- Saki [faqs]

[Link]

Every month, I purchase 4-5 different Hustler's titles, plus the magazines. I've endured the mandatory ads and the crappy extras.

Please don't watermark your movies.

[Link]

Thanks for your support in buying our titles. However, it's surprising that you complain about two areas where we've made a lot of progress recently. The ads are no longer at the start of the movies on any our DVDs and our extras have also significantly improved, and will continue to do so.

[Link]

Watermarking is a BAD move, and studios who use it will suffer because a significant proportion of their customers HATE this and will vote with their credit cards.

Even if the unhappy guys/girls make up only 5 to 10 per cent of their customer base (I suspect the percentage is higher) why do companies shoot themselves in the foot and deliberatly abandon chunks of their marketshare? Hopefully they will see the light eventually...

[Link]

The businesses making money off stolen content should be put out of business. No ISP wants to be held responsible for enabling theft.

[Link]

It's not the Peer to peer you should fight or those paysites, but the ones that makes them.
Now here is my little story,...

I've been in Bosnia in 1995 and 1998.
One thing i've learned. NEVER fight against several peoples/groups at the same time. Take your time, fight against one of them. Once you've won go after the other. It's really a bad bad bad idea to fight to all of them at the same time! takes to much energy. One by one is good enough.
Now those paysites are not even the main problem. How many members do those sites have? 10 100 maybe 1000. how many peoples have those peer to peer programs? Thousands, millions, billions, even 50% of the world population(probably even more. You want to fight against billions of peoples at the same time? You will lose, defenatly! ( Example Bosnia ) Fight against this problem right from the source. The ones that makes them. Go on the internet and figure out some names who makes those movies/pictures from your VHS/DVD. Smut, Pornolation, are just a few names to mention. I've seen those names almost everywhere. If i would put my energy on this issue 24/7 for a few months i swear i will track down more than 50% of the groups who makes those movies. Just give me 2 laptops, a hell of a internetconnection, and some time. If you have taken down those groups you'll get
1 publicity, ( Better sales )
2 Less piracy ( better sales )
3 respect from the governement and other company's.

It's still a good idea to put the hands together and make a strong big fist of it, however the beginning of this is crucial i think. if you guys need me or need any help with planning just let me know.

[Link]

1) the re-selling of pirated DVDs in their hard form
2) the unauthorized re-selling of material in subscription sites and
3) the availability of proprietary adult content on P2P sites.

We believe that the studios will benefit from working together to address the re-selling of DVDs and also subscription site piracy. We've already been given helpful information from other studios about our content being available on subscription sites, and will similarly share information with our competitors.

The P2P question is trickier, and studios may want to handle their approach to this problem in different ways. For example, Jules may want to offer watermarked clips, we may want to offer up clips with promotional offers and another studio may want to just go after the P2P networks without appealing to the P2P community.

We have to be realistic and acknowledge that the adult industry will never be leading the charge in going after the P2P networks-it will be the music and mainstream film organizations. The question becomes how adult studios utilize P2P networks and market to P2P users, and this should be an individual decision for studios.

[Link]

The problem with the war on piracy is that it's being waged on a digital battlefront against digitally savvy "criminals", but ones fighting are still thinking analog. You can't apply brick and mortar loss prevention thinking to a digital problem. Cyber detectives will be no more effective than store detectives. The internet, while making piracy easy, has also had a bigger, even more detrimental impact on the media studios. It's made information available. It's helped to remove the veil of secrecy that protected the industry and taught the would-be consumer what's what. No longer can studios charge $15 for a CD and claim that the money goes to the artist. We all know now that the CD itself costs under a dollar in material, packaging and shipping and that the artist gets maybe 25 cents. The rest of the money goes to the studio. No longer can the motion picture industry claim that high ticket prices keep the theater in business as we now know that the ticket revenue goes to the studio and the theater makes it's money by charging $4 for a Coke that costs 11 cents to serve, and that includes the price of the cup and straw. The consumer now knows that he/she has been the unwitting dupe in a giant 3 Card Monty game played for billions of dollars of our money. We know we've been getting ripped off from day one and even those of good morality start to think "Do unto others as they did unto me".

The porn studios might not be as guilty as the mainstream music and movie producers as their smaller sales volumes mandates higher prices, but they are still painted with the same brush. Media studio = evil = ripping off the consumer = okay to rip them off in return. That's the real issue and that's the part that the MPAA and RIAA just don't understand. There are more computer-savvy media pirates than there are lawyers in the world (that's a scary thought, huh?) and for every one pirating to make money there are a dozen more pirating simply because they hate the criminals they're pirating from. As long as the studios place themselves as the enemy of the pirates they will be treated as the enemy. This is a war and there's one simple fact that's held true in every war mankind has ever fought. While some warriors like to think that God is on their side and others think that they're fighting for truth, justice and the American way and that they have "right" on their side, right and God are wimps. Those who have technology on their side ALWAYS win. Whether it was longbows over axes at the Battle of Hastings, the musket over the bow and arrow, the tank over the machine gun or the crusie missile over the tank, technology wins. Which side controls the technology in this war?

The solution to this problem is not a band of zealots who think that they and 2 laptops are going to fix a problem so deeply imbedded, the solution is changing perception. Media studios are perceived to be thieves, the product they sell is perceived to be overpriced at best, valueless at worst and we consumers perceive ourselves as nothing more than pawns in a game that we don't even know we're playing. That's what needs to be changed. We consumers want to see media that's fairly priced, where the money does go to our favorite artists and not the corporate suits, we want things sold the way we want to buy them, NOT the way the media conglomerates insist upon forcing them on us. We want what we purchase to have a perceived value, something extra that the pirates can't get as easily, like good liner notes, hidden DVD Easter Eggs or mainstream movies that are shown on screens that have not shrunk down to TV size in an effort to pack more theaters into a complex. Until the media studios relaize that no longer are they in a position to set the terms under which we'll give them our money, they're never going to make any headway. They've ripped us off for too long, the wounds run deep and it's up to them to start making amends, otherwise they will remain the enemy.

As for the Jules, go ahead and watermark, it's about the most sensible solution available at this point. It faces the reality that piracy is not going away and attempts to make lemonade out of the lemons currently available. If the movies are going to be pirated, it'd be foolish not to get some advertising out of the process. Once again, it comes down to value and good porn with a watermark is infinitely more valuable than crappy porn without one. Nobody is going to switch from Evil Angel over to Vivid based solely on EA including a watermark in their videos. But it's still a band-aid on a bullet wound. Until retail CDs or DVDs offer something tangible that the pirated versions don't, it's a long, uphill, losing battle.

[Link]

Now here is my answer back.

Listen, the problem i believe is still those who make those pirated movies. If you think that you with your watermark would be better off, i really do not agree with you.
I am not really a person that would pay 25 bucks for a DVD movie with watermarks in it.Ieeeuuuwwwww....
I pay for the movie. So let me take an example...
RLD decides to add watermarks to their movies. The ones that ripp those DVD's will still continnue. And everybody knows the title of RLD movie. Just go ahead startup a RLD movie and it starts with a nice intro. So everybody who has downloaded that movie already knows it's from RLD. Then another thing, I know when DVD came out everybody was so promissing about anti piracy and encryption blah blah blah, you know how some big company's like Philips, Sony etc can talk. We have the best, it's uncrackable. Hahaha, few months later a boy ( 16 ) cracked the first DVD. 16 years old. Company's invested billions of dollars. What you have now? Nothing! That boy was so kind to release his source code under GPL. So that everybody could contribute it. No Microsoft can ever buy the license of owership for that.It's free for use, you may edit the source code, improve it whatever you want to do with it. And the company's like Sony, and the others that make use of those DVD's. they're just screwed up. Now suppose as mentioned RLD is adding watermarks, i'm sure there would be people's out there that would develop some kind of code that will crack off those watermarks. So me as a honest 28 year old guy go to the shop, buy a RLD DVD and watch it when i'm back home. Then 2 weeks later i am on internet and see the same title on one of those so called Peer 2 Peer sharing programs. Exactly the same title! I'm curios and start to download it as a madman. Once it is completley downloaded i fire it up on my PC. Amazed as i am, i don't see any Watermarks in that movie. Now what would you think at that point? Am i fooled by the Studio or what? What would you think if such a thing would happen to you? Would you really be that happy with watermarks? I don't!

Now about the RIAA and MPAA. I personally would really think after spending $100.000 without any serious information back that it's freaking waste of money.To be honest i think they are IDIOTS! :-) Man what kinda shit institutions are those? they just go ahead, spending money like water, in search on those Peer 2 Peer networks for illegal movies, mp3, games whatever you could imagine. But i tell you all, they are totally in wrong direction! It's not that Peer 2 peer where you have to dig. Man, billions of peoples have such programs, you want to spend years and invest billions $$$ in digging in that jungle? You want to put billions of peoples in jail or sue them all? LOL.
Be smart use your imagination, and look beyond that. for that $100.000 Dollars you can bring down at least 50% of movie piracy, software piracy, mp3 piracy. That should be more than enough. All it takes is using your brains in right way.
I know it sounds unbelievable, but i really believe, almost know for 100% sure that it can be done!
It's all up to the studio's what they do. I'm not the one to decide for them. i don't even dare to do so. All that i could do is to help them. But if nobody contacts me or ask me to help them i just wish them good luck with it.

My final tip for all the studio's.
Be smart catch the real big ones first. Once you've captured their flag, the smaller ones will run away!

JWNL

[Link]

Just as a comment on your point here. If you head over to www.isonews.com which must have been about the biggest of its ilk (also a totally amusing read in its forums and a wholly pointless website altogether) and you will see it has been closed down. What is interesting is that it has not been closed down for its involvement in piracy (although it was always a shop window for a shop which, for 99% of people, was never open anyway) but because of some bloody mod chip advert.
This is the real killer. Whatever money and resources the legitimate businesses use they are still just that: legitimate. Companies operate within the law and pirates outside; companies abides by the rules and pirates, by their nature, flount them.
Anybody with an internet connection can find this stuff but identifying and prosecuting the individuals concerned is a different matter.

I have never had anything to do with a warez group but I have spent time trying to figure the whole thing out. Many people inside what they term the 'scene' (or at least claiming to be) freely admit that they hoard new games/porn/music/apps as fast as they can dload and burn it but many of them rarely, if ever, utilise any of it. These people are thieves where the thrill is in the acquisition and not in the enjoyment of the material itself. My point is, is it really worthwhile going after these people - if you stop them doing their thing they will not start spending money on porn or music or games etc - they are not really interested in the material itself it is the act of getting something for nothing which turns them on, not the assfucking

My view is that you are best off, in the first instance, going after the paysites - those who are trying to make money out of others content.

What the actual answer is to piracy I do not know.

If I were a company, be it music, movie or porn I would try to make my product worthwhile in its own right and make the product itself worth owning and not just the electronic code. People like 'things'; nice things and so however easily available a pirated version may be if the original product is accessible (in terms of price and location) and desirable when viewed as a whole you will sell even to the pirates.
When I was a child a game called 'Elite' was released. The packaging was sumptuous with maps, a novel, a large manual, a large box etc. Although we all copied games at that time this was a product you needed to own - the box itself was iconic; a copy just would not do. Make originals attractively priced and desirable in their own right and this is worth more than any amount of watermarks or legal battles.

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And euhm i'm not calling you an idiot, just do some deeper research before you say things like that i would say..
yet another prove that many people think the wrong way.
You want me to point to isonews for ya?

One of the moderators of isonews is captured yeah, for selling moderated chips for in your XBOX or whatever those things may be called.

But isonews is still fully operational.

Amazed huh:-)

JWNL

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My point is that despite providing such a shop window onto illegal activity it took something rather unrelated to allow it to be closed down; the fact you say that even now it is not closed down just emphasises my point.

I don't need you to point to wherever it exists now, my sole purpose for ever going there was for a bit of a chuckle at reading the forum posts of everybody telling each other how insignificant they are - it just tickled me that's all.

I am sure if organisations like the RIAA were not hamstrung by having to act within the law they could deal with these things - I don't know whether it would gain them as much as they think - but they could deal with them. As it stands it seems that knowing is one thing, being able to do is quite another.

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On P2P piracy: I'm not about to dismiss the threat of peer-to-peer file sharing, but I will say that as a practical matter, the bandwidth, tools, and storage required make video piracy less realistic than music piracy. For most people, there's no way the time and effort to download a VOB or even an MPEG of Barely Legal 99 is worth less than the $20 to buy it and own it. Contrast that to $16.99 + tax for a CD that someone can easily locate and download in a fraction of the time. Unfortunately, as computers get more powerful and communication networks get faster, the threat of P2P will grow.

On P2P marketing: I am a 100% believer in the power of the promotional trailer or sample. College Fuck Fest and other sites are quite effective in drawing paying customers with spammed 2-3 minute clips. Even releasing an exisiting trailer (if properly identified) into Gnutella or a newsgroup will probably lead to sales.

On Jules being the most pirated director: Scanning the multimedia newsgroups, I'd say he's up there, but RLD and Ana/Dia have a hell of a lot of pirated stuff that people have posted.

On where the companies shoud start: Go after the ISPs and NNTP providers who allow people to host websites or post your content. Go after the assholes who turn your product into infomercials to sell their product (I'm thinking of findfreefiles and the like who add their spam to pirated video clips and post them on Usenet).

- Saki [faqs]

[Link]

I did some research about illegal shit. Yes because i've developed a programm with some friends from a local Univesity. And some of those so called " Group " released it what costed me and my friends alot money. That pissed me off yeah.
So what's wrong with that?

Now my question is...
What you mean with " Well that in itself kind of defeats your own arguments doesn't it? " ????

I am against such groups, but that doesn't mean i don't keep on eye on them.( Keep alway's one eye on the enemy, even when you sleep! ) I just say something if i know for sure it is so.
Isonews is just a DNS setting problem. That's all.
US Governement has claimed their Domain name. and pointed to one of their sites. But if i do a research about something, somebody, groups or whatever, i work precise.
Just type in their IP and you'll get to isonews again if you want.Have fun, nothing special there. And euhm there are more websites out there, but why do we talk about isonews? that's nothing man. If you would be precise you would be amazed what you can discover about "their" world.

But hey, who am i? I'm nobody, you don't even know me, i don't even know you. All that i know is this. If i do some research it can take up a few months, but hey, it will be rewarded with IP's names, adresses whatever information you want. The heck, i can get you even evidence if you want to sue them. That's research.

All i'm just trying to say is that i really don't hope that such great studios like Red Light District, Evil Angel and many others get involved with some kind of Journey what could cost them alot money without getting anything back for it. see RIAA, MPAA, FBI and so on and so on.

JWNL

[Link]

Now, if the producer of the video were to do something like make the video available for direct download, at a price approximating renting it at a video store, it would take away most of the incentive for people to distribute and download the bootleg copies. Knowing that you're getting the latest Jules Jordan epic straight from the source, and that there won't be any undisclosed technical glitches like, say, the video in Flesh Hunter 4 suddenly turning to crap at the 39:00 minute mark because the guy who ripped it didn't actually watch it all the way through before uploading it (ahem), and that there's a chance that some of the money you're paying will be going directly toward buying even larger objects for Jules to try to shove up Bella Donna's ass next time he sees her, could well be enough to get even the most dedicated tightwads to start paying for the product.

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Actually, Evil Angel offers VOD with several sources, including gamelink and adultdvdempire.

[Link]

That's the real thing, Piracy with a capital P.

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But Sbando hits it on the head...newsgroups and IRC, especially with parity files, make it much easier to get high quality copies with a high degree of confidence.

As far as VOD, I've been less than satisfied with the quality of the VOD that I've seen. Streaming video has always been a painful affair with me, even with a broadband connection. Dealing with bandwidth for a living, I'm not sure from a provider standpoint that it's even financially viable to deliver even VHS quality streaming video to multiple customers over the internet.

- Saki [faqs]

[Link]

Whether it's right or wrong or even makes a difference, there is ONE big difference between the "criminal" studios and the "criminal" piraters. The studios earn their money off of people who are willing to pay money for a product that the studio worked hard on, and the consumer gets a video in return. The piraters (who do it to earn money) earn their money from a product that they didn't work hard on at all, and they cheat the studio who gets nothing in return from the pirater.

[Link]

I am well aware of USENET and have been an avid newsuser for 8 years. I have downloaded a few movies from USENET, but there are some big issues that would prevent this from being the piracy pulpit you warn of:

1) Most of these posts are huge (>5GB) and split into many parts (usually yenc these days) which increases there size almost 2-fold. USENET is inherently slower than the web (due to the fact that if you even hope to collect all of the parts, you need to use a premium server and those are loaded down, and generally not proximate to your location). The upshot of this is that it will take several days to download all of the parts.

2) If you do collect up all of the parts (and don't find out that after 6 GBs of downloading, 1 of the parts is bad), you still have to hope that the rip was done correctly. Many of them aren't.

3) Now you have to burn this thing to find out if they ripped the whole movie, the menus, etc.

Hardly worth it for a DVD that can be purchased for $20. Not even for the pirate producers! They would simply go out and buy the DVD and then rip it themselves.

There were only 2 reasons I went through the hassle of doing this exercise:

1) To see "how" it is done (very educational!)

2) To get my hands on LOTR early! I will be buying the 4 disc set though, to match my 4 disc Fellowship.

So, the upshot is: I hardly think USENET is a threat to the movie industry!

[Link]

But what about irc?

And who rips the tapes and the dvd's in the first place?
The small rip-off pay-sites, some kid on the FastTrack Network or, instead, the so called "release groups"?

Hundreds or thosands of people are downloading Seven The Hard Way 2 or any Evil Angel movie you can think of as we speak. Not fast as the Web?
Full speed!
And not a damage to those companies?

The idea that the full movies are out there, but they're hard to get is a fairy tale.

I'm not interested in the watermark debate, at all.
But I don't see how something like that could ever repay
a company.
Leeches will never pay for anything.
They'll crack it, they'll crop it, they'll rip it and in the end the paying costumer will end up with a cd that doesn't play in the cd-rom player or a watermarked dvd.

[Link]

Do you really believe that:

1) The people downloading these versions are really a potential customer base that could be tapped for dollars? I don't think so. I think if the material weren't free these people wouldn't go near it.

2) These people are actually making any money off of this activity? I don't think so. As I said, I believe the real pirates buy a production copy and manufacture clones of it.

3) These people actually number in the hundreds of thousands (that would actually take the time to download 8 GBs for one stinking movie)? I really doubt that that number is even close to reality.

I'm not condoning piracy, but I think this is the wrong direction of pursuit. Instead, the focus needs to be on those who are creating illegal clone discs. That's where the money trail leads!

[Link]

In a couple of months I'll have my dvd-burner, with dual-layer DVD-R's, so I know the difference.

They're not all "potential costumers" (the "Microsoft/Metallica theory"), true.
But those files will spread all over the 'Net and many real potential costumers will be lost along the way.
Isn't that the whole point of this discussion?

But I still don't see how a watermark in a bootleg version is ever going to convince a thief to subscribe to a pay-site so to repay the original creator.

[Link]

A website that's selling access to certain movies for a monthly fee is dealing with the completely unsavvy consumer. They're preying on the weak and stupid (P.T. Barnum was wrong, there are really 100 suckers born every minute and 1,000 to take them) That customer is completely unaware of usenet, P2P or even DVD rental. Before the web they previously thought of porn as the heavily edited Vivid stuff that they can get on Pay Per View while on a business trip. They likely have no idea who Evil Angel or Redlight District are and would not be buying a DVD under any circumstances. So while that site is making money off your work and your intellectual property, it's likely not really costing you anything in the long run. It's also nearly impossible for a studio to take legal action against that sort of pirate because it's too much effort for too little reward, something that JWNL just doesn't understand. It's pretty easy for a Russian citizen to start a web company through a registrar in Tuvalu, get hosted through a company in France that colocates it's servers in a NOC in Belgium that buys it's bandwidth from a backbone provider in England. Now, even if you did spend several million in legal fees and did unravel the Godian knot of which country has jurisdiction over which aspects of the case, you're likely to find that the web site is actually owned by a 17 year old kid who's running it out of his neighbors garage. Sure, you're entitled to compensation, but he's judgement proof, so kiss those millions spent on recovery goodbye. So let's view website piracy as being here to stay because nobody can afford what it takes to investigate and prosecute.

P2P faces many of the same restrictions. You've got file-sharing networks spread across every country on earth with no central servers and no suable entities. For every Napster or Morpheus that eventually fall after a billion dollars of lawyers billable hours, a dozen more rise to take their place. The software can be coded by kids, distributed free worldwide in seconds and used by millions within a month. Faster than your $1000 an hour lawyer can scribble "ceast and desist" is a legal brief the software has morphed in a dozen different directions and the suit is now meritless since "Joe's File Trading Inc" has now become "Sams Supershare Limited". The idea of knocking off kingpins is foolish, misguided and ultimately futile. The prisons are full of high level drug dealers, but the drug trade has not been damaged one whit. Napster and Morpheus lie in the cyber graveyard, but Kazaa and Emule sail onward with an undimished user base and if they should fall, the next P2P network is only a click away. On P2P, the genie is out of the bottle and it won't go back in. The trick now is to make it serve you rather than it's current master.

The mistake the studios make in their spittle-flecked rants about how piracy is killing them is that they equate each act of piracy with loss of revenue. If 1 million people download song "A" that equates to a loss of 1 million CD sales. That's outright fraud and is just another example of the lies the studios will spread to protect their own greed. Statistically, very few downloaded or shared files would have been purchased. The whole file-trading form of piracy arose because people refused to spend $15 to get their favorite song when the rest of the CD was pure crap. This form of piracy leads to relatively few lost sales and, given the free exposure of new material, has not been proven to impact sales in any relevant way.

Take it a step further, let's assume that 10,000 15 year old high school art students each download a copy of Adobe's Photoshop. At $600 a pop, how many of those kids could have and would have bought the software they just stole? Probably very few if any at all. So what has Adobe lost? No actual material since the stuff was downloaded, not lifted. Their monetary loss was almost nothing, but some corporate spokesman will multiply 10,000 X 600 and claim that Adobe just lost 6 million dollars. Meanwhile, those kids become Photoshop experts. They perpetuate PS as the image-editing market leader. They enter college and the workforce pretrained on the software, cementing it as the only choice for any businesses dealing with image editing since it's cheaper to hire a pre-trained artist than it is to train someone on something new. Those 10,000 stolen copies of which only 10 might have been purchased has turned into 10,000 actual corporate licenses to use Photoshop. But rest assured, that same spokesman will still view it as 6 million dollars lost. The same happens in porn, albeit to a lesser degree. Many people are exposed to certain studios through pirated copies. A person that never would have even heard about EA, RLD or Private might become a loyal paying customer after discovering them through some pirated scene.

Let's face it, the watermark is a pretty insignificant addition and it's ultimately harmless. Sure, it might be nice if it wasn't necessary, but it'd be nice if I could fly too. The porn industry is the last to climb onboard the train to greatly inconvenience the paying customer by slightly annoying the pirate. Microsoft has phone-in registration codes that are a pain in the ass to paying customers, but easily circumvented by pirates. The CD companies have created supposedly uncopyable discs where the protection can be beaten by a simple magic marker, yet the discs are unplayable in cars, on computers and other places the legitmate buyers might use them. The watermark is a sensible short-term solution. The DVDs will be pirated, that's indisputable. Long term the studios need to find a new distribution method and a value-added business model that makes the legitimate purchase/rental of a disc preferable to a pirated copy. In the short term the watermark will at least draw business from the people who see pirated, hacked-up scenes and think "This is pretty good, where can I buy the movie?". It's an imperfect solution, but it's the best one available right now. Ultimately, this is capitalism at it's finest. The watermark will be accepted if the porn it protects is good enough to make the trade-off equitable. If the porn sucks the watermark will be it's death blow as the consumers go elsewhere. As far as EA and Jules go, the stuff they make is good enough to watch even with the watermark, so I for one will keep watching. Hell, if we can deal with Microsoft wanting us to do blood, urine and DNA tests to register a copy of Windows XP, we damn sure can deal with a small logo in the corner of a screen.

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I agree that the watermark is not intrusive and if it does any good to Jules/EA, then by all means I have no problems with it. I just wondered aloud how much good it actually does.

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EDIT: Some of the partentipants of this thread should be honest enought to admit that they're more or less very active in that same scene that they're trying to pass as harmless.

Edited by - Sbando Boy on 3/4/2003 1:44:11 PM

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OK, I'm tired now. Do you have some booze, ayb?

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You make some very interesting points and afaik (and I don't know much on this subject at all), you might very well be describing the real problems and issues concerning piracy in a very coherent and convincing way. So, I have two questions (they are questions, not comments or criticisms) for you, which have something to do with this statement:

Question 2: Why do you make this equation: "ripping off the consumer = okay to rip them off in return"? You may be only describing what is going on in the marketplace, but on a more fundamental level, do you agree that two wrongs make a right? And what effect will this attitude have on the "culture industry" as a whole? Will it lead to the availibility of more variety in cultural forms, or will it lead to more uniformity in available cultural forms, wherein only the stuff with mass appeal will survive?

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Believe it or not, a lot of people are just like me. We started out doing what we thought was the right thing and we'd still like to do the right thing. But the reality of the situation is that the media conglomerates have drawn a line in the sand. We are faced with a choice of either allowing them to rip us off or to rip them off by getting things via alternate methods. If they'd come up with a way of selling us honest goods and services for an honest price, we'd use it. Until then, I'll fall back on a time-honored excuse. "They started it!"

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He steals stuff and then comes here to prove that what it does is not real piracy, but even an incentive to sales and to software development.
Even in the filesharing Forums people flamed him for that and called him hypocritical.

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It's a true fact that Adobe allow distribution of their software through "little complex" schemes : they know about PS piracy, but (almost) never change their serial numbers, thus allowing anyone to use any version of their PS without even burden to find a clear new serial. To my knowledge, no PhotoShop serial has ever been blacklisted.

They also do their best to promote PDF format through Free Acrobat Reader, but make you pay if you want to use their Writer... this is exactly the same scheme as "PS'scheme", all in all...
There is no problem with these ways of acting. They try (and quite succeed) to take place in the market, and allow what is inappropriately called "piracy" to inject new fresh fuel to settle their leader place.
They don't try to make money with every piece of their software running on a computer, but only with their LICENSED sofware running on computers, and they KNOW that, and they adapted their distribution to that.

DVD piracy is quite another story... I totally condemn money being drawn from "piracy" (-> you pay less to see a cracked movie...), but have no problem with P2P. P2P is exactly the same as lending an audio-tape to a friend as we did 20 years ago. Today, there is plenty of offer, and plenty of P2P, only the scale changed.
My whole salary will never be able to pay all the cultural products I actually enjoy (thanks to P2P); and you can not ask me to pay for whatever crap I see (actually, sometimes it doesnot deserve any penny...).
I do pay some products; I try to pay for talented, creative ones.
For the crap, marketed product (let's say... Independance Day for example; there are plenty others), there is no mercy to have.

(My own feelings though, you can keep yours :-)

Edited by - Figti on 3/5/2003 7:10:16 AM

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Some of us are aware of this.
Some others fool themselves into believing that they're harmless to the developers and the artists.

So it's
1) funny that everyone seems to agree with someone who rips RLD dvd's and spread them on the Internet, in a thread called: "DVD Piracy (Hustler/RDL/EA/JulesJordanVideo)", started by Hustler. Not so long ago Vroomfondel brought up the same arguments in a filesharing forum, and everyone told him that he was wrong, that we just steal, period.

2) As ayb, I'm just playing the devil's advocate, but...
Vroomfondel must bring this "shut up, retard" attitude back where it belongs.

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One last thing, though: fortunately you were not a black man serving somewhere in texas in the beginning of "slavery age". You might have considered it natural.
Things valid at a certain period of time sometimes are just totally wrong.

Man was not born to live through money. He was first born to live freely.
Someday, money was created as it appeared to be a tool to gain some freedom.
Today, money sometimes cloud some people's view toward what's right and what's wrong...

Don't be wrong about Copyrights : copyrights do not exist to make money, they FIRST exist to allow someone of being called a "creator".
This induces that creators can be retributed, for what they brought to the world.
Next, "captive money" is the majors' story...

Edited by - Figti on 3/6/2003 5:48:36 AM

Edited by - Figti on 3/6/2003 5:49:52 AM

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But let's not forget that what we do is illegal and let's not get romantic about it.
And trying to rationalized it it's even worse.

You know very well that even p2p forums don't allow direct links.
The majority of forums out there (like this one) don't even allow to talk about ripping techniques or places to get the software, not to mention to post links.

So a Forum where porn industry insiders hang out is hardly the best place to advocate p2p.

As my friends here know, each month I spend dozens, many times hundreds of $ in porn dvd's, because I love it and because I want to own the originals.
So, still very humbly, I can't accept lessons from someone who steals those movies and then comes here to tell Tricia: "I don't mind the watermark, keep up the great work".

That said, I share many of your opinions although I don't think that this is the most appropriate place to post them.

Ciao.

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And as a warning, making personal attacks is a good way to get banned.

Unfortunately, since this thread has gone downhill, I'm going to lock it. If anyone wants to continue an on-topic discussion, please feel free to do that by opening a new thread. Thanks.

- Saki [faqs]

Edited by - Saki on 3/6/2003 9:20:19 AM

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