But borrowing a book, movie or audio tape from a library also “leads to lost revenue regardless of when the film is released in what format.”
If “lost revenue” is the main criteria for a police action why wouldn’t libraries be shut down?
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It’s entirely fair and democratic - if the gentleman in question had his own lobbying and budget for campaign contributions then surely he would also be able to buy a politician to to implement his whim in law and buy a police force to uphold it. there’s no suggestion that the justice the MPAA is able to afford is out of reach to the average cinema goer, if they can afford it. If they can’t afford it then it’s their own fault for being poor or not having foresight
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I’m not being silly. I’m just pointing out that “pirating” a movie (for some definitions of “pirating”) does not lead to loss of revenue. I borrow a lot of movies from the library; it does not follow that if the movie was unavailable at the library, I would buy (or rent a digitally available, licensed) copy. Thus, the movie industry loses no revenue from me borrowing at a library.
I presume that this is true for many instances of “piracy.”
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It would have been doubleplus good if the screen switched to this just before the miniluv muscle arrived.
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The weird part is that the feds (according to the victim’s account), for all of their paranoia, seem to know little to nothing about Google and the Glass explorer program. Like they were trying to accuse him of being recruited and paid by Google to record the movie.
It’s like the maniacs at the MPAA are convinced Google is conspiring against them and sending out agents to take them down, and the feds believe it. Are the ICE people just that confused? It’s bizarre.
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Yanked out of a movie for wearing Google Glass, you say?
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First, you don’t lose money from someone who was never going to pay. A 12 year old kid that pirates porn wasn’t going to pay for it. Someone without cable who pirates A Game of Thrones isn’t lost revenue because that person can’t buy it to begin with. It takes magical thinking to believe that every single act of piracy is lost money. It isn’t. There are people on minimum wage with hundreds of thousands of pirated movies and songs, and it doesn’t translate into a billion dollars of lost revenue.
Second, it is hilarious to see law enforcement and corporate thugs trying to stop pirating. Only one person needs to do it and then it is over. Oh look, they have already failed http://thepiratebay.se/search/Shadow%20Recruit/0/99/0 You would have better luck legislating that the tide shall no longer go in and out and then send police to go enforce it. Someone somewhere is going to get a copy. It is useless and a waste of my fucking tax money to fight it. They have never once seceded in preventing a movie being pirated on day 1, and so long as we have even the vaguest notion of civil liberty, they never will.
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Not only that, but they’d taken away his property including prescription lenses. Depending on his eyesight, that can be a pretty crippling state to try to “voluntarily” leave in.
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obligatory
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This problem will persist as long as A.) MPAA’s thugs are allowed to pull this shit, or B.) as long as anyone attends these shitty movies.
If “B” were to happen first, the thugs would beg you to pirate their crap.
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The paranoia the MPAA has over Google Glass and similar devices is misplaced to say the least. If i were to be a movie pirate the last thing I would be using would be a google glass. Why? Human heads move constantly if somebody wants to watch a constantly jittering image or one that is pointed at an angle more power to them.
Another issue is that Google glass devices don’t have the greatest battery life out there. Use one to record a video and more likely than not the internal battery will not last the full length of an average movie (127+ minutes) you could use an external battery but still a less than optimal arrangement.
To tell the truth the best tool for a pirate for this sort of thing is an inexpensive and compact video camera. Which can be gotten far cheaper than any Google glass device as well as being far better at recording video and audio than any Google glass unit.
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This is beyond moronic but no one has asked the most pertinent question:
Who would be stupid enough to watch a 2 hour movie from a camera strapped to someone’s head? ergo, who would bother recording it on glass?
DHS for piracy? Sheesh. A 6.7 rating on IMDB does’t even warrant watching a DVD rip in my opinion… they could at least have waited until the end to ‘arrest’ him…
To be fair, Google IS kind of trying to take down their business model. Just legally.
I think what’s happening here is that the MPAA have convinced the feds Tech Companies are willing to fight this copyright ‘war’ with the same kind of underhanded, only-barely-legal tactics the MPAA likes to use.
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From the /r/BadCopNoDonut reddit thread:
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Yes, obviously they overreacted.
HOWEVER, the fact remains that he was watching the movie with a camera pointed at it. It seems like they had this planned for the first glass complaint, to make a point.
And this guy was obviously looking for attention when he made sure he had to wear the glass every where he goes by fusing it to his regular glasses.
I do think the glass is a great piece of technology, but maybe they should add a bright red LED so people know when its recording, as that seems to be the biggest complaint right now.
Or, ya know, he might just have wanted to 1) be able to use it normally, and 2) not carry around two pairs of glasses all the time, because that’s a pain in the ass to do and introduces an awkward fumbling period every time you need to swap them out.
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Technically, people who bring cell phones with cameras (i.e. nearly everyone in the theaters) are violating most theaters’ policies by bringing “recording devices” into the theaters. In practical terms, the management knows that most people have absolutely no intention of recording the movies, and at most they’re going to ask that people turn their phones off, mostly so as not to disturb other patrons with ringing and buzzing. Glass is novel and rare enough at this point that the theaters are still able to get away with making a huge deal of it. If Glass gets big enough (and one of the biggest risks to Glass is incidents like this), then the theaters will eventually stop worrying about Glass just as they don’t really worry about cell phones as “recording devices” today. More importantly, if Glass gets big enough, then ICE isn’t going to have the resources to keep up with the hissy fits that the MPAA wants to pull every time someone wears Glass into a theater.
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Yes, they totally stopped all the day one piracy that day. It was an awesome use of tax dollars. Oh wait, they didn’t and they never will. Every single person that steps into a movie theater is armed with a recorder, and across the entire nation it takes exactly one person to record it and put it up and everyone has it. At no point in the past 5 years has there EVER been a major movie that wasn’t pirated on day one. It is an unexcusable waste of police resources and my tax money to try and fail on every single fucking movie that comes out to prevent day 1 piracy. If someone wants a copy of a movie on day one, they can just pirate it like every other normal person.
Yes, anyone who wants to be able to both see with their prescription and use Glass at the same time is an attention whore who totally has it coming when police and corporate thugs curb stomp his rights. That fucking nerd had it coming! If he didn’t want it, he would have dressed differently.
I think it is hilarious that people are scared shitless that someone wants to secretly record them. No one gives a shit about you and wants to ever have to bore themselves playing back a recording of you drink a soda. Seriously, no one cares. If they did care, they would just use one of the many much smaller, more covert, cheaper, and less battery hungry secret cameras. If someone wants to secretly record you for some reason, they won’t be using something as obvious as Glass. Get over it and deal. There is literally no defense against being secretly recorded other than to not go outside. Worrying that a random bloke is going to stare at you, semi-secretly recording you (they do have to stare directly at you after all) is insane. In fact, a cell phone is far more convert, as someone can point it at you, pretend to be playing candy crush, without having to stare directly at you. Also, you get recorded a few hundred times every time you walk down any street. Really, no one cares.
Finally, a red LED isn’t going to do shit against anyone that wants to “secretly” record you by staring intently at you. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to tape over an LED or simply break it.
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Before you know it they’ll be hitting you with a Men In Black memory-zapper as you leave the cinema, because your memories of the movie will infringe their copyright. Obviously no-one will recognise the Men In Black reference because, memory-zapper.
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I wish they would, then at least I would think “Hobbit Episode 2 : The attack of the Smaug” might be worth watching rather than the travesty it was…
Most people would probably pay extra to forget the shit that Hollywood pumps out 9 times out of 10…
