My concern with this US border search is the idea of confidentiality. One, we've all seen movies. Lots of them. And though we may laugh at how easily the antagonist acquired the needed information from the protagonist, it can't be said that it can not happen in real life. And this US border search is making that highly possible. Also, for doctors and lawyers, this confidentiality thing I'd like to believe, is sacred. So when another person sees that on their laptops or gadgets, would it be the same as doing a breach of contract or doing something against their oath?
I wonder if it would be possible to get the American Medical Association (and whatever the lawyers' equivalent is) to fight against this ridiculous policy. Or would they just shrug and say that doctors shouldn't put confidential data on portable computers?
But the thing is, even if pirate bay stops operating, there are still other sites like btjunkie.org and the like. Also, with sites like tumblr where a lot of artists blog and share using the reblog button, it's almost impossible to put it to a stop. I also don't think Hollywood artists mind as the like of Diana Agron and Kevin Mchale even reblog the very same videos that FOX produced.
With sites like piratebay,org and btjunkie.org, in some sense, "show business" as an industry is affected. The number of people hitting the cinema would be less since most movie goers would just wait for the "copy" to be available for download. But the workers behind show business aren't really being let out by their employers, so I don't think it's such a huge problem.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Moviegoers love to go to movies, and movie downloaders are the same guys that wait a week in line for the new Star Wars. Perfect customers, in other words.
Did you know our town had a second-run movie theater until last year? One of the last towns to have one. They were packed all the time - but the new owners of all the theaters in town closed it because people could watch movies on the cheap instead of paying eight bucks at the plex. Now everything's only open for about five weeks and is then gone forever.
I'm a busy man. My schedule often required going to the second-run because I literally cannot focus on chunks of time of five weeks to see a movie. Now, my only recourse is to wait a year or so for the studios to release a version of that movie I can buy, or pirate it. Sometimes I pirate it, even though I freaking loathe Bittorrent and the hassle involved in finding a good pirate copy.
But I don't have a choice. And I love movies. I love Pirates of the Caribbean - my wife actually saw the first one in the cinema nearly thirty times. Once she showed up five minutes late for the evening showing and the attendant just laughed and waved her into the theater instead of opening up the cash register again, knowing she'd be back the following night. So after it closed in the movie theater, I downloaded it to continue watching it - then we bought it as soon as they decided to sell it to us, wore out one copy, and bought another.
Do you think I'm atypical? Yet Hollywood thinks I cheated them by downloading Pirates of the Caribbean.
If movie attendance is down, it's not because people are waiting to see a pirated videocam version they downloaded, it's because real prices have doubled or tripled and people simply no longer have the money to go to the movies as often. In a recession, no less. Next the MPAA is just going to garnish everybody's wages on suspicion of piracy.
(If they actually do that, please don't blame me for thinking of it first...)
Saying movie goers is probably incorrect. However, I still stand by what I said that most of movie lovers, especially people between 15-22 who do not have enough means to go to every single movie they want to watch just wait for a copy of these movies to be available online. According to Hollywood, this is cheating. Pirate Bay as the name suggests thinks so too. But still, downloading movies has no significant effect of the number of movies being released every year. So really, I don't think show business as a whole is affected.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Moviegoers love to go to movies, and movie downloaders are the same guys that wait a week in line for the new Star Wars. Perfect customers, in other words.
I doubt those perfect customers are representative of the average movie goer. Surely very few people "wait a week in line for the new Star Wars".
By percentage, no the fans that wait in line for a week is not huge. but the free advertising that the news gives them with the"wow look at the weirdos" spots I'm sure adds some weight to the number.
What you've said is completely annecdotal and completely wrong. As evidenced by the article from Forbes and the original article at Arstechnica, the number of movies being made and the number of people paying to see movies is higher than it was 10 years ago before file copying really got stated.
In the last few years there has been a big push in the movie industry to produce movies that are better in or more suited to the theatre than at home. 3D, Imax, etc. This is a direct response to piracy (and secondarily to people who wait to get the Blu-ray).
I think it's misleading to say that the spread of piracy is responsible for increased revenues, when the products themselves have been changing in a direction designed to generate more revenue in the cinema.
I completely agree. I'd like to point out as well that even movies that aren't supposed to be in 3D are now in 3D. So really, these sites are the are the sole reason of increased revenues
After this, I think btjunkie would be next. btjunkie.org is the closest one to pirate bay in terms of the number of movies and songs in their data base
I think it would be good if only registered voters can give campaign money to candidates. If they want to call it donations, then so be it. BUT only registered voters can give donations as well.
Joel is right on some terms, however the problem is how are we going to know who gets to join in this share of air time on these sites? Also, who is going to determine that?
So I multiplied the $30/day by the 9,600 employees in Mountain View and New York by the 251 days Google is open every year. Remember that Google probably spends a lot more than this, because there are employees outside those offices, and because visitors are there all the time eating.
The grand total: By our guesstimate, Larry and Sergey are spending at least $72,288,000 per year to fill their workers' pie-holes. How can they afford to do that? Easy, of course: Last year Google (GOOG) earned $4.2 billion.
You seem to have just lifted your comment directly from this 2008 Business Insider article and changed "we" to "I." But you missed the "our" in the second paragraph.
