from the the-internet-treats-DRM-as-damage-and-routes-around-it? dept.
The Invisible Man, Emma, and The Hunt Hit Pirate Sites After Rushed VOD Releases
A decision by Universal Pictures to quickly make movies available on [video on demand (VOD)] services due to the coronavirus pandemic has resulted in the inevitable. Titles including The Invisible Man, Emma, and The Hunt, which are still in their theatrical windows, are now all available for download on pirate sites, just hours after release.
[...] In common with hundreds of business sectors and individuals around the world, the spread of the virus is having a profound effect on cinemas. As preventative measures are put in place, revenues are reportedly down to the lowest levels in twenty-five years. On the other hand, services that can be accessed at home – Netflix for example – are enjoying a boom in usage.
In an effort to cushion the blow, earlier this week Universal Pictures announced that it would be releasing some of its newest movies, that are technically still in their theatrical windows, on digital platforms for rental. As a result, The Invisible Man, The Hunt, and Emma all went on sale Friday at around the $20 mark.
How well these movies will be received and in what volumes consumed remains to be seen but within hours of them appearing on official platforms, the inevitable happened. At the time of writing, all are available for free downloading and streaming on dozens of pirate sites.
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With day 1 digital distribution of films becoming more prevalent, and movie theater chains going out of business, Hollywood and the MPAA are going to do everything they possibly can to kill or cobble illicit streaming. This could include increasing potential criminal penalties for individuals who operate "streaming piracy" services:
Movie Company Boss Urges US Senators to Make Streaming Piracy a Felony
In the United States, criminal copyright infringers can be sentenced to five years in prison. However, this is not the case for streaming piracy, which is seen as a misdemeanor, punishable by a maximum jail sentence of one year. Millennium Films boss Jonathan Yunger is callling on senators to change this, so the Department of Justice can effectively shut down and prosecute streaming piracy operations.
The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property is actively looking for options through which the US can better address online piracy. During a hearing last month, various experts voiced their opinions. They specifically addressed measures taken by other countries and whether these could work in the US, or not. Pirate site blocking and upload filtering emerged as the main topics during this hearing. While pros and cons were discussed, movie industry insiders including Millennium Media co-president Jonathan Yunger framed these measures as attainable and effective.
After the hearing, senators asked various follow-up questions on paper. Last week we reported how former MEP Julia Reda answered these by stressing the importance of affordable legal options. Yunger, however, takes another approach.
In his answers, which were published before the weekend, he reiterates the power of website blocking. In addition, Yunger also brings a second, previously unmentioned issue to the forefront: criminal penalties for streaming piracy. "The second thing that we could easily do in the United States is close the legal loophole that currently allows streaming – which accounts for the vast majority of piracy today – to be treated as a misdemeanor rather than a felony," Yunger writes.
See also: Movie & TV Giants Sue 'Pirate' Nitro IPTV For 'Massive' Copyright Infringement
Copyright Holders Have to 'Resend' Millions of Pirate Bay Takedown Notices:
After several weeks of absence, The Pirate Bay became accessible again through its main .org domain last weekend.
At first sight the site looked more or less the same but there are some significant changes, both under the hood and in appearance.
Many users immediately noticed that the site doesn't work well with several ad blockers. Whether this is a bug or a feature is the question, but it was both frustrating and annoying for some.
[...] With the new Pirate Bay design also comes a new URL structure. Instead of the old torrent pages that were accessible through thepiratebay.org/torrent/12345, the format has now changed to thepiratebay.org/description.php?id=12345.
Other URLs, including categories, the top lists, and user pages, all updated as well. To give another example, the 100 most-active torrents on the site can now be accessed from thepiratebay.org/search.php?q=top100:all, instead of the old thepiratebay.org/top/all.
For users, this isn't a problem. All old links simply redirect to new ones. However, for copyright holders, it's an outright disaster as it means that they will have to resend all their takedown notices.
[...] Looking at Google's transparency report we see that copyright holders have asked the search engine to remove more than five million URLs. Pretty much all of these notices have been rendered useless.
For example, this 2012 takedown notice from Paramount Pictures removed the link to The Pirate Bay's top 100 video torrents. However, after the update, the same page reappeared under a new URL. Another consideration is that Google is just one search engine, so the same applies to other search engines too.
Previously:
(2020-04-11) Pirate Bay No Longer Uses Cloudflare, Visitors Sent to 'Black Hole'
(2020-04-09) Anti-Piracy Copyright Lawyer Decides to Abuse Trademarks to Shut Down Pirates
(2020-04-07) Movie Company Boss Urges U.S. Senators to Make "Streaming Piracy" a Felony
(2020-03-26) Supreme Court Rules States are Not Liable for Copyright Violations
(2020-03-23) The Invisible Man, Emma, and The Hunt Hit Pirate Sites after Rushed Video on Demand Releases
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday March 23 2020, @04:30PM (8 children)
Are they worth the bandwidth to download them? That's probably a silly question - Hollywood doesn't produce much that is worth the bandwidth.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday March 23 2020, @04:52PM (4 children)
The bandwidth gets cheaper all the time. But not many ripped movies are worth 1x 8 MiB Shrek [soylentnews.org].
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by stretch611 on Monday March 23 2020, @11:18PM (3 children)
Of course, I have no idea where to find pirated content on the interwebs...
But it shocks me what people are putting out there and the bandwidth needed.
Just the other day I saw a 23GB release of Sister Act 2... And lets just say that anything with Whoppi Goldberg that has her in anything better than VHS quality will hurt your eyes.
I currently see a 26GB version of Spaceballs... As much as I like it, and (IMHO) Mel Brooks is hilarious, do we really need an uncompressed Hi-Res bluray rip of it?
I regularly see titles reaching 50-80GB and I just wish I had the bandwidth to download them. But even if I did, would I really need that quality for movies that aren't worth the $10 theater price?
What really shocks me is that I see a lot of 30GB+ releases of old movies... from anywhere between 1930s to the 1950s. And I seriously doubt that the source material is even such a quality that it requires even a SD DVD file to show in all its original glory. Yet.. people upload and download them.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday March 24 2020, @01:58AM
8 TB HDDs [slickdeals.net] are coming in at about $100 now, which is what I paid for a 3 TB HDD... 9 years ago? That should be enough to store 100-300 giant rips, let's call it 200. $0.50 a movie, comparing well to Red Box or $10 theater price. And of course you can delete them or store something else on it at any time.
On the opposite end of the size spectrum, people complain about the heavy compression used on streaming services (which has been degraded further [forbes.com] in light of the virus!). That may have a negative impact on color/HDR/etc.
As far as benefits go, having "uncompressed" (lightly compressed) right now means having a better source for compression or other uses later. Maybe it can run better on older HTPC machines, although it might not matter any longer with new, cheap devices like Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K and RPi4 supporting 4K H.265 decode.
https://old.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/9en0n1/where_can_i_buy_uncompressed_or_less_compressed/e6098of/ [reddit.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Cinema_Package [wikipedia.org]
It looks like films as presented in the theater are roughly 200 GB, using 4K resolution JPEG 2000 frames (sometimes only 2K resolution, although that might have changed).
There could be a final push to sell 8K resolution films since 8K TVs are available now. There are supposedly consumer-oriented 128 GB BDXL discs [soylentnews.org], and discs at 200 GB, 300 GB, or even 1 TB [wikipedia.org] could be sold without too much trouble.
I prefer small. I like that a decent quality 720p H.265 movie can now fit onto a single CD-ROM instead of a DVD, meaning over 10,000 of those could fit on an 8 TB HDD.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Tuesday March 24 2020, @04:05PM (1 child)
Depends on what you mean by old and which movie. Really old silent era stuff, 30GB is overkill. Things improved rapidly though, and by some time around 1930 the top quality was good enough that there is some image degradation with anything less than bluray. The real problem is film grain. It takes a lot of data to encode all that noise, but if you smear it enough to get rid of the grain it looks like a shitty cartoon.
There's also a funny time window with TV shows. Some stuff was filmed, and then broadcast from that. Then they invented videotape, and while the quality was ok for tv broadcast it wasn't anywhere near as good as the film. Re-releases of 50 year old TV shows can be much higher quality than more recent shows of 20 ~ 40 years ago, if they still have the film.
Apparently if you get recent re-releases of the classic The Rockford Files in hi-def you can clearly see that all the backdrops are badly painted cardboard.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2020, @10:18PM
Particularly in the world of animation, an especially bad time for video quality (by modern standards) was the early-to-mid 2000s.
This is the time when many studios started transitioning from film-based workflows into digital post production. At the same time, this shift enabled a massive increase in the use of CGI effects, virtually all of which were done entirely in standard definition. Especially bad in this era is that very typically the hand-drawn stuff would be done at 24fps, converted to 30fps via 2:3 pulldown, and then all the digital editing and effects would be done directly at 30p or even 60i. The result is frequently an absolute nightmare for modern displays and video formats.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 23 2020, @05:29PM (1 child)
the hunt showed Emma Roberts in every commercial but killed her off right away. silly movie too. i didn't download the invisible man b/c i wasn't in the mood to have things jumping out at me over and over again. another Emma?, no thanks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 24 2020, @04:41PM
Can't wait for the sequel ... "They Died With Their MAGA Hats On!".
(Score: 2) by mmh on Monday March 23 2020, @06:46PM
I've seen Emma and Invisible Man, though all reviews are subjective, so take this with a boulder of salt.
Emma: Very well done, great acting all around, good score, good set, good costumes, witty writing. If you like 1800's romance and Jane Austin, this is my favorite Emma remake thus far. Though, as a poster above said, "another Emma", it's the same story that has been movie'd before.
The Invisible Man: Just bad, Elisabeth Moss is a decent actress but awful writing/plot/characters – there's really no redeeming qualities to this movie. It tries to be a horror movie and fails, then it tries to be a murder-mystery and fails, then it just gives up. Like seriously Mr. Writer, IR cameras are $100 on amazon, an optically invisible dude isn't a threat.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 23 2020, @06:00PM (4 children)
First forced to delay because of mass shootings and now their release profits hobbled by the Coronavirus!
Poor guys
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday March 23 2020, @07:40PM (1 child)
It's a film with a $14 million budget. The initial controversy drove awareness of the film way up. Coronavirus did it no favors though... unless this VOD strategy actually pays off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunt_(2020_film)#Box_office [wikipedia.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 24 2020, @08:09AM
FTFY, expanded your acronym, in your house!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 24 2020, @04:43PM (1 child)
Mass shootings of the cast or the writers?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 24 2020, @08:37PM
"Mass shooting" is when one right-wing nut-job deplorable shoots a lot of people. When a lot of people shoot a deplorable, it is called a "Shooting mass". Do try to keep up with the current nomenclature!