themselves the "licensing industry"..the recording title should be left to the artists who don't have law degree's but have talent..

My experiences are roughly the same.  I donwloaded musid to listen to JUST on my computer.  At the time the fastest CDRW I could afford was a 4x and thos took for ever.

In addition I was also DJing alot.  The irony is I would find music....download it...Love it so much I'd order/Buy it.....Then I'd play it at my shows and I'd have a ton of people asking "who is this?  Were can I get this?"  And then my friends at the local music stores say they'd get flooded with calls for said music.

I'm not trying to justify it here but what I don't think is justified is the preditory response from the RIAA.  All of this could have been avoided if they were willing to embrace this new tech.  For me I think their name is scared forever and people wont soon forget.

[Mini D]

And when MP3 players came out... ?

The noble behavior of the few posting in this thread is greatly outweighed by the typical behavior of everyone else in the world.