Technique Can Trace Illegal Copies Of Movies Back To Source

[Nelson37]

If you don't like your terms of employment, get a better deal. If a company is paying you to do research in their facility, then of course they own what you come up with. What is it you think they are paying you for?
As for the musicians, same thing, be more careful what you sign. That is one of the few things lawyers are good for. As for the engineer, this is why they have copyrights. Are you trying to say that since people have been dealt with unfairly in the past, and present, this justifies theft?

Property rights are important to ANYONE who has anything of value and does not want people to simply walk up and take or destroy it. If it is OK to steal from companies, why not your car? or TV? or your daughter? What is DANGEROUS is the general philosophy that if you want something, then you should have it, and in fact are entitled to it, by any means necessary.

The free market economy, and the people who comprise it, is far from perfect. It IS, however, the most fantastic generator of innovation, and fairly priced products and services, the world has ever seen and is likely to see.

As far as greed, pricing is self-correcting. If too few will pay a certain price point, the producer will lower the price, (or a competitor will), or go out of business. Virtually any time price is dictated to the producer by any outside entity other than competition, the result is negative in the long-term. The value of a thing is what that thing will bring, period.

[rwarren]

For those of you who work, what if your employer decided to steal your work by refusing to pay you, because he or she had decided your wages were just too high?

This happens all of the time. It is called being a salaried employee. I am a licensed mechanical engineer. Most people in my position or higher are salaried employees. Many times my work requires me to exceed a 40 hour work week, at times putting in 60-70 hours. But since I am salaried my pay is the same. So you can look at it as working 20-30 hours without getting paid. I remember getting in trouble with my boss once for not reporting overtime. I told him "I get paid for 40 hours so that is what I am putting down." To this he replied, "but if you do not put it down, we can't bill our customer so he gets work for free." So I replied "but if I put the time down, I do not get paid for it so you are getting work out of me for free. " At this point he shut his mouth.

The movie and music industries are not too different from the cable and satelite industries when it comes to pirating. They spend 10s of millions of dollars to fight it and they will always come up the loser. If a man makes copy protection, another man can figure out a way around it. They should take the 10s (if not 100s) of millions of dollars they waste on copy protection and lower the price of the product.

Of course the cost of movie tickets, DVDs, CDs, sports tickets, etc. are our own faults. We pay it, so they charge it. Movies stars and athletes are so grossly over paid it is sickening, but it is our own fault. Think about, big name movie stars make more per film than the majority of us will earn in our lifetime. But as I said, we pay them that ridiculous amount of money so it is our fault.

Richard

[LanEvo7]

I don't think anybody in would argue that they are breaking the law when they download copyrighted material. My theory is, pirates cannot be stopped, only deterred. It is bad if everybody freeloads off of one artists hard work and dedication. Companies spend millions of dollars a year to pay people to think of new copy protection schemes and lawyers to stop internet trading. Why not spend that extra money to benifit the customers? Lower prices of CDs to about $3 and a lot less people would waste their time finding sites and downloading. At the same time, you probably would wipe out the corner bootleggers. Then you would still be making money. Besides CD's sound better than mp3s encoded at 128.

[logannsan]

Holy shit>>This thread can go on forever.

I would like to just add my 2cents about the movies..

Why do certain movie compaines even make a DVD(quality) Screener? and then give it to someone without being able to track it in the 1st place?
The Two Towers is obviously the biggest one being all over the net, but even Die another Day, Friday after next, Catch me if you can..etc..is out there also. These screeners are given to people for a reason..which I would think is to only criticize them? right? what else would be the reason?
View this and tell me ..blah blah blah..etc..and if you work for a big network or paper..well I hope you give it a good review.(Like anyone listens to those IDIOTS!!..The Two Towers is a perfect example> Like the company didnt have a billion or 2 people that wanted to see it anyway...why the F*** give copies out to people to "review" it?? They already know that same amount of people are coming back///
My point is they should know exactly who the F*** has a "screener" copy and so on..It should not have ever gottn to this point ..and if they think it is a real problem? Then stop giving out copies of it to every goddam personm on the world???

[Nelson37]

Rwarren, I am so sorry that those people FORCED you to accept a salary that you apparently thought justified the extra hours and then changed your mind, or maybe they decieved you about the conditions, in which case any employment contract is void. Or do you still work there because the pay is reasonable for the work done? Please understand that "reasonable pay" is NOT determined by your opinion, but by what the market will bear. If you can do better elsewhere, go there. If you truly believe they are "stealing" your labor, then you do not have a correct understanding of what a salaried as opposed to hourly wage truly means. Your employer is NOT stealing from you, he or she is paying you what YOU agreed was fair for an amount of work which YOU agreed to do.

Whether you have your labor or a product to sell, if you don't think the deal is fair, DON'T MAKE IT. I don't personally like labor unions but they are the main answer to "unfair" management practices. It is their lack of understanding of basic business principles which has lead to the demise of many businesses, and the unemployment of many union members, largely through the sheer stupidity of continually promising laborers what they want, as opposed to what is realistically feasable.

If a business owner with a million dollar investment is reduced to making less than 10% on the investment, they will simply buy savings bonds and eliminate the risk, putting all the employees out of work. This is exactly what happened to no less than four major industries in my former hometown, which then suffered over 25% unemployment for several years. Today there is only one major industry, which now has lower pay rates because there is so little demand for skilled labor. The company I worked for folded during the high unemployment phase, which is why I moved, in order to market my skills elsewhere.

[int_53185]

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LOL>>>>>this thread is longgggggg... anyone hear of public domain? Remember how certain old songs were around so long that theyre copyright was in the public domain? HMMMMMM....seems like the internet has sped up that process...........int

[pacmania_2001]

Pirates are crappy quality - Have you ever seen a movie that was recorded using a camcorder? The quality is horrible. You can barely see the things going on, the audio is fuzzy, and you can see people getting up..

If you take away cam's from the scene you are still left with screeners (VHS quality), telecines (VHS Quality), work prints (VHS Quality), DVD Screeners (DVD Quality) and DVD Rips (DVD Quality) all of which people are prepared to watch.

Add that to the fact most people are prepared to watch cam's and telesync's just so they can say they have seen the movie first.

But it would be just as easy to show the film to 500 or so journos a month before release and not have to worry about DVD screeners being pirated.

That is what they do already but they provide the screener copies to the reviewers that can't make it to such showings. Also they produce DVD screeners for other reasons like to show to potential merchandising partners, studio executives etc etc.

[rwarren]

Rwarren, I am so sorry that those people FORCED you to accept a salary that you apparently thought justified the extra hours and then changed your mind, or maybe they decieved you about the conditions, in which case any employment contract is void. Or do you still work there because the pay is reasonable for the work done? Please understand that "reasonable pay" is NOT determined by your opinion, but by what the market will bear. If you can do better elsewhere, go there. If you truly believe they are "stealing" your labor, then you do not have a correct understanding of what a salaried as opposed to hourly wage truly means. Your employer is NOT stealing from you, he or she is paying you what YOU agreed was fair for an amount of work which YOU agreed to do.

As I expected, my point went right over your head. I was not complaining nor did I feel I was treated unfairly. I worked for that company for over 10 years, and had they not been bought out by a German company, I would probably would have continued to work there. My point was, I got paid the same amount if I worked 40 hours or 60 hours. If I reported 60 hours, my company billed their customer for 60 and paid me for 40. If I reported 40, they got mad because I gave the customer 20 hours instead of giving it to them. Actually, it even goes beyond that because the project was billed as lump sum, meaning the customer paid an agreed upon price for the engineering work. We were really charging ourselves. If we estimated 40 hours and it took 60, we could not charge them for the extra 20 hours. So, the point was moot. My boss couldn't understand that, you probably will not either.

Richard

[Nelson37]

Richard, all you are pointing out is that some people (or companies) are paid (or billed) by the hour, regardless of the job to be done, and some by the job, regardless of how long it takes. Once you go by the job, hours taken is irrelevant except that this should be considered when quoting future projects. There are advantages and disadvantages to each approach, on both sides of the buyer/seller relationship.

It was you who stated that you worked 20 to 30 hours without pay. This is simply not true. You are paid for every hour you work, because YOU agreed to work however many hours it takes to do the job for a base salary. You can't take salary and then bitch about how many hours you have to work, just as you can't accept hourly pay and bitch about how much more the salary guys make. You can't have it both ways.

I don't think your boss shut his mouth because he had no reply, I think that, like me, he was astonished at your lack of understanding of basic principles of economics. To bill customers by the hour for a salaried employees labor is a standard practice, when you refused to report 20 hours of billable labor you were not giving it to the customer, you were stealing it from your employer. You were already paid for that work.

[rwarren]

I don't think your boss shut his mouth because he had no reply, I think that, like me, he was astonished at your lack of understanding of basic principles of economics. To bill customers by the hour for a salaried employees labor is a standard practice, when you refused to report 20 hours of billable labor you were not giving it to the customer, you were stealing it from your employer. You were already paid for that work.

This is getting way off topic so it will be my last post. I understand economics perfectly. If you had read my post, you would have realized that the customer was not billed for my hourly work. The project was a lump sum, fixed price project. We agreed to do that work for a certain amount of money. By charging my overtime hours, the project would over run on man hours. The customer would pay no more if I worked 120 hours than if I worked 40. The point about estimating future projects is very true and we had that discussion. However, I was involved in putting together many estimates for that company and the true amount of manhours required to complete a project was rarely used. When required manhours were determined and mulitplied by the hourly charge rate, the project cost was always deemed to be to expensive. So, how do you lower the cost. You either cut the number of manhours or you cut the billing rate. My company always chose to cut the manhours allotted the project. Then they couldn't understand why the project went over on manhours.

I was not stealing money from my employer because I was not paid extra for my extra time (as you said, I was already paid for the work) and he would not have been able to bill the customer for it anyway because it was fixed lump sum. If I reported the extra, it was billed to the project which in effect was billing ourself.

Maybe this makes sense to you, maybe it doesn't. Of course, that is why I am glad I am an engineer and not an accountant. I understand the mathematics of economics, not the "theory" of economics. I want to keep it that way.