My new stand on movie piracy

I have changed my opinion on movie piracy during the last few days.

Until recently I was strictly anti-piracy.  Maybe not strict enough, but stricter than anyone I know personally.  I wasn’t downloading movies from the Web.  I was buying DVDs.  I was renting DVDs. I was a frequent movie-goer. I was advocating people against movie piracy.   I was wrong.

I am tired of being the “last samurai” pain in the butt.  Nobody cares anymore.  And the worst part, is that movie industry doesn’t care.  Why should I then?

There is no way anymore for me keep watching movies, while staying an anti-pirate.  I cannot rent a legitimate DVD anymore – everyone is using pirated and copy-pasted disks.  I cannot share films with my friends, most of who are downloading them from the Web.  There is no video-on-demand service around here, like Netflix in the USA.  Our home ADSL speeds aren’t in the AppleTV ranges yet. And I can’t stay up-to-date using only cinemas, because all of the cinemas in Cyprus belong to the same people, they show the same movies, and they bring only about one new titles a week.

There is an option of buying DVDs from Amazon, but the prices (including shipping) are prohibitive, and, as I was reminded with my recent DVD player change, I have to pay attention to the regional encoding.  Otherwise the DVDs that I bought won’t play at all.  Oh, and, of course, if they play, I will have to go through a gadzillion of un-skip-able ads, trailers, FBI and CIA warnings, and the like.  I am tired of this crap.

So, from now on, I won’t be paying much attention to all the movie anti-piracy noise.  I will still try to get the movie legally – in the cinema or pay-per-view somewhere online, or whatever option will be available.  But if everything fails, as it often does now, I will download and watch the pirated version.  I have tried it recently, and it is a pleasure, indeed.  It’s easy to find the film I want to see, it takes minutes to download it (compared to days or weeks waiting for it in the cinema or for a shipping delivery), I can talk about it with my friends again, and I can move on spending times on the things that I worth spending time on.

I tried my best and failed miserably, annoying a lot of people on the way.  I won’t do it anymore.

P.S.: I won’t be producing or commercially distributing any pirated materials.

P.P.S.: The above opinion change for now only applies to the TV and movie industry.  Software industry is different and I still stand strict on the anti-piracy stand there.

P.P.P.S.: If you were annoyed by my anti-piracy rants over the years, please excuse me.  You should know how passionate and stubborn I can get, often for no reason.