Pirating Movies - Do You Do It?

[Doctor Who?]

I have to say I am in the group of people who doesn't understand why in these days of HDTVs anyone would want to watch a blury version of a movie shot from the back of a theater with people talking over it just to save a few bucks.

[RobtheBarbarian]

*This thread is now being watched by the FBI.

*Beware.

[Chaos]

I do, for three reasons.

1) Convenience.
2) Availability.
3) Cheapness / Quality Concerns

The nearest movie theater to where I live is an hour and a half away. The time commitment and cost involved in getting a babysitter, and driving an hour and a half each way, to watch a 2 hour movie, is not worth it for pretty much any movie I can think of. Unless we are taking a planned trip to the city (which we specifically did to see TDK), we do not watch movies in the theater. Also, there is only one video store in our town, they carry no old movies at all, very few copies of new releases, and their selection bites. They also charge $5 for one night's rental, because they can.

Additionally, our satellite provider out here ALSO sucks ass. We don't get very many good channels, and because of the time zone we are in, most of the shows we want to watch start at 11pm, which is generally speaking too late for two working parents to start watching a TV show and still get up at 6:00 the next morning to get ready for work and deal with getting the children to daycare and everything. So I just download the shows we want to watch, and we watch them at our convenience the next night (this is why you will never see me post in the TV threads until the night after a show has aired).

As far as the cheapness goes, I have no problem paying for something I enjoy, but it really sticks in my craw to pay for something ahead of time that there is a fairly high chance I WON'T like. I absolutely refuse to buy video games that there is not a free demo for, or if the franchise is well established and trustable (Final Fantasy, Fallout, anything from Valve, anything from Bioware, etc.). I consider movies to be the same way. I will download pre-screeners of them shortly before they come out in stores (having not seen them in the theaters because of the aforementioned distance issues), and if I like the movie, I will gladly buy it. I have quite a large collection of movies, TV series, and anime DVDs, all of which I legitimately purchased after viewing them via download. If I had not watched them first, I would have just never bought them in the first place. I know that a lot of "pirates" do not do things this way or think of them this way, but that is how I personally use them and think of them.

I flat-out refuse to pay for the movie portion of a RiffTrax, though. I always download those movies, because there's no way I'm going to pay the studios for that dreck (unless, of course, they are riffing a good movie like LOTR, in which case I will probably already own the movie anyway).

[jewishcarpenter]

Sweet, I was wondering when we were going to have an "Incriminate yourself" thread.

[bettertomorrowamy]

I do not know any of you people or what you are referring.

[Chaos]

Actually, the RCMP have specifically said they have no intention whatsoever of wasting manpower and manhours trying to catch individuals for copyright infringement. They are only concerned with large-scale corporate fraud. You know - the stuff that copyright laws are ACTUALLY supposed to be protecting against.

[BBQ Platypus]

*snip*

Well, that sounds like a good excuse, at least.  If you have to go through that much trouble to watch a movie, it becomes difficult to see anything at all.  Do you have a Netflix subscription?  I tell ya, Netflix is a lifesaver.

My satellite provider sucks, too.  My family pays as much for internet access alone as most families do for EVERY SINGLE SERVICE a cable/satellite company can provide.  Although we do live in a vaguely sparsely populated area, I suspect that this is not the reason at all.  I know this because the east side of Eagan (a much, MUCH larger and more densely populated suburb of the Twin Cities) has the same provider, and also the same problem.  We've gone to companies like Qwest or Comcast to see what prices they would offer, and they're universally lower.  Unfortunately, we can't switch to them.

Why?  Because the market is so strictly regulated that the consumer LITERALLY has no choice as to which provider they choose, even if they can get more service for a lower price.  Technically, the utilities board can change the allotment of service, but they never do because the board is basically run by the cable companies.  As a result, I'm stuck with a shitty, two-bit company that can't even provide basic service at a reasonable price.  This is NOT a free market.  Hell, it isn't even fucking American.  This is just BULLSHIT.  Our infrastructure would NOT collapse if people had more choice over what kind of service they have.

In case you're wondering which company I'm talking about, it's called Frontier Communications.  Their headquarters is in Stamford, Connecticut.  Look them up in the phonebook if you want to firebomb their main office building.  I certainly encourage it.

/rant off

[Chaos]

Netflix is not available in Canada. The nearest equivalent is called "Zap," it costs twice as much, has a limit of  I believe 8 movies per month, and the selection sucks (less than half of what Netflix has). And while I admit that 8 movies a month for $30 is slightly better than $5 per movie per night, it's still a rip IMO.

Please understand, I do not attempt to justify my actions - I know that what I do is illegal. I just don't really care. It's an explanation, not a justification.

[bettertomorrowamy]

Actually, the RCMP have specifically said they have no intention whatsoever of wasting manpower and manhours trying to catch individuals for copyright infringement. They are only concerned with large-scale corporate fraud. You know - the stuff that copyright laws are ACTUALLY supposed to be protecting against.

I, of course, am not that organized.

[mrbasehart]

I have to say I am in the group of people who doesn't understand why in these days of HDTVs anyone would want to watch a blury version of a movie shot from the back of a theater with people talking over it just to save a few bucks.

My friend says that you clearly haven't been downloading the right files.

[Doctor Who?]

I don't want to know what type of people you have to get involved with to get a pirated  version of a movie that is near HD quality.

it' seems to me you would have to have some way of coping the film onto your computer.

If someone is able to do that i think they may spend their free time putting horse heads in people's beds.

I'm not cut out for any sort of life of crime.

[BBQ Platypus]

I don't want to know what type of people you have to get involved with to get a pirated  version of a movie that is near HD quality.

I get the feeling it starts with a T and rhymes with "Dyad."

[gojikranz]

generally if i wanna watch something i want to own it cause its good, and i to have the ocd where i must have the best version of whatever i own, so i never download movies, one exception i downloaded eltopo back when it was impossible to find but i have since bough the dvd set, i also of course have some mst3k episodes that we will never see on dvd.

[Minnesota]

As far as pirating movies there are three or four different animals. Streaming, downloading, movies on demand, and burning. The topic is far too complicated for a single forum post but I imagine it would make a great paper for a college student.

Regardless, it comes down to ethics. Movie addicts watch films, some find ways to do this honestly and cheaply, others find ways to do this honestly and expensively. Vis versa with the 'dishonest'.

If its solutions you want... they exist and have existed for quite sometime. On demand is huge. Netflix is huge. Burning is huge. Oh and downloading is huge too. Fuck if neither of those fit your fancy take a stroll to the pawn shop and buy your movies for two bucks a pop.

End of the day: ethics.

[Chaos]

I don't want to know what type of people you have to get involved with to get a pirated  version of a movie that is near HD quality.

Five years ago this certainly held true, and the most you could ever expect to get ahold of was something that was near-DVD quality, if the person who did the original rip actually had the real DVD in hand and used fairly expensive software to rip it (though of course if they were really into the pirate game, the software itself may have been ripped as well).

These days, there are some new digital formats that are essentially undistinguishable from HD (they are, in fact, digital HD formats), and again, assuming the person who did the ripping used the original material, the right compression, the right software, and had a beefy enough system, you can get output that is literally identical to what comes on the Blu-Ray disc. You won't see this often, because it takes a lot of time and effort to produce, and from what I have seen (especially with TV episodes), the main focus is on speed of delivery. In some cases, episodes go up online exactly 1 hour after the show airs.

The myths that piracy is less convenient and lower quality are both just that - myths. Certainly the quality is usually a LITTLE lower (near HD instead of pure HD), but the capability is there to have the same caliber of image, too.