What’s this got to do with the FBI executing people?
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That’s probably because mentioning that many movies aren’t for sale at any price seemed an implicit problem. It’s one of the things this article is about anyway.
But hey, if you wanna judge me without knowing me and make assumptions about what I do, that’s up to you. I’m just not going to take your criticisms seriously.
As for the idea of directly downloading content easily available through paid services, there seems to be a protest spirit to some of it. When you see grandmothers being arrested for a download they didn’t do, dead people sued who never even owned a computer, and children arrested for clicking a link, I can understand why people might want to push back and try to hurt those industries. I sometimes wonder if that’s a motivation for torrent seeders. After all, what other recourse does the average Joe have in stopping abuse by very wealthy media companies who have our politicians in their pockets and the police to do their bidding.
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what other options do I have… if I want to see that movie…
I, for one, am just joshing. Living in TJ, I can see movies at the theater with English subtitles. Rarely, I cannot (Black Panther). I was happy to pay for both Netflix and Amazon video, but no matter if you pay, they put on regional restrictions and fight VPN tooth and nail. You’d think they would be happy to earn extra revenue if they could work out some deal.
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That’s an out-of-context excerpt from a related bit from The IT Crowd, a British sitcom. Here’s the whole bit:
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fwiw this jibes with my personal piracy experience.
Copying other people’s intellectual property without permission? I don’t even know what you people are TALKING about. Do some people actually DO that?!
/wanders off whistling innocently
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I recently tried to rent the lord of the rings movies on the google play store here in Mexico, but didn’t because they only had the dubbed version available! In fact, if you buy a movie from there you have to choose the original audio or dubbed, if for some reason you needed both a dubbed and a subbed version you have to buy it twice.
I get how it’s hard to work out deals for rights since historically, rights have been sold off to different companies in different regions, but this is inexcusable.
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You get all the normal movies legally, and load a list of skips and jumps into VLC or something?
This.
There is an animated series that I am fond of. Unfortunately, the license holder (suspiciously mouse-shaped) refused to release the third and final season of said series on DVD; I’d snap it up in a heartbeat if it was available to me. So, one questionable download later, I have the first two seasons legitimately, and in decent quality, and the third season… questionably, and obviously ripped from someone’s DVR, and decidedly lessor quality then what I normally desire.
There’s another series that I’d love to buy a box set of, but due to Executive Meddling, there is no coherent box set of, and the individual volumes are both overprices, and pieced together in a terrible manner. (You might have to ‘bust’ things around to ‘discover’ who I’m referring to here.) Did I mention that the volumes are also priced at $50 for either one season, or half a season? and that said series is ~14 seasons long?
That having been said, I do try my damnedest to support content creators when humanly possible.
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Sadly I do not have the necessary skills yet. 
I do have all the DVDs already, so technically I’ve paid for the content (they were presents, so really someone else paid, but you know what I mean) but it’s hard to justify learning to edit video when skilled editors are making their cuts easily downloadable.
I did teach myself to edit audio when I converted all my old cassettes to FLAC files. (Hooray for Audacity! L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace!)
I think that’s what matters, really, in the long run.
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The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet?
Edit to add: If I did spend the $128 it takes to get that series, which of the content creators will benefit from that purchase and why do I suspect it’s none of them…
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Gargoyles, for the first example, and Mythbusters for the second. DIsney really dragged their feet getting the second half of the second season out for gargoyles, and they still haven’t release the third (and last) season to DVD. And for mythbusters, (the first iteration and it’s 14 season run) Discover butchered the DVD release. Badly.
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Enh, as someone who pirated a fair bit in my younger life, they conspicuously left out “could easily afford and buy it but don’t want to pay.”
And obligatory Why I pirate
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Not as true as it used to be. But still true enough.
Weirdly Netflix went through a phase where it had so much of what I wanted to watch, there was not even temptation for a long time to torrent.
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When Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog was initially released, someone asked Joss Whedon if he was afraid people would steal it, because it was being released online.
He answered along the lines of: some people will stream it from the site. Some people will torrent a copy. Some people will wait to buy the DVD. And a lot of those are the same people.
Sometimes a pirate copy sucks in new fans who might not have seen a thing before. A friend sends them a file, link or hands them a USB drive, and suddenly they’re spending $$$ on the franchise.
In other words, it’s complicated and messy. Probably because it’s a human enterprise.
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We waited for the movie to come out on free TV. If we could not wait, we sneaked into the theater. Which by the way, is the only true tie-dyed hippie way to see the movie “Woodstock” (1970). What’s the difference? Illegal downloading or shoplifting the Blu-Ray?
I cracked up at “Impossibly proportioned girls who want to date your testicles”.
Thanks, I think?
There is a way that is “not illegal.” Fan edits made for non-commercial purposes are considered fair use, but their legality is unclear if you did not purchase the original. If you have already purchased a legit copy of the original, downloading a fan-edit is not a codified crime. See http://www.maple-films.com/faq.html For a discussion see: https://www.fanedit.org/
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