Random Thought Of the Day #452

Day 452

So apparently the MPAA is going hard after people that are pirating movies. Watch your ass, people. Use proxy servers when possible, IP masking or any other sort of annonymity-creating methods you know of to hide your IP when downloading.

Christ, I'm thinking about going back to the old fserv method on mIRC to get my pirated movies. Now I just need to remember how to avoid the REAL perverts that still use that regularly.

Actually, fuck it... I'll just hit RedBox or wait for Netflix to deliver them and then rip them, send them back immediately and watch them when I feel like it thru my xbox or appleTV. That's what Handbreak is for.

With the way the MPAA, RIAA and all the rest of the AA's are going after people for piracy anymore, it's just almost not worth the effort. But with how much utter crap hollywood, the LA music industry and the Valley porn producers are putting out there anymore, it's more of a crapshoot on how good something is anymore. And with how much stuff is competing for our ever-shrinking entertainment dollars, it makes it even less likely that I'm gonna go out and waste money on something that I don't have a pretty good indication is worth every penny I'm paying for it.

And don't get me started on buying DVDs anymore. It's not fucking worth it. At all. Between the physical space that they take up, the apparently rising cost of them for no apparent reason (gotta make up the profit margins lost from all the crap that people bought when they were down to like $8 each 5 years ago and people bought them like fucking candy, I guess) and THIS:

and they wonder why people pirate movies?

Fuck... by the time the god damn thing starts, I already forgot which movie I put in the dvd player and I've gotten distracted by watching Netflix Instant Play on my phone.

But I do have to ask you all your opinion on this one...

Music & movie piracy has been around for a while... digital piracy for the past 15 or so years. First it was Napster, then Kazaa, and other services. P2P file sharing is not going away. I think we can all agree on that. But I have to ask, 5 years ago, when the studios were still making a killing on DVD sales and piracy levels were at the same level as they are now, why weren't they going sue-happy then? Is this just a cheap ploy to make up their lost profit margins by sueing instead of putting out a decent product for the price?

When I could walk into a best buy 5 years ago and buy a new-release DVD the first few days it was out for $9, I didn't mind buying them. If I do that now, it's nearly $20 because it's a new-release. It used to be cheaper to drive up sales on new-releases... now it's more expensive to drive up profit margins (well, bad economic understanding & bad math makes them think that, but that's a whole other argument). And they wonder why people aren't buying them as much?

Thankfully, it looks like the lawsuits have mostly been directed at people torrenting indie flicks or generic porn. It doesn't look like most of the BIG studio productions have been targetted yet. Or even the BIG release porn stuff.

I guess it's because most of those already make a killing in total profit, so it's not worth the effort or bad publicity to go after pirates of blockbuster movies. So I guess we're a little safer in that regards for the time being. But it's only a matter of time before they start going after that too.

Though I do wonder... since Apple found a way to make money off my pirated music collection, are they going to find a way to do the same thing with my pirated movie collection too once it's in the iCloud system?