Pirate Copies Of Spider-Man 3 Abound
If I am to believe everything I'm told (and I tend to, to a point - at first, at least) the streets of Beijing are flooded with bootleg Spidey discs, your favourite Bit Torrent server can probably broker a deal and pirate copies of Spider-Man 3 have even been seen in London, just as the UK premiere is going on.
Reuters have a piece on the Chinese Pirates.
Do you buy, make, sell or download pirate versions of films? If so, why? I'd love to see your excuses in the comments section below.
5 comments:
I work in film post-production, buy at least 5 or 6 DVD's a month, have a subscription to LoveFilm and frequent the cinema, usually, twice a week. Paying £8 a pop to see the latest shit storm in my local Odeon, only to be let down by crappy prints and amateur projection.
I also download films, because even though I live in London, my lifestyle doesn't let me get to see all the films I want too on first release, and watching old prints drives me insane. If I like the film, i'm going to buy the DVD. Also, crazy release scheduels (Zodiac being a prime example of recent times) keeps the European, and specifically British, audiences artifically behind American audiences.
That's a pretty compelling argument. The counter argument?
That even if you don't like a film, you should have paid to see it. People struggled to make that film and worked very hard - and you get it for nothing? If they were on anything like a points deal, they aren' getting paid their dues.
Cinema projection is, generally, pretty awful. Digital will make small steps to resolving this issue.
Yeah, I don't do the whole pirated movies thing. In fact, at our local train station, a vendor was selling pirated DVDs and I contacted police about it, and after a week or so, the vendor was gone from his spot for months, so I assume he was appropriately busted.
I don't care how rich some artists are -- I don't think we're entitled to say "I want your product NOW" and "I'm not paying for it." You know that if the shoe were on the other foot, downloaders would raise a hue and cry -- there's no moral consistency among folks who practice theft.
That being said, I'm kind of on the fence about companies wanting to sue YouTube for clips and such. Technically, yeah -- it's your product, it's your right -- but those clips are such low quality, they're not really archival or anything; more like free advertising, really. Not sure why it's not considered fair use, really.
I'm going to use the Bill Clinton argument: "Because we can."
The internet allows us to download music and movies from torrents. Lucky for studios that human beings can only absorb so many titles per human. Once movie companies provide a system of smooth, fast direct downloads (hey, if a bunch of hackers figured out how to do this 5 years ago and counting now) then maybe more customers will buy the stuff. What you have are old, fat rich punks behind these companies who treat film like "a medical experiment" with terrible theatres prone to tons of advertising, and failed (inane!) attempts to push Blue-Ray/HD DVDs to an American public that is struggling economically and perfectly happy with their story-bought 100 DVDs.
It's comparable to Woodstock 99. Yeah, the bands deserved to get paid (and they did), but the greedy punks behind charging $8 for water and throwing up ads everywhere caused the riots and looting.
Your argument that people aren't getting paid who worked on the movies is asinine. It's not like they're working for free awaiting the DVD to hit the top 10. And in a summer where there are five $200mil+ movies and a few $300mil+, even the gaffers are glad to be in business.
BTW: I'm the original coward poster : )
I agree that people _should_ pay to see films, and I pay my dues through as many means as physically possible (without getting into the DRM shit storm that is V.O.D), but sometimes it's easier for me to watch a film before it gets released, rather than waiting. I do admit to having downloaded a few films then never paying a penny towards the cost of production, but seriously, they are few and far between.
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