Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)

It's not just the retread movies. It's the whole damn business model.

Basically the MPAA wants you to go to a theater, pay $10 to watch one showing, where you can't pause and have to hope that you're not sharing the theater with someone who is more then willing to talk on their phone during the movie. Then they want you to wait 6 months or something like that and either pay $5-$7 to rent or pay $20 for a DVD and $30-$50 for a Blu-Ray. Heck on I-Tunes they charge $20 for HD versions of movies and $14 for SD versions and those are designed for use only on ipods and computers.

They have little desire to licence these movies to affordable streaming services nor any desire to reduce the price on home DVD's and Blu-Rays which by the way come with unskippable trailers and PSA's. It's no wonder their main demographic, teens to young adults, turned to piracy.

The price was already way to high and when free options became available enough people jumped on board. The need to make their content more affordable and accessible has been long overdue and instead of doing that they've opted to raise prices and make legitimate options harder to come by.

Not to mention rather then create good will with the public they've attacked their customers with lawsuits, threats, and power grabs with bills like SOPA. And the funny thing is that Hollywoods main demographic, the one doing most of if not all the downloading, is teens to young adults. A whole group of people that absolutely love pissing off old people.

Yeah it is too expensive...but it does costs millions to make these movies. I am constantly baffled at the amount of money they spend to produce these movies.

my price is $5. If I see a DVD I like for $5 or less, I'll buy it. $10 for Blu-ray.

That's the price where it's just easier to buy it. For games its $5-20, depending on quality... for metal bands it's I'll show up at your show.

and creativity isn't dead, hollywood has always liked remakes (charley chaplan plays the same guy in about 42786 different movies, indy and star wars had 3 movies each in the 80s, evil dead had 3 (and evil dead was pretty much exactly the same), ghostbusters, batman in the 90s, etc.

there's still the donnie darkos, the inceptions, the mon oncle ameriques, run lola run, etc etc etc.

Ha!


LOL! Except for me of course...LOL!! :cheeky-sm

I think what Dirtbag59 said really hits it home. The business model is all screwed up. This is what happens when your business is ran by greedy rich people who don't know the value of a dollar. Yes, it can cost millions of dollars to make a film, but the films with those high budgets aren't always the best films either. I don't have any pity on their bloated budgets for film making. The truth is, the average family around my region of the country brings in a net income of approximately $30 - 40k a year combined. If just one person is working, that drops to about $20-$30K per year. This is actual take home pay. Once you take away living expenses (food, shelter, clothes, electricity), and maybe add in a car payment here and there, you don't have much left. And, its human nature to want to sit down and be entertained. Heck, it's almost necessary for one to remain in good mental health! But, if you can't afford to go out to the movies, and the price of an instant download rental is too ridiculous, what do yo do? Not everybody lives within walking distance of a Redbox, and Redbox may not have what you're looking for anyway.

The only time I spend more than $10 - $15 on a DVD/Bluray is if it's something I have desperately gotta have... That isn't very often for me.

http://a3.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/406802_10150592502610943_559200942_11268487_154734 9591_n.jpg

Also consider this. If the MPAA and RIAA had gotten their way to begin with here's some of the things that wouldn't have happened.

First of all we wouldn't have had VCR's and Tape recorders and as a result we wouldn't have DVD's and burnable disc. Hollywood claimed in the beginning that VCR's would ruin them. Now they can't fathom being without their home video sales.

The MP3 player would have never hit the market had the RIAA won it's suit against Diamond's Rio Player, and Apple, one of the biggest contributors to the economy would never have experienced a renaissance seeing as how the capital to contribute to R&D on the iPhone and iPad would have never been generated without the money earned from the iPod.

Furthermore the I-Tunes store wouldn't have emerged which offered individual tracks at the reasonable price of $0.99. Streaming services like Netflix would have either never been invented or wouldn't have emerged until recently.

YouTube would have been dead a long time ago.

TiVo? Forget it. On demand? Gone. Hulu? Watch the damn show when we tell you to watch it. Pandora? Maybe, but it would have been on the RIAA's terms.

And had SOPA passed we would have had extremely watered down versions of YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Redit, and many other key sites that people use. Also who knows what next great innovation we saved by killing SOPA?

No good comes from giving into these two media cartels. Absolutely NONE. All the jobs and GDP produced by the tech industry was fought by the cartels at EVERY TURN. They have never embraced innovation and have always had to be dragged kicking and screaming. The time has come to let them throw their tantrums in the cereal aisle and pretend like we don't even know who they are.

MPAA: A Medieval Guild, Committed to Fight Progress at Any Cost (http://godfatherpolitics.com/3266/mpaa-a-medieval-guild-committed-to-fight-progress-at-any-cost/)

http://a3.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/406802_10150592502610943_559200942_11268487_154734 9591_n.jpg

Just like how folks supported American slaves by buying cotton. Yep, no way the top dogs would hoard most of the money for themselves.

MPAA: A Medieval Guild, Committed to Fight Progress at Any Cost (http://godfatherpolitics.com/3266/mpaa-a-medieval-guild-committed-to-fight-progress-at-any-cost/)

I must point out that this ****ing idiot author uses the year 1512 as part of the medieval period when that year is 20 years past the traditionally labelled end of that epoch(1492).

I must point out that this ****ing idiot author uses the year 1512 as part of the medieval period when that year is 20 years past the traditionally labelled end of that epoch(1492).

To be fair, sometimes people cite 1517, the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, as the end of the medieval period.

But you are right that 1512 is a little random. Either 1492 and 1517 makes a better date.