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points by hobofan 17 hours ago | 0 comments
I think the piracy scene has in many aspects always been romaticized to some degree.

With movies more so than with games, the piracy scene and the organized/commercalized bootleg scene were never far apart. Few people sit in a cinema with a camcorder "for the love of the game" and risk criminal charges, while many people will do the same thing for a few hundred bucks.

[–] sigmoid10 16 hours ago
The movie ripper scene in particular doesn't need any love for the game, because anyone with the balls to do so can walk into a cinema and set up a telesync. Breaking copyright protection on a game is something that required an enormous skillset that was unachievable for most people before AI. In particular stuff like Denuvo is a constant battle of wits with the DRM people.
[–] EmX_3000 10 hours ago
TS's are usually made by projectionists, you're talking about screeners which are inferior.
[–] ssl-3 10 hours ago
In that realm, the terms as I understand them:

Cam: Some regular person at audience-level aims a camera at the screen, usually with poor results. Easy to detect when the person in the next row gets up to go to the bathroom, if nothing else.

TS: "Telesync". Usually an inside job by a projectionist or similar, often with excellent audio (but sometimes not). Camera is usually very stable with an unoccluded view; these can be hard to detect if a viewer isn't paying particularly close attention.

Screener: Once upon a time, people with influence in things like the Academy Awards were sent physical copies of films to watch and judge at home. These copies were called screeners. Not as often a thing these days (with limited-access online streaming being a largely-solved problem), but they could be both very high-quality and very early. Sometimes, they included things like a periodic scroller or crawler that informed unaffiliated viewers that they were not allowed to be watching the thing they were watching. Sometimes, they also had one-off watermarks that were intended to show the source of a leak[1].

In the realm of leaky films, screeners were/are usually the superior format by a wide margin.

[1]: https://waxy.org/2014/01/ellen_degeneres_walter_mitty_screen...

[–] Grombobulous 16 hours ago
It's rightfully romanticized when companies fail to make their products easily available for purchase and usable far into the future.

Will EA sell me Need for Speed Underground 2? Nope! They won't even acknowledge it exists on their website:

https://www.ea.com/games/need-for-speed

Just look under the "Need for Speed Games" menu. It's not even there in the sense of "we're proud of our heritage, look at a history of our old games."

I think this is what makes movie piracy a lot less romanticized. For the most part, Universal Studios is willing to sell me an old movie for a fair price. I bought the 4K remaster of Lawrence of Arabia for $5 on the Apple TV Store recently, and that's a very fair price. It's mostly the software and especially the game industry that is hostile to this idea.

I think copyright law should be modified to have more consideration for the rights holder's commercial abandonment. I would change it to add these parameters:

If a copyrighted work was sold to the general public at any point, and the rights-holder no longer sells that product in a way that a reasonable person would purchase and consume that work, or is no longer for sale in a manner reasonably consistent with its original form of sale (e.g., they used to sell Need for Speed Underground 2 as a one-time purchase but now it's only available as a subscription, or the price has been changed from $50 to $3,000), people are then free to copy and redistribute that work for non-commercial purposes, although they may collect donations for the purposes of covering distribution cost so long as they don't make those donations a prerequisite for the end consumer's access of the copyrighted work. The redistributor would also not be allowed to represent themselves as the rights-holder or do anything that would confuse people into thinking they were the original source of the work.

[–] frmersdog 10 hours ago
If you transpose back to a similar time period, post-nascence, of the film industry, they were basically trashing irreplaceable film reels for kicks.
[–] vel0city 13 hours ago
> For the most part, Universal Studios is willing to sell me an old movie for a fair price

So I can go to the store and buy any of these? No? Huh. Sounds like this is largely untrue for most films ever produced commercially.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Universal_Pictures_fil...

[–] boston_clone 3 hours ago
I’m not a lawyer or anything, but aren’t these all public domain?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_in_the_United_St...

[–] vel0city 1 hour ago
They are under public domain. But they still could theoretically distribute them. Theoretically, pretty much anyone could, but most of this list is just essentially lost to time. They couldn't even if they wanted to for a lot of these. They put in a good bit of work to republish and remaster a select few pieces of work forever but the vast majority of stuff just sits and rots. The same is true for videogames. A small slice gets recycled and republished as some retro game pack or whatever. But most of it gets ignored.

But sure, let's go to more modern examples. Are all of these easily acquired "new" these days?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Universal_Pictures_fil...

[–] brink 16 hours ago
CyberLeek with the GTA6 fiasco is a great example.

They started with a mission "for the gamers" to preserve consumer rights and force Rockstar to publish physical copies of the game, and it ended with them streaming nudes of the main character to pump their meme-coin.