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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata quote of the day I bought a number of pirated DVD’s in Malaysia recently and they all include unskippable piracy messages at the start. …
– A commenter, who unsurprisingly preferred to remain anonymous, contributes to a discussion about how the crap at the beginning of legally purchased DVDs makes pirated DVDs, provided they are of sufficient quality, a happier watching experience. Not always, it would seem. I now copy all my DVDs from the television.
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There is a TV ad. that has a little group of singers singing a song called “Knock Off Nigel” at a guy in a pub, during the performance “Nigel” sits there looking shifty and embarrassed as though everyone is going to despise him for buying knocked off DVDs.
The problem is that the tune of the song is itself a knock off of ‘The Times They Are A Changing’ by Bob Dylan. I wonder if Mr. Zimmerman gave his permission for this and received his due share of royalties? It would be a little ironic if he did not.
Malaysia (assume KL) is not really the place for pirate DVDs. Try Ho Chi Minh City (cheapest, less than a dollar), Bangkok, Phnom Penh, Kathmandu… Some places you can purchase the legitimate product for way under UK retail.
The big advantage with pirate is you get to see the latest movies, often before release in UK.
Quality is patchy at best, so you might want to make a back-up copy immediately. Obviously you’d prefer that Customs were not burdened by these unofficial channels products, so slide the bare discs into one of those clear plastic leaf files with internet travel pages as cover.
And before you start lecturing on copyright, keep in mind that if UK retail prices weren’t so outrageously high there’s be no opening for the pirates.
i’m surprised that digital files, and carriers such as sd cards, ipods, etc missed all mention in something like this. the purest source is always from the fountain, not the middleman in the alley. take a few moments to research the scene, streaming, and encrypted bittorrent. some countries may be more difficult to download in than others, but where there’s a will, there’s a way.
I now copy all my DVDs from the television.
Conversely, I now wait to download many TV shows from the internet since they are often free from logos, those annoying popup ads, delays due to sports and DVR defeating schedule inaccuracies (this last has led to me downloading shows that I had actually watched where I had missed the last couple of minutes of the show where it ran past where the DVR switched to another channel to record something)
They’re not really ‘pirated’ in that sense; they’re fully, technically, accurate and genuine copies of the licensed DVD in question. Off-the-record copies, but genuine nonetheless.
It’s just that nobody bothers to hack it so that you can skip the anti-piracy stuff.
BitTorrent, the way forwards.
I’ve been a video junkie since the early 80s, and amassed over 1,000 video tapes before beginning the move to DVD. Many of them were legally bought, most were “time-shifted” off-air because you couldn’t buy them legally, or even quasi-legally from overseas without the magic BBFC seal of approval – it simply wasn’t available commercially.
Nowadays far more films, TV series, documentaries etc. are available at ridiculously cheap prices (remember when tapes first came out as “rental copies” at £50 a pop?) and I’m down to my last few hundred tapes which I’m backing up direct to computer format and bypassing DVDs entirely. Some stuff still isn’t available, some has been “altered” from the original version (not just George Lucas’ continual meddling with Star Wars – John Carpenter’s “Dark Star” and many other films and TV series have been censored for “copyright reasons”), and then there are the ad breaks, little time capsules which make you think, “Dear Lord, did we actually buy this?”
I don’t have time for pirated stuff: it’s not the end of the world if I don’t see the latest blockbusters right now, I can wait a year or two and pick it up cheap or add it to my rental queue. I do note in passing however that nearly all the sources for pirated stuff are the movie studios themselves and not a hand-held phone camera in some cinema complete with a MST3K row of heads at the bottom…
I assume that the author of this blog is writing from GB. (I linked via Stumbling and Mumbling.) On that site was a discussion of the Internet versus the city for serendipitous connections; I voted for the Internet. And here I am reading comment on DVD piracy that I was reading just yesterday. Wonderfully peculiar.