Wow, are you going to flame everyone in this thread?

The MPAA and many times the RIAA are the biggest hypocrits that walk the earth...Oops, there are politicians walking around too, aren't there ???

My wife just reminded me of the Hollywood hypocrisy that is continously at work... Some examples are......
Movie actor Cliff Robertson was charged by the IRS for not paying taxes on over $100,000 of earnings. He launched a private investigation that turned up a producer that was issuing checks in Robertson's and others names that neared a million dollars, co-signing the checks and cashing them for his own use. When this was brought out, the IRS dropped charges against Robertson and charged the producer with tax fraud. [ the producer's name was withheld at request of the Hollywood studios ] The studios declined to press charges for what amounted to grand larceny and embezzlement so there were never any arrests or charges against the producer. Meanwhile, the major studios blackballed Cliff Robertson for nearly ten years befor an independent studio decided to use him in a movie...

James Garner, who played a detective in the TV show ' The Rockford Files ', agreed to be paid through residuals instead of by episode. He signed a contract to do a set amount of shows. He was paid a comparitive pittance during the shows run. When the time came for the residuals to come in, creative bookkeeping kept Garner from collecting a cent, yet, The Rockford Files are still showing re-runs and making money for the studios.

The first Batman movie was one of the highest grossing movies at the time it was released. Yet, according to reports and although the studios made a bundle, there was little or no profit in the movie. Creative book cooking again.

MPAA is a case of crooks screaming foul...

I just received an e-mail from a Canadian who says the FBI was roaming around up in his area this last weekend arresting file traders. The regular citizens are getting a little ticked off suggesting that the Royal Mounted Police should be able to come down to California and issue traffic tickets or something. They feel that this is setting a dangerous president...

quote
And, here's a fact, since you seem to have trouble recognizing them: NO ONE has gone to jail for file-swapping or burning a copy of Eminem's latest CD and giving it to his cousin. Yes, kids (including, infamously, the twelve year old girl that appeared in the Pepsi Superbowl commercial) have been sued by the SS-RIAA. Yes, that's absurd. But there's a big difference from paying $1200 is settlement of a civil lawsuit and being thrown into a cell.

there's been people jailed for having dvd's and prosucuted for unlawfully labeling record

SO they are suing people in a civil court setting??? Its not in a federal court by the governemnt. That is bad but not as bad as I thought. Wow they are spending a hell of a lot in lawyers fees then. Its about 5,000 us to put a lawyer on retainer and sue someone in civil court. And they only get 1200-3000 per law suit. Why sue then? They are just trying to scare people away. I hate to say this even if they took down every file sharing site and even the torrent sites..people will just go old school...private ftp's lol

Pain_man. Your a perfect example of why so many countries find the American way sickening.. Im not going to go into a diatribe on why suffice to say that alot of us Aussies would just call you a drop punt..kmate?

Guys,


PLease lets not fight on here. I think we all came to this site looking for solutions to problems. We are all united for are love of technology. If we are talking about America it is not a perfect country, it has done some terrible things I agree with that, but I would rather live in American then anywhere else. That is just my few point. As for copyright protection, file sharing, and anything else....the companies that sell this stuff are just behind the times. They will either discover new means of making money, or the economics of free markets will bankrupt them...bottom line economics 101

I do not buy music or movies or go to the theatre anymore. Since the RIAA and the MPAA likes to sue 12 year old girls, 85 year old women who don't even have computers, even dead people.. They are going to have to get their next Lamborgini without my help...

Before anyone says that not buying their products will hurt the little guy, remember that the entertainment industry loves to call for a boycott against any industry that doesn't fit their view of how the world should be and they do not care how many "little people" get ran over in the proccess.....Besides, my life is not dependant on them, but their's is dependant on people such as me.....

I do not buy music or movies or go to the theatre anymore. Since the RIAA and the MPAA likes to sue 12 year old girls, 85 year old women who don't even have computers, even dead people.. They are going to have to get their next Lamborgini without my help...

Before anyone says that not buying their products will hurt the little guy, remember that the entertainment industry loves to call for a boycott against any industry that doesn't fit their view of how the world should be and they do not care how many "little people" get ran over in the proccess.....Besides, my life is not dependant on them, but their's is dependant on people such as me.....

Hmmmmm....It posted twice, must have been worth repeating...

My thoughts exactly dufas.

Quote:

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Oh and Kligy (sic) ..... you crazy mofo are u at it again? ;-)

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Hi Dela! =)

Well, I'm being "good" today, but it seems that lots of others are 'at it' by the sound of the name-calling I've been reading. Oy !

I'm not going to get into this one (!) although I hope the good folks in here can tone it down a bit.

I was really sad to see your preliminary NeroDigital guide just dissappear so quickly, Dela. I had wanted to compare notes, so-to-speak.

I made a simply *marvelous* .mp4 nero encode today with the 30-day trial version of Nero Digital. Probably the best-looking mpeg-4 encode I've ever made. (Beats DivX handily).

Perhaps I'll post some comments in the Nero forum and drop off the .log file if anyone's interested.

And please guys...... Geeze Louise, today was the USA's *birthday*!
(Ours was July 1st.)

So, peace to you, and try to be nice to each other!

-- A_K --

They are still missing the point, its actually against the law to do the below,

- copying music from LP to blank tape ( blank tapes never went out of circulation )
- Copying TV movies and shows on Beta and VHS tapes, even tape to tape ( Beta and VHS tapes never went out of circulation )
- copying CD to blank tape ( as above )
- Copying radio stations and other music sources to tape ( as above )
- copying ..... ahhhh what are they doing.

Lets look at the situation point blank,,,,,,

I have a internet connection allowing 1000 Mb per sec download speed with 60GB per month download limit. Now would anyone seriously use that much or need that speed, so there ya go the ISP's around the world are promoting this sort of thing to happen, not to mention blank cds, they are available in supermarkets for gods sake, they are just making excuses and need a scapegoat to blame the downfall of the industry. I remember going to the movies for $5 and for another $3 bucks ya got a popcorn drink and icecream. Now ya need $40 bucks per person for the same thing.

ITS TO BIG, THey will never stop it, they will make a big thing out of it but noone will look at the causes only the end result until something else comes along

A little history is needed here........

During the advent of TV, the studios fought the idea of broadcasting moving pictures for free over the air. The movie studios felt that if this new medium was going to exist, they should be in control, after all, it is the movie studios that create the visual arts.. The studios lost that battle and three major independent broadcast networks emerged. The studios started to realize that their movies could make a lot of money being broadcast over and over and over using TV. They could even get involved in 'for TV only productions' and the dust settled down for a while...

Then Sony, before they were involved in movie and TV production invented the BetaMax home TV recording system. The Beta TV recording system was already in existance but it was a larger, bulky unit that the TV studios used to record TV for later broadcast and to replace a crude archival system based on a kinoscope system. [You may have seen some examples of this when something like a Johny Carson or a Milton Berle or Red Skelton aniversery special would be aired. The kinoscopes were the ultra-low rez washed-out black and white barely viewable clips of very early shows...]
Anyway, when the home use BetaMax was offered for sale, the studios went ballistic. They tried to block the sale of any of these home recording machines using much of the same arguments that they are using today. The studios kept blocking the sales of BetaMaxes all the way to the US Supreme Court. The court came down with what is now called the BetaMax decision...That being that it is perfectly legal to record anything from TV as long as it is for personal use only. The ruleing was based on the idea that while pirating off of TV was posible, the Video tape recorder has a multitude of other, legitiment uses, so, the court shot the studios down and allowed video tape recording.
Recording from tape to tape is considered illegal. CDs and DVDs were not invented yet.....

The video recorded on beta, and soon, vhs tape was of a comparetivly low quality when put up against commercially recorded video as evidenced by when a home recorded TV is broadcast over the air. [Such as Funniest Home Video or even survailence camera video shown during news broadcasts..]

There was one type of video recorder that was successfully blocked from being marketed though. I saw one in operation around 1976, it was a tape machine based on the Beta format with one huge difference. Instead of recording in low rez analoge as conventional video recorders do, this one recorded in full, overscan digital TV.. Whatever TV the broadcast signal was carrying, this recorder would capture. Playback would give a high defination picture with the same quality that a standard TV siganal would give, plus, with the flip of a switch and connecting 4 leads to a true TV monitor, the first high-definition, home video system was within reach of any consumer...but it was squashed by the studios in fear that what is happening now concerning video piracy would have happened in the 80s. It took over twenty years for digital to finaly make it to the public. Even the new digital camcorders were nearly nailed down by the studios, but, luckily, they were shot down. You can thank the computer industry for freeing up digital because the MPAA and the RIAA was still trying to keep digital away from the common person. [Read near the end of this rant..]
It is not just piracy that concerns the entertainment industry, it is control. Control is what the studios had from the late 30s on through the 70s. The studios controlled where, when, and how anything that they made was seen [or heard]. They had a monopoly, They either owned outright or had controlling interest in the distibution, and viewing systems that had anything to do with their product. The studios controlled the theatres. If a theatre wasn't under their direct control, the most that theatre could show was bad 'B' movies and if a non-studio theatre did make a deal with the studio to play a first run movie, the independant theatre owner would end up not only giving most of the tickets sales profit back to the studios, the studios would take a big chunk out of the concession sales also. It paid an independant theatre to become part of the studio monopoly or go broke. In truth, during the early days, the studios operated in many ways similar to the old Mafia. The Bell Telephone System was broken up into smaller chunks for the exact same thing that the studios were doing. The difference was having movie stars under contract. How does this differ you ask....
Politicians, even today, are as star struck as any teen age girl. [Sissie Spasec testifying before congress about farming in America ?? The closest she has been to a farm is on a movie set..] If you have a huge movie star under contract, you can have he/she lobby for the studios just by going to Washington and being themselves. If a movie star declined, they didn't work. If they kept on declining, they never worked again even after their contract was ended with a particular studio. The call would go out to blackball the actor. The hold outs never workrd again until the studio system was broke in the 60s..

This video pirate/file trading whine is more about power, control, and the possibility of adding more money to the studio's coffers than it is about the studios being wronged. Video piracy and file trading has been going on for years. I first got onto the internet in 1986 and there was movie files available then. Around 1992, it was about the same level that it is now.

Why all the yelling by the studios at this late date ?? The answer is digital.. TV is going to go full digital soon. Theatres are showing digital movies now. The studios are laying ground work for the conversion from analogue to digital. If the studios didn't do a thing, the recording of digatal video [and music] would be as simple as hitting a record button and you would save full broadcast quality video/audio ready to be saved on a DVD disk, the conversion to DVD easily made by the digital recording device. The studios have planned with the help of the TV [and possibly the radio] broadcast networks of embedding code into the digital video in order to squelch copying or at the very least, preventing copying to a disk..

I worked with the studios for nearly twenty years, lived in Culver City, home of MGM, Desilu, nineteen blocks from 20th Century Fox, and various other small studios and support shops. I worked with the special effects people making props for the movies.

The studios and many of the people that work there are the most un-ethical, hypocritical people that one is ever to meet. I have more respect for a sreet gang than many I have met in the movie industry. One knows what a street gang is about, one never knows with the hollywood crowd....

wow that was an amazing history thank you for your time to share all that with us. The good news is that the digital broadcast flag you refer to has been struck down by the supreme court in its present form...so maybe that will never come to pass!

Thankyou dufas that was well stated. It gave me an insight into the dubious nature of these studio/film executives characters and let people know that these people are all about control. Free the technology!

Well I still have 2 ampeg beta machines and I dont like what I see happening with the ability to have copies of movies and cd's. What can we do to stop the studios from getting away with their control???

The entertainment industry needs us more than we need them....

i agree with dufas .....the control is all they want and it isn't fair to people that spend the time and money for recording equipment.

Exactly. If they focused half as much on making good movies as they do on stopping piracy, they'd make way more money, simply because more people would go to a movie worth seeing - and all without lawsuits too!

I think that the movie industry is running out of either talented writers or ideas.

Has anyone noticed that for the last couple of years, the majority of movies has been poor rehashes of older movies or they have based on old comic books.

After seeing War of the Worlds 2005, my wife dug out an old VHS tape of War of the Worlds 1953.

Other than the CGI special effects, the 1953 version was more enjoyable. The older version was made when movie makers had to work to make a special effect believable. In my estimation, the old timers succeeded with this one.

I realize that this is subjective but the story line was more cohesive than the newer version in that it followed a logical progression. The 2005 movie had a few holes in the plot that the older version filled leaving no questions in the viewer's mind.

Although the '53 movie was fluff by today's standard, it carried the author's message straight through to the end. There was no political correctness, just a striaght forward, simple story telling experiance.

Many of the other re-makes that I have seen gave a similar experience. It seems that the studios are trying to make up with computer graphics for what is lacking in good, old time story telling.

It used to be that for every ten movies made, they had one or two duds..I think that it is the other way around now. They will release ten or twelve movies and only have one or two that is worth viewing. It used to be that the "B" movies had this ratio of good to bad...Now, those old "B" movies look as good or better than today's major releases.

To play the devil's advicate, I would be un-fair if I didn't include the drain that 350 plus TV channels have made on the Hollywood talent pool. Many good writers are now on contract, being well paid all year around by one TV channel or another instead of being paid for one or two jobs by the studios. Remember, one cannot trust the studios to pay residuals...creative book keeping works overtime...

It all goes back to greed. The instant the movie industry gave more attention to money than quality films is when this started. No matter what else they do, if they don't start focusing on quality again, they will lose - even if there's no piracy at all. People will eventually just lose interest. I used to love going to the movies. Now, I hardly ever see previews to anything that looks worth watching, let alone worth paying to go to a theater and see.

You're definitely right about them milking the old ideas for all they're worth. I mean, just in the past few years - Spiderman, Daredevil, (wasn't Elektra an old comic too?), Fantastic 4, War of the Worlds, Hulk, X-Men, The Avengers, even more Batman, and I'm sure there's more that I can't remember right now. And they wonder why people aren't going to the movies as often? Because they've already seen them! Sure they get a visual makeover and some profanity tossed into the script - but there's nothing really new to be gained from watching them.

I'm no writer, but IMO I could write a more original and entertaining script than almost every movie that's come out in the past three years (of course, there are a few exceptions ;)). They just keep cranking out crap and wondering why nobody wants to see it.

If they spent half as much time, effort and money on the quality of these films as they do on hyping them up to the skies, ......

These aren't "movies". This isn't "entertainment". This is "Product". These are commodities. They have all the excitement of a 100-pound bag of cement. Forget "intellectual property". This is programmed propaganda.

Greed. That's what it's all about. Pure and simple. Unsatiable, unrepentant, bottomless greed. Holywood has taken the concept of HYPE to a whole new high. (Low?)

Objective? To make as much money as humanly possible in the shortest possible time to make room for the next toilet-load of hype, coming to a video-store-near-you.

Screw quality. It's a question of how well the hype can Push the Product. We're all lemmings; stooges; money-carrying drones slogging our way to the video stores like well-programned zombies.....

Hollywood's mindset: "Joe public wouldn't know a quality film if it came up and bit them in the ass. They have to be told what it is they want to see."

(I could go on......)

I would like to add a note for those of you that are still avid movie goers and i should probably include those who were so in the past.

This is what I call "intelligent Movie Viewing.."

Lately, groups have called for the studios not to have actors smoke cigarettes or use any tobacco products unless it is absolutely neccesary to the movie's plot line. This is done to keep the subliminal message out of the movie that it is acceptable or cool or some other reason to smoke. This is just one example of what psychoiologists and sociiallogists deem as the power of the moving picture.

Another would be that all the good guys drive Ford products and the bad guys drive foriegn cars subliminally sending the message that only American products are good, plus, Ford most likely paid and supplied the cars making the movie a two hour advertisement for Ford Corp.

Many feel that this is a new phenomenon. Actually, this concept has been around for nearly as long as there has been movies. Many call it propaganda. The Germans were the first to use movies on a large scale to manipulate public opinion during the late 30s. Hitler used the movies during World War II to effectively rally the German people against whatever he wanted at the time. The US government did the same in order to unite the population during the same war.

The above are just examples of the past use of movies to sway public opinion. The real insidious use started in the mid 1940s and has continued to today.

While the public sits in a theatre or in front of their TV set to be entertained by some comedy or block buster drama, they are being subtly nudged towards the studio's and Hollywood's way of political thinking or some corporation is influencing your need for some product ...

Susan Sarandon was once asked why she felt the need to become an actress. Her reply was "...to make society better.." In other words, she became an actress to mold people to her point of view and has excepted and changed many scripts that allows her to push her views.

Martin Sheen has the same asperations and has voiced the same many times. Although, he has been very silent lately. His last tirade nearly cost him his TV show because the public's backlash against him and viewership dropped so low, show was almost cancelled. His comment on the situation was that he should have the right to voice his opinion with harming his carreer, which tells me that he should have the power to influence how your life is lived but no one should be able to touch his.

In the early 50s, there was a movie called "The Wild Bunch"..It was about an outlaw motorcycle gang that took over and terrorized a small town. The actors in this movie raped, stole, murdered and ravished much of town. In the real world, there have been motorcycle clubs since the 30s. It wasn't until this movie that they were renamed gangs. It also wasn't until this movie that a small town [in Mexico] was really terrorized by a group of motorcyclists.

In the 90s, a movie had a group of older teenagers daring each other to lay on the yellow center line of a busy highway. A short time after this movie played, several teens were killed, ran over by automobiles while trying to replicate this feat in real life.

Another movie was called "Hot Rods From Hell". It portrayed modified automobile owners in much the same way as the Wild Bunch movie. The actors used their modified cars as weapons and generaly destroyed everything in sight. The movie caused a political uproar and eventually laws were passed against such cars until that today, it is against the law in most states to license a modified automobile for the road. What the movie didn't say and the politicians wouldn't listen to was that after spending huge amounts of money and hour after hour of back breaking work, very few modified car builders would drive their cars as depicted in the movie. That would be like constucting a custom built, one of a kind home and then throwing gasoline on it and striking a match to it...All of the people that I knew drove and took care of their automobile creations like they were precious jewels. Some wouldn't even allow shoes to be worn while riding in the vehicle..

I list these last three instances because the studios and actors will take credit when their art raises the concousness about some pet subject or effects the outcome of a political fight but will quickly deny any responsability if their mmovie's influence on a person results in a negative act. After all, it is just a movie, they will say.........

The movies have a tremendous power to both entertain and educate. Just as with the entertainment function, one has to be aware of what education is being delivered. Just as the renaming of manhole covers to something like personal orifices is supposed to subtly enhance womens selve esteme, the movies descreetly deliver messages that one should be aware of. People should use their own powers of reasoning to come to a conclusion instead of being led around by the nose by people whose main reason for doing anything is for money and power.

I do not care if you are a Democrat, Republican, or any one of the multitude of political entities that exsist today, the point that I would like to get across is that one should be able to come to their own conclusions about a particular subject. One should be able to base their position on what one thinks, not on what some group has subliminally planted in one's mind over and over and over.

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