Posted on 09/04/2012 12:36:01 PM PDT by Nachum
Anyone using file-sharing service BitTorrent to download the latest film or music release is likely to be monitored, UK-based researchers suggest.
A Birmingham University study indicates that an illegal file-sharer downloading popular content would be logged by a monitoring firm within three hours.
The team said it was "surprised" by the scale of the monitoring.
Copyright holders could use the data to crack down on illegal downloads.
The three-year research was carried out by a team of computer scientists who developed software that acted like a BitTorrent file-sharing client and logged all the connections made to it.
BitTorrent is a method of obtaining files by downloading from many users at the same time.
The logs revealed that monitoring did not distinguish between hardcore illegal downloaders and those new to it.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
It's coming. My wife and I just paid $9.99 to stream Bachelorette on demand in HD. It won't be released to theaters until this Friday but for the last couple of weeks it has enjoyed huge success Video On Demand. The studio bigwigs are taking notice. Other titles are also enjoing "pre-theater" VOD releases, granted not the huge blockbusters, but smaller less expensive films aimed at grown-ups.
that’s a whole lotta SWAT teams busting into a whole lotta Starbucks...
Not ALWAYS theater movies. MOST theater movies on torrents are recorded on handheld cameras with the hearing impaired audio jacked into the camera’s audio-in port. You get great audio and horrible video.
More often, I see people downloading movies recently released on DVD/BD since they’ll be exact rips from the media that someone somewhere picked up.
Back in my college years, I knew people in the media who would get advanced copies of movies that the studios often sent out as promotions for reviews in magazines/newspapers/etc. Those advanced copies were the actual DVD of the movie set to be out in theaters and often had a header and/or footer with studio markers. It took a theater-school buddy of mine less than 90 seconds to remove those watermarks, et voila! You had a perfect copy of a movie that wasn’t even in theaters yet.
As I recall, it was Bowling for Columbine.
Vudu streams newer films for $6 or $7 a title I think. It's basically a video on demand service equivalent to the one provided by the cable provider except it uses IP streaming and sometimes has movies not available through the standard cable provider on demand service. I got free trial credit and watched a couple of movies, worked great.
Netflix (on the streaming side) has every movie you never wanted to watch.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.