[Porter]

It is sad, people that do pirate movies usually DL them offline. They usually spend any where from 6 to a mind boggling 24 hours to DL movies. If they are ever, mass produced, the quality of the pictures is usually bad enough to catch the person doing it. Generally people that pirate movies are bigger losers than I am.The fact that the quality sucks is yet another reason for people to shut up. People usually buy the VCDs and DVDs anyway. Because they are re-mastered. This sounds like some big Exec's getting mad that they are losin maybe .003% of money possibly made because people get to see the movie before they buy it...(and if the movie sucks, that may discourage some from buying it.)

[Karsus]

It would be easier for me to buy DVD's if the MPAA would just quit trying to put people like me in prison for watching them under Linux.

[Not_Who_U_Think]

I have a friend who DLs movies, and yes it can take a while, depending on a number of factors. He has a machine dedicated to such tasks so it just grinds away until finished. Quality can be outstanding to poor, depending on how it was captured - a DVD rip can be almost as good as the original. Most newly-released movies are captured either by someone in the projection booth using a digital camera, or by ripping a VHS preview copy sent to a reviewer.

[lelio]

To your 'quality of copies sucks' comment -- that worked for VCR tapes, but with DVDs there isn't any loss between 1 copy and 100.
But you're right that this isn't much of a high on their earnings and are probably spending more (well spending MY tax dollars) money than the are loosing.
I think that's why DVD makers are trying to get tie-ins to websites for their productions. Its easier to create an infrastructure on a website to handle registration than on the DVD itself.
Part of me wants people to copy DVDs as 'the interests' are taking the DeCSS guy to court over his desire to play them under linux.