I made a similar topic on GameFAQ's movie board and I was in some way appalled by the responses. So I'm interested in seeing what you guys have to say.

My opinion is that if it were as easy to download and watch any movie at any time for a small fee ($2?) as it is with pirated stuff, 50% of the problem would disappear right there.

You honestly expected an intelligent discussion on GameFAQs? That's like building a car with square wheels and expecting it to win the Indie 500.

i don't pirate movies anymore...

local theater has $4 admission at certain times of certain days so if i want to see it and can't wait it's not that expensive

if i can wait for video local video store chain has 99cent wednesday which includes bluray rentals

add to that the fact that 99% of pirated movies on the intarweb (while they are still in theaters) are cams and look and sound like crap

If all the other cars had triangular wheels, It'd be in with a fighting chance.




I don't pirate movies for the same reason I dislike digital distribution; I actually like to have a physical copy of something.

Also the whole illegal thing + what jim said about quality.

What Boco said, plus the fact that there aren't really many movies I'd like.

meh, depends. I could go either way on this one, but the arguments don't hold as well for movies as they do for music of games (since movies eventually migrate to TV). I did recently buy the DVD for a movie I had acquired in the past, and I'll be doing so again sometime soon.

Netflix + DVD Burner = Win

Go go hulu.com

A limited selection but whatever. It's free.

I agree with this. Digital distribution cuts out so much of the physical process that requires money, there's no reason to be charging $15-20 to own a digitally distributed copy of a movie.

I pirate stuff that I know will be bad. Love Guru and The Happening are recent examples, but I go to the theatre 3 times a month or so to watch movies, and have a netflix account.

Tv on the other hand...

This.

Hulu doesn't like my DSL, though...

And it doesn't like my country.

I stopped pirating things a long time ago because 1) Even though I now have huge amounts of storage, I always feel like "large" files like movies will clutter it and I'm too lazy to burn them to DVD or whatnot after downloading, 2) If I don't care about quality I'll just stream it from the dozens of stream sites that have people uploading the stuff they pirated and then probably never watch it again, and 3) If I do care about quality I'd rather have a DVD or blu-ray and I can usually get them for extremely discounted anyways.

Shut up. You get BBC iPlayer.

I rent alot of movies and I download what I can't or don't want to rent.
I almost never go see movies in the theater. not because I don't want to but just because it's not convinent.

Tonight my project was downloading vmcNetFlix, installing it and stream movies to the Xbox 360, as found on Lifehacker. After several hours of fighting bugs, I finally managed to watch "The Air I Breath", which was alright I guess. I watched the first few minutes to get the netflix plugin to work, and then I decided to watch it on the 360 after I finally got it to work. If you're curious, no, it did not buffer, pause, or interrupt in any way once. However, I had to do a lot to get it going.

It's a great concept, saves be a hundred bux on one of the Roku box, but it is a lot of hassle to initially set up...Light, some of the movies don't even play!

It would be way easier just to buy the damn box, however I don't want to be left in the dark when netflix upgrades their servers to bluray quality definition and I'm stuck with a Roku that only plays standard.

Anyways, right now for movies what I do is a Netflix plan that is $14 a month or something. I worked it out to be:

• Netflix 2 blurays a month, for when I want to watch something artsy or in high quality on the PS3.
  
• Stream movies to the Xbox 360 via Vista's Windows Media Center, and vmcNetflix plugin

As for the original question, I have more problems pirating movies than pirating music, but still don't think it illegal.

Piracy rips off the people behind the films and is basically indefensible.

I'll go as far as to rip a DVD to watch on my laptop at my own leisure rather than borrowing it, but I delete them when I'm done (I've only got an 80GB HDD for crying out loud!!).

As far as I can see, that's just borrowing but without forgetting to give it back (because they get it back in about 20 minutes or so).

I personally enjoy just getting out of my house to go see a movie on the big screen. Its more about getting out and having fun then anything. Plus, if you go to the right theater, the sound is just intense.

As far as buying DVD's goes, who wants to hunch over a computer screen with a bunch of friends or a gf to watch a movie file? I say a good DVD, Screen TV, home 7.1 surround, and a leather couch FTW.

sounds to me like you just don't get invited to the good trackers

I don't care about the money so much, but every time I see an unskippable antipiracy ad before a movie I bought I feel like I have to do it. The media companies have made the very act of participating in the economy a humiliating inconvenience. I'm not even sure where they get the idea that piracy is rampant because they haven't even made anything worth STEALING in years! How can they possibly be losing billions of dollars to piracy when they don't make anything that anybody wants to watch ever?

My computer is actually hooked to my HDTV and I have a wireless keyboard/mouse and leather couch sooooo...

(That's why I love this thing -- suddenly streaming video and stuff doesn't suck so bad anymore, even though the quality is still pretty rough. Watching the new Quantum Solace trailer on this thing = WIN)

Why is it that you can't yet buy the Star Wars movies on blu-ray, and yet I've had high quality 1080p rips of them on my computer for months?

How come when I illegally download a movie, it's fast, easy, can be played with any player and moved to as many devices as I want, but when I tried out a legal video download service it took 45 minutes to set up an account and download the proprietary player, all for a low quality .flv that couldn't be fast-forwarded and had no audio through most of it?

How ironic is it that when you *BUY* a DVD you are forced to watch stupid anti-piracy PSAs and warning screens?

Seriously, movie industry, you make even the sketchiest public-tracker back-alley piracy seem way more attractive than your alternatives. Is it too much to ask for a way to purchase a movie that won't be locked in to a single format with layers upon layers of your crap DRM? Also, you guys are the ones with the movies, if you would sell them to us *before* pirated R5s or whatever were available, we would probably buy them. Example: I just watched Stargate: Continuum. I can't even buy it until the 29th. This is not right. Get your act together already.

I just really don't do it anymore. I refuse to watch any movie that is a cam rip basically, and when movies come out, usually that's the first rips that come out (exceptions are American Gangster and such, which had DVD Rips 2 weeks before it came out). I will download DVD rips months early, but usually of movies that I will eventually by the DVD for. I can't believe when my friend will say he was streaming Iron Man. To me those are the kind of movies that just demand a good quality huge screen with awesome sound systems.

I still believe that the MPAA grossly overestimates the effect of movie piracy on their sales, and like the RIAA, they should be trying to adapt to technology, rather than reject it.

i pirate everything because i'm an a**hole.

It costs £10 or more to go to a cinema in London so it had better be worth it.

Actually now that I think of it ... I can't remember the last time I pirated a movie through downloading. The few that I had on my computer I got because my friends had pirated them and then put them on DVDs or flash drives and brought em to my house. I think the last time I actually tried to download something for myself was back in the prime of KaZaA.

Yes, but I also have that on my tv anyway so it's nothing special.

Come on, you have to know that this is because unscrupulous employees leak the films early. No matter what the release date is the product still has to make its way through the marketing chain.



Well, the answer here is because some people ruin it for everyone by ripping and torrenting their DVDs. I don't see the problem. It's like one or two short screens.

ditto,

also I have (what I consider) a pretty large collection of dvd's, over 150 dvd's for sure, maybe nearly 200.

In total I've downloaded maybe 5-6 movies in my entire life plus a few I've copied off a friends computer/network.

you have deinterlaced 1080i HDTV broadcasts

This, but I'll ad an opinion like the thread asks. I do it all the time, mostly to movies I've already seen. If I like one enough I'll go to the theater or buy it. I have over 3xx movies on my external harddrive. So that I don't have to lug DVDs to and from wherever I'm traveling for extended amounts of time.

Doesn't that technically already exist?

I believe it's called renting.

Which entails going to the store, finding it (if its in stock), paying the rental, taking it home, hoping the disc isn't scratched too badly for it to play properly, and then paying late fees when you forget to turn it back in unless you have a membership that curtails the late fees.

I'd rather have $2 OWNED Digital copies of the movie. In high resolution that I can display on whatever machine I wish as long as it's for personal use.

I would buy movies like a mofo. Eff the theater. If I could've watched Iron Man from my house on my 65" LCD rather than surrounded by children the day it came out I would have in a heartbeat.

I doubt that's possible without other people acheiving a loss.

I haven't pirated a single movie since I got blockbuster (now netflix.) Given an entirely DRM-free cd-quality music service with all labels available for a monthly fee, I'd stop pirating music, too. Right now there's only exclusive download services with low quality drmed mp3s for monthly fees.

Duh, that isn't the point. I believe kyle was trying to point out just how much easier it is to pirate movies than it is to buy them.

The games industry seems to have pretty effective anti-piracy measures. Often, the anti-piracy measures aren't worth messing with, it's easier to just buy the game. This is becoming more and more true with digital distribution like Steam. I am however against all but simple, non-obtrusive forms of copy protection (i.e. no StarForce). Oblivion had no copy protection and was one of the best selling games of 2006.

It'd be nice if they made Steam (and Source) for OSX, though.

Yeah there are already OS X ports of Quake I it shouldn't be too hard.