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A Few Words About A few words about...™ Vendors, film piracy and national security (1 Viewer)

Robert Harris

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bigshot said:
I bet the vast majority of those "Ethiopians" who downloaded Lawrence of Arabia never even watched it.
I would certainly hope not!
 

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Just to keep it fresh, I'll repeat an example I gave some 20 pages ago that I think bears examination.

Ten years ago, Taylor Hackford made the movie "Ray", which was a project that took somewhere around 15 years for him to finally get someone to put money into financing a biopic on Ray Charles. He made the movie for about 40 million dollars, shooting as efficiently as he could, and as I recall, pretty much on location in the Southeast US, mostly in Louisiana. Taylor has recounted that on the day the movie was released to theaters in the United States, there were literally thousands of illegal downloads of the movie - from sites that uploaded bootlegs in Asia, as I recall. He said that the number of people who had stolen his movie was massive - and I'm sure that every person who engaged in the activity didn't think they were doing anything wrong. Taylor's movie went on to make its money back, particularly after Jamie Foxx won the Oscar for his performance, but it certainly didn't go on to make the kind of money that would encourage its producers or anyone else to invest heavily in more biopics of its kind. You could argue that most of the people who stole the movie would never have gone to see it anyway. But who knows how many of them actually would have.

Put it another way - if people could have been bootlegging and stealing movies (and I mean 1:1 copies as we've noted we're looking at today) all through the history of cinema, how much damage would this have done to the ability of filmmakers trying to finance and make these small, personal movies that we cherish today? How many of those films would not have been produced due to the backers not seeing a way that they could circumvent the public's ability to simply steal the work for free? And as RAH has pointed out, how many movies that could be restored and preserved will not get the funding given that the backers are confronted with cheap bootleg copies of those movies that severely limit their ability to make such a project viable?
 

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I'm sure THE EXORCIST is available to view for free all over the place and especially in 2013 but it doesn't seem like this is going to keep Warner from releasing it. They do continue to hold hostage an AIP flick where those filmmakers have yet to be able to profit because some judge said that the movie was "too close" to the Warner film. Surely Warner has made enough from this film to where they could let the smaller guy see the light of day. By Warner refusing to do so it's not only hurt the small guy but it's also hurt them because the lack of the film being available means that most people already bought the bootleg. Small guy loses again (although I'm sure the disc would sell well enough if it could get released).

We could spin this countless ways and I'm not sure there would be a winner. Stealing movies have been going on since the 1890s so it's not like this is a new event. Hell, these studios everyone is crying over were themselves funded by thieves who made a killing stealing from THE BIRTH OF A NATION back when it was released. That filmmaker certainly didn't see all the returns he was meant to since theater owners were changing numbers to put more money into their pockets.

Perhaps one day we'll get "A few words about....the various moral-less things Hollywood has done."
 

Robert Harris

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Michael Elliott said:
I'm sure THE EXORCIST is available to view for free all over the place and especially in 2013 but it doesn't seem like this is going to keep Warner from releasing it. They do continue to hold hostage an AIP flick where those filmmakers have yet to be able to profit because some judge said that the movie was "too close" to the Warner film. Surely Warner has made enough from this film to where they could let the smaller guy see the light of day. By Warner refusing to do so it's not only hurt the small guy but it's also hurt them because the lack of the film being available means that most people already bought the bootleg. Small guy loses again (although I'm sure the disc would sell well enough if it could get released).

We could spin this countless ways and I'm not sure there would be a winner. Stealing movies have been going on since the 1890s so it's not like this is a new event. Hell, these studios everyone is crying over were themselves funded by thieves who made a killing stealing from THE BIRTH OF A NATION back when it was released. That filmmaker certainly didn't see all the returns he was meant to since theater owners were changing numbers to put more money into their pockets.

Perhaps one day we'll get "A few words about....the various moral-less things Hollywood has done."
If piracy was to inhibit the release of new motion pictures by their rightful owners, there would be no need for production. If there were no new production, there would be no new piracy.

As to WB restraining an AIP film (I have no background info here), to do otherwise might well be to set precedent.

Not sure I understand what point you're attempting to make.

RAH
 

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Michael Elliott said:
Perhaps one day we'll get "A few words about....the various moral-less things Hollywood has done."
I don't think you could do that subject justice in just a few words.
 

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Michael Elliott said:
We could spin this countless ways and I'm not sure there would be a winner. Stealing movies have been going on since the 1890s so it's not like this is a new event.
Logical Fallacy #464 of the piracy playbook: "We could tape songs off radios back in the 80's, and videotape movies off TV, so how does downloading a song or movie these days make any difference?". The fact is that it does make a difference, a huge one, due to differences in technology and the scale of the activity.

Back in the 1980's when you taped a movie or song, or bought a bootleg, the quality wasn't necessarily very good. With songs, the radio DJ always continued his inane babble over the intro and tail end of a song. With movies on TV, there were ad breaks and station logos. You also needed to wait until you heard your favorite song on the radio, or your favorite movie was on TV, before pressing record - some songs and movies got very infrequent airplay.

The bottom line is that due to noticeable quality differences, the time and effort required, and lack of availability of some stuff, it was still much better to purchase a legitimate copy than to pirate it. Plus of course, home theater as we know it today simply didn't exist back then, so it really didn't bite into cinema sales in a major way anyway.

Fast forward to the 21st century and I can now find and download pretty much any song or movie whenever I want, in high quality (frequently 1:1) with no-one talking over the intro, no ad breaks to fast forward through or edit out, and no need to wait for it to show up on TV or play on the radio. I can view this pirated media on a variety of devices, like a home theater system, a tablet, or a PC. The quality difference is now negligible, the time and effort involved is also negligible, and availability is almost 100%. With millions upon millions of people undertaking this activity, the impact is now many orders of magnitude higher than what was occurring in the 1980s.
 

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Robert Harris said:
As to WB restraining an AIP film (I have no background info here), to do otherwise might well be to set precedent.

Not sure I understand what point you're attempting to make.

RAH
The film is ABBY. The film was released in theaters a few weeks until Warner got it pulled. It was never shown again in theaters (although Louisville has played it twice since the director is from here), on television and it's never had an official release. I think big boy Warner protected their EXORCIST enough and have made enough off of it to allow the owners of ABBY to finally give it an official release so that fans won't have to keep supporting bootleggers in order to see it. Especially since every other wannabe EXORCIST is now out there in R1 in special editions.

However, I guess this here is the perfect picture to use for the right for fans to be allowed to own a bootleg and especially if there's no other way to see it.
 

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Persianimmortal said:
Logical Fallacy #464 of the piracy playbook: "We could tape songs off radios back in the 80's, and videotape movies off TV, so how does downloading a song or movie these days make any difference?". The fact is that it does make a difference, a huge one, due to differences in technology and the scale of the activity.

Back in the 1980's when you taped a movie or song, or bought a bootleg, the quality wasn't necessarily very good. With songs, the radio DJ always continued his inane babble over the intro and tail end of a song. With movies on TV, there were ad breaks and station logos. You also needed to wait until you heard your favorite song on the radio, or your favorite movie was on TV, before pressing record - some songs and movies got very infrequent airplay.

The bottom line is that due to noticeable quality differences, the time and effort required, and lack of availability of some stuff, it was still much better to purchase a legitimate copy than to pirate it. Plus of course, home theater as we know it today simply didn't exist back then, so it really didn't bite into cinema sales in a major way anyway.

Fast forward to the 21st century and I can now find and download pretty much any song or movie whenever I want, in high quality (frequently 1:1) with no-one talking over the intro, no ad breaks to fast forward through or edit out, and no need to wait for it to show up on TV or play on the radio. I can view this pirated media on a variety of devices, like a home theater system, a tablet, or a PC. The quality difference is now negligible, the time and effort involved is also negligible, and availability is almost 100%. With millions upon millions of people undertaking this activity, the impact is now many orders of magnitude higher than what was occurring in the 1980s.

A quick Google search showed that there were 7,038,044,500 people in the world as of 9/8/12. Earlier you said (or an article did) that the most pirated film had been downloaded 8 million times. I'm sure there were some repeat offenders but lets just pretend that exactly eight-million different people did do the download. That leaves 7,030,044,500 people who are honest and not downloading. It's a pretty small percentage of people who are downloading these things.

But to be fair, again according to Google, only 2,405,518,376 people worldwide actually use the internet so we'd have to adjust our numbers a little bit.

Even more from a Google search shows that 44% of those 2,405,518,376 come from Asia, which appears to also be leading the world in bootlegs of everything from music to movies to shoes and anything else that you can find cheap on eBay or Amazon (I got ripped last week on an iPhone case).

Any thoughts on why Asia might be the leader of much of this stuff? I have a few ideas kicking around but I wonder how many downloads come from Asia and I wonder how many of them are being put onto a DVD-R and sold on the streets, which means that 8,000,000 could double once the item is put on disc and sold on the streets. I also wonder if these leading markets for this stuff have these movies around to actually view in a legal way. Perhaps these movies just don't get released there so they're doing to WOLVERINE what I do with various silent or Clara Bow titles.

0.0033256865: According to Google, this is the percentage of people who use the internet and download. Many other crimes have much higher rates. I think we all agree that it will never stop all together but the numbers aren't nearly as bad as some make it out to be. Yes, yes. One poor disc not being sold officially hurts but let's face the facts that we will never completely stop it.
 

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Sorry, but it's ridiculous to use the population of the world, or all Internet users globally, as a reference point for the scale of piracy of one movie. Let's look at this in its proper perspective:

The single most downloaded film of 2012 was downloaded 8.7 million times between its release in March 2012 and the end of 2012, via a single source of piracy (torrents) - this doesn't include physical pirated copies, usenet, or private torrents, all of which are substantial.

It just means that in 9 month period for which the data was captured from just one piracy source, a single film was downloaded at least 8.7 million times.

Now, according to the same article above, that movie grossed $100m in the same period. With a movie ticket costing around $9 in the US, and DVDs and Blu-rays costing twice that or more, we can estimate that even at only $9 per pop, at the most 11 million people legitimately saw the movie; less if most people waited for the DVD or Blu-ray.

So let's look at our very rough numbers: up to 11 million saw the movie legitimately, and at least 8.7 million saw it illegitimately. Hard to suggest there's no real impact, isn't it.
 

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Michael Elliott said:
The film is ABBY. The film was released in theaters a few weeks until Warner got it pulled. It was never shown again in theaters (although Louisville has played it twice since the director is from here), on television and it's never had an official release. I think big boy Warner protected their EXORCIST enough and have made enough off of it to allow the owners of ABBY to finally give it an official release so that fans won't have to keep supporting bootleggers in order to see it. Especially since every other wannabe EXORCIST is now out there in R1 in special editions. However, I guess this here is the perfect picture to use for the right for fans to be allowed to own a bootleg and especially if there's no other way to see it.
Fans have no rights, whatsoever, to own, sell, distribute or duplicate bootlegs.Let us neither return to discussions about the secession of all law, nor the fine art of murder. There must be some basic premise of law. Surely.RAH
 

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Once we get into the bushes of whether laws should exist at all, we are truly lost.

This is not a discussion of anarchism or of the proper nature of society and the gatherings of mankind.

I think we can all agree that laws exist for a purpose, and that there are avenues to obtain those hard-to-find movies or TV shows that are completely legal. And if a movie is totally impossible to find, then it's something where we can always try to get the merchant to make it available. If not, then frankly, that's the breaks. I'm aware of hundreds of super-low-budget movies along the lines of The Terror of Tiny Town that may never become available again, and I really won't lose much sleep over that.

Now, a debate about the fine art of murder - on THAT issue I must respectfully disagree with RAH. If George Bernard Shaw was able to discuss this worthy matter, then who are we to dispute his august wisdom?
 

Robert Harris

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Kevin EK said:
Once we get into the bushes of whether laws should exist at all, we are truly lost.

This is not a discussion of anarchism or of the proper nature of society and the gatherings of mankind.

I think we can all agree that laws exist for a purpose, and that there are avenues to obtain those hard-to-find movies or TV shows that are completely legal. And if a movie is totally impossible to find, then it's something where we can always try to get the merchant to make it available. If not, then frankly, that's the breaks. I'm aware of hundreds of super-low-budget movies along the lines of The Terror of Tiny Town that may never become available again, and I really won't lose much sleep over that.

Now, a debate about the fine art of murder - on THAT issue I must respectfully disagree with RAH. If George Bernard Shaw was able to discuss this worthy matter, then who are we to dispute his august wisdom?
And a wonderful new book on the subject from David Morrell.

RAH
 

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Robert Harris said:
Fans have no rights, whatsoever, to own, sell, distribute or duplicate bootlegs.Let us neither return to discussions about the secession of all law, nor the fine art of murder. There must be some basic premise of law. Surely.RAH
Me owning ABBY is about as bad as me speeding on the way home, having a beer before I turned 21, ripping the tag off the couch or staying in the local park past 9pm because our basketball game wasn't finished.
 

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Persianimmortal said:
Sorry, but it's ridiculous to use the population of the world, or all Internet users globally, as a reference point for the scale of piracy of one movie. Let's look at this in its proper perspective:

The single most downloaded film of 2012 was downloaded 8.7 million times between its release in March 2012 and the end of 2012, via a single source of piracy (torrents) - this doesn't include physical pirated copies, usenet, or private torrents, all of which are substantial.

It just means that in 9 month period for which the data was captured from just one piracy source, a single film was downloaded at least 8.7 million times.

Now, according to the same article above, that movie grossed $100m in the same period. With a movie ticket costing around $9 in the US, and DVDs and Blu-rays costing twice that or more, we can estimate that even at only $9 per pop, at the most 11 million people legitimately saw the movie; less if most people waited for the DVD or Blu-ray.

So let's look at our very rough numbers: up to 11 million saw the movie legitimately, and at least 8.7 million saw it illegitimately. Hard to suggest there's no real impact, isn't it.

Well, we really don't know how many of those 11 million people would have actually paid anything to see it. It's doubtful they would have paid $25 for the Blu and it's doubtful they would have paid $12 for a movie ticket. Some might have paid $5 to a Blockbuster like store or VOD. I'd say even more would have paid $1 to Redbox. I'm not sure if China or Russia, the two biggest bootleggers apparently, have these options there as widely as we do in America. I'm not sure how many of those 11 million would have just waited for it to be a free stream on Netflix or how many would have waited for it to be on HBO so they could watch it without paying something extra.

From the list you keep quoting, I find it fascinating that a movie that pretty much bombed in America would be so popular to view for free. If you take a look at the other films on that list, most were released in 75+ different locations across the world. Going by IMDB, PROJECT X only had around 53 releases and not many in Asia. Again, the most popular place for bootlegs so perhaps the majority of those downloads came from places that had no access to the film. Not that it makes it right but as the FBI site says, most of these type of crime happens where the laws just don't go after it or try to stop it. The majority of the crime might just be something that's not going to get cracked down on.

It's funny but last night I legally ordered THE CANYONS from Amazon and while watching it it struck me that much of the selling point was to see Lindsay Lohan naked. I think the producers are selling her nudity in hopes that it will gain viewers but then I started thinking about this thread and realize that this selling point really isn't one anymore with the nudity. I saw many threads from people who would like to see Lohan nude but refused to pay anything for such a bad movie. They weren't trying to download illegal copies but instead they were just going to wait for someone to post the screengrabs from her nude scenes. So, even the days of exploitation have pretty much hurt current movies and the promise of a nude actress (remember STRIPTEASE) just isn't going to be enough to get money.
 

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ahollis said:
ABBY is the perfect example of a company defending their IP rights.
And it's also the perfect example of a rich studio and a somewhat ignorant judge making a questionable ruling against a film when seen today shows it did very little to rip off THE EXORCIST. If ABBY was to be banned then the majority of Blaxploitation films should have been as well. BLACK GODFATHER, BLACULA, BLACK FRANKENSTEIN, DR. BLACK AND MR. HYDE and countless others were just as guilty but these films didn't have to run up against a powerful studio and to some a questionable producer.
The artists/actors/director also should have a right to have their film seen by people who might enjoy it and it's yet another perfect example of why fans should have their hands on something. If MGM and Warner want to come to some agreement then I'm sure this here would sell just as well as any other Blaxploitation film that MGM released. If Warner wants to continue cashing in on THE EXORCIST then I think they could re-visit this case, free MGM to release it or perhaps include it on one of their future cash-grabbing re-releases of the film.

By keeping ABBY (or SONG OF THE SOUTH or any other title) in the vault you have no winners. The people who made the film gain nothing. The studio gains nothing and those interested in seeing the film gain nothing. Keeping these things unreleased just help those who shouldn't be making a dime off of it.
 

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While it's nice to wave all of this away using vagueness, when a movie has an almost 50% piracy rate, you can bet that if the free (pirate) option wasn't there, sales would be higher by some proportion. Calculating the exact amount is difficult as we've discussed before, but trying to suggest that it is largely irrelevant is all well and good when it's not your product, and hence not your income, that's affected.

It's interesting to note that the link I keep using is to TorrentFreak, a pro-piracy propaganda site, which I've mentioned before in this thread (they're basically the Fox News of the piracy world - distorting truth to suit a very clear agenda). For example, the reason they include the gross income next to the download figures for their "top pirated movies" list is to deliberately imply that although these movies were heavily pirated, they also made lots of money. However, as you can see in 2012, the top pirated movie only grossed roughly one tenth of its competitors. This nicely demonstrates that despite the Robin Hood stereotype they like to paint, pirates really don't prioritize their downloading based on any moral code of conduct. My research tends to confirm that the most pirated stuff is simply the most popular stuff, regardless of whether it made a profit or loss, was funded independently or by a large corporation, and irrespective of whether the product was even of very good quality. People hear about something, and their first instinct is to download it illegally.

Obviously, some proportion of those people who pirate may then buy the legitimate version. But I'd suggest this occurs far less often than is commonly thought, such as in cases where there are physical extras which cannot be pirated - hence the proliferation of fancy packaging (slipcovers, digibooks, steelbooks, toy/merchandising offerings) for big blockbusters on DVD and Blu-ray.

To back this up, a few pages back I posted this quote from an article about an independent filmmaker who saw lots of illegal downloads of her work:
...It’s clear that the [large] number of people illegally downloading is not balancing out with the few that have gone on to donate to them or buy the film outright. So it’s helping them in one way (exposure) and not helping them in another (money).
Basically, given complete anonymity and little chance of being caught, most people can comfortably turn to piracy as their main source of media consumption, and pass it off as "trying before buying" if questioned about it.

While we certainly can't eliminate piracy, and no-one who deals with it has ever suggested that this is possible, we can reduce it. I like the idea that zoetmb raised in his post on the previous page of this thread: educating children about the importance of intellectual property while they're in school, so we can get out of this Dark Ages mindset that only physically tangible products are actually "worth" something.
 

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Well, considering budgets don't allow for stuff such as meals and the fact that kids are getting dumber when it comes to reading, writing and math, I have a hard time believing anyone is going to give money so that kids can learn not to download movies from China. Can you imagine what would happen if some "official" said they wanted to take money from countless other things that need to be done so that schools can teach about downloads from China? Geez, if kids don't pay attention during History class just imagine what they'll be doing here.Your link to the small filmmaker is one that I'm sure will get sympathy from most. As I said 20 pages ago, I talk to young filmmakers daily and usually have films, screeners and rough drafts sent to me weekly. I know their stories and I've talked with some who want to get their money back, become rich and famous and then the other side who wants their projects out there because they want them to be seen. There's was a rather hot debate a few months back on one very popular forum between an angry writer who wanted people to buy the film and the director who was unhappy with no one getting to see it so he released it for free. You're right, I have no money being lost in regards to piracy but I think most studio boys would be very happy with my spending habits throughout my lifetime. I'm really terrified to even try to calculate how much I've spent in my life. The numbers of how much I've spent at the theater alone this year is somewhat scary. Still, even after being educated that I could have watched all these movies for free, I still elect to go to the movies and pay for official versions be it from Warner Archives or streaming thru Amazon and Netflix and Hulu and several other stations. I'm pretty sure there are millions of people who watch legal forms of entertainment who would be offended by some of the ideas in this thread. I guess that 0.0033256865% of people who download are bad but I tend to try and be positive by looking at all those who do things the right way. In my case, if the right way isn't an option then I'll find other film buffs to help.
 

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We're going round and round in circles now, but just two final things from me in regards to the points you raise above:

- There is no need to "take money" away from other things to teach kids in school about intellectual property. It's not about chastising kids in China for downloading movies, it's about the entire economic concept of intellectual property. And it's a very important one that many people these days seem to have absolutely no clue about, but which drives a significant portion of the economy. In the US of all places, you'd think schools would find at least a few hours a year in their curricula to explain to young minds the sheer importance IP and associated rights have for your own economy, and their futures - especially given a lot of people in the future will be entering industries where IP plays a significant role (e.g. software development).

- I implore you, please don't use this nonsense about "0.0033256865% of people who download" from your earlier calculations. Taking 8 million (understated) downloads of a single movie over a 9 month period and dividing it by the total number of Internet users across the world is absurd. I've posted this before, but various research shows that pirated multimedia forms anywhere from 24-44% of all Internet bandwidth used across the world. This is not .003% of the world's population engaging in this activity, it is a profoundly large number of people, and is growing every day. And given the advent and rapid uptake of 3D printing technology, whereby people can create duplicates of physical objects in their own home, there are serious ramifications of this scale of piracy for all industries in the near future, not just filmmakers, singers, authors and game developers.

/EDIT: Sources to back up the bolded claim above:

CNBC Article: Piracy Rules the Web - An estimate of 23.8% of all Internet traffic across the world attributable to pirated downloads.

Multimedia Intelligence Research article - Older article from 2008 estimating 44% of all Internet traffic attributable to P2P (i.e. torrents). Note that the article's prediction of legitimate torrent use growing by 400% has been proven to be false.

In truth the real scale is unknown but it's huge. Here in Australia, we recently had what is known as the Game of Thrones Effect whereby there were so many people illegally downloading the final season 3 episode of the Game of Thrones TV series, it slowed down all Internet usage.
 

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Yes, we're starting to go round and round. I will be fair and bump the understated 8-million up to 50-million copies. With the Google numbers that brings the percentage up to 0.02078554065. And yes, this 0.02078665065% is causing major damage that even I won't deny. The numbers might be absurd to you but there's no point in highlighting every download if you're not also going to highlight or give credit to everyone out there who doesn't do this type of thing. I'm the complete opposite as I'm a studio person's best friend because I actually go and see these movies when they're in the theater. For older movies I'm a member of Netflix, Hulu, Warner Instant and countless other programs, which just goes to show that I fully support the studios. Heck, very few people watch more movies than I do and yet I've never even done anything like downloading or posting movies online.

I've said from page one that I don't agree with people downloading movies. I think I've said this countless times throughout this thread but there's no doubt that the other side needs to see other's point of view as well. What I have said throughout this thread is that I don't believe movies should be thrown into a vault and forgotten simply because someone doesn't care about them or can't release them. SONG OF THE SOUTH is a very popular title and thread here at this very forum and I don't see anyone in these threads saying that the film should simply be forgotten because Disney has no plans to release it. As a film buff I don't think it's right that my son or another film buff should never see this film simply because the mouse is embarrassed by it.

The biggest problem is that I'd like to hear from some of these people who actually do this stuff. Since I'm apparently the only person on this board who knows no one who has downloaded a movie I'd like to hear from people out there. I'd like to hear their stories of how their parents, aunts, uncles or other family members or friends are actually staying at home every evening and downloading movies. I'd like to hear from the members here why their family members do this. Perhaps if we can hear why they download then perhaps we can come up with a way to protect the studios, the copyright holders, the fans and those being impacted in a big or small way. Again, there's no doubt that there's a group of people out there doing this but I think most people on this board are legit and I'd say that the majority of the people they know are legit. If not, let's find the reasons why and not just pretend that this issue is going away by passing this law or protesting another law.

The numbers on both sides don't lie. You've shown numbers and I've shown numbers. The fact remains that an overwhelming majority of people out there are honest, good people who don't download or do illegal things. These people deserve more credit and I think a film buff's voice should also be heard.
 

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