SOPA

Yesterday big sites like Wikipedia and Google protested against the Stop Online Piracy Act. Even the White House made it clear that the bill will face presidential veto if it is not changed drastically. And I'm glad that even John Stewart spent the first half of his show yesterday on the topic bringing up some very good points and give a good explanation why the bill is broken:

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But if you want to know more why the bill is broken Chris Heald explains it here really well. According to his explanation, if I post a link on Facebook to a torrent file of the latest Disney movie, Facebook must be shut down within 5 days...

That explains it.

I understand that the entertainment industry is frustrated, but ever since the compact disk became a widely used medium in both the music and data worlds, and computers were able to read CDs these studios just couldn't find a way of taking an advantage of the situation.

Here's the deal: I can watch movies in an acceptable quality on Netflix for $7.99 a month, I can stream practically any music for free on Spotify, but I can't watch the latest Bleach episode at the same time as people in Japan. And I'm gone through 355 episodes now, and don't want to give up! It's still very exciting! :)

I'm not saying that piracy is good, no. I think if the 'information' was accessible otherwise, people would go the legal way. But I ain't gonna subscribe to Netflix and Hulu Plus both. And it annoys the hell out of me that I can't watch a video clip in Germany while I can do so in the USA. You think it solves things? It doesn't cause I can either go through a proxy and ta-dam I'm watching Youtube from the USA (but this would never work since open proxies are always under heavy load), or the working way is to go one of the Youtube down-loader sites, and get the clip in MP4 without having the chance to click on the ads on the site or in the video! Still makes sense?

Check out the Comedy Central website! They put up all their shows online there! If they'd give up limiting access on a geographical basis and give me the choice if I want to see the Hungarian, German or US versions, it'd be perfect!

I think in the 21st century we should just forget about geography, and geographically targeted content. It's either online or not. And if not, and I want it, the only option left is piracy.

I also most like will not pay $5 for each on-demand video. Yeah it is much cheaper then a movie theater, and I can stay at home, I can also get HD content if I'm streaming through my cable provider's on demand service. But I'm convinced that a subscription approach is way better. (Would you pay for TV per minute or per show?!) I have a digital preferred cable subscription, yet I watch only about a dozen shows (I should downgrade my package, I know, and American TV sucks. Go BBC!), and when there's nothing on, I simply switch to Netflix on my Wii and watch something there. Like Drawn Together or a documentary how cows are fed with corn they can't digest and stand in their feces up to their knees and these two causes major e. coli epidemics from time to time and people die and FDA doesn't have the power to shut down such ranches (!). Or find a great documentary about American history.

Things I most likely wouldn't watch if I didn't have that subscription (that doesn't apply to drawn together, though :D). So what did I do? Made money to those filmmakers!

And by the way if all you do is shitty remakes of great old movies, or movies doesn't even worth watching (for money), er, then what kind of $58 billion loss are you talking about? Great movies don't equal green/blue box recordings mixed with CGI (see picture). I don't want to watch a video game in the theater!

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