Where Can I Download Movies?

I think I'll only call it theft about half the time, give or take.

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You'd have to elaborate on which half isn't, and why. But if the argument is about things that aren't for sale anyway, I'm pretty sure it's theft all of the time unless one thinks that a lack of a product's availability is sufficient reason to steal it, which a) doesn't make any moral sense and b) is ultimately counterproductive, anyway.

just some context here.

what napster and limewire provided were "technically" legal. They used the Peer to Peer excuse. however, we all knew that's just an excuse.

much later, both wanted to transition to legal downloading. they approached music labels and film companies to be licensed for distribution. they had all the ammunition for it. limewire had 20 million members. they knew exactly what each member was downloading, what time, what they are searching, etc. they knew their consumers' behavior in ways no company, business or research agency ever did.

the music labels refused because they saw it as a threat rather than as an opportunity. limewire and napster would give the consumer an option to buy on a per song basis rather than the entire album, which, could pull down their revenue per album.

they were also worried about furthering piracy. when people get the file on a digital form, it's easier to forward it. that's reasoning had holes all over the place but that's that.

to date, even itunes can't get distribution rights from all labels and film companies because of reasons stated above.

i work for the industry and i obviously don't want people downloading illegally but i do recognize that behavior indicates people like to listen first and then buy (for music, at least). that is why some bands or indie artists release their songs for free and make it available for sale later. and there are bands who get through with that.



just thought i'd share.

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I thought this thread was about where I can download all the good illegal movies? So... where are they? This thread is bogus.

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I did say "I'll only call it theft", not it is theft based on the morality of a society which in my opinion is fvcked up.

By the way, does anyone know how much the film industry made last year?

If I recall correctly (and I do), that's precisely the stance I took quite some time ago in a certain thread debating this very topic of which I was the last poster.

But don't go back there, because that post was made during a time before I had Deleuzian language (a better time for some of you, no?) and it is through this vocabulary that the idea can be framed in its least paradoxical form:

Human energy and its products should be, in principle, nomadic---seeking to new domains of its own expression, new contexts to redefine its own meaning, its maximum creative potential. However, every sedentary civilization restricts our flow in some way in order to subsist on that captured energy---indeed, in order for there to be civilization at all---so this pure nomadicism is ultimately lost (for a time).

However, the emergence of global communications technologies in recent times, most importantly the internet, has reintroduced the possibility of an intra-civilizational nomadicism for certain privileged beings. Art---music and film most of all---has clearly emerged as one of these beings.

Of course, nomadicism might not be practical for all things, but if there is one category of beings this does and should apply to, it is art, which draws all of its significance from the various interpretations of its audience. To striate art in such a way through the channels of capital so that its sole route of expression is through consumption is to also obstruct it---indeed, to steal it away---from all of its other possibilities of expression and, most importantly for art, much of its potential audience.

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I actually have a theory that you're genyav.

We're all genyav. He's a collective manifestation of all our greatest hopes and fears, our most rapturous dreams, our most horrific nightmares...

Downloading Hollywood movies without permission is wrong.

It's okay if it is porn.

You've got a modifier hanging here; it's impossible to tell whether or not you're saying the very idea of basing legality on the morality of a society is f**ked up, or if you're saying the society in question is f**ked up.

Either way, you'll obviously have to elaborate to be understood. I've made my position pretty clear: movie piracy is not the worst problem in the world, but it can't be seriously morally justified unless someone's own moral code fails to recognize property the way most people's does. If you want to argue with this, be my guest, but that'll have to involve more than the odd vague sentence here and there.

Nope. But I do know using film industry profits to try to justify piracy is an incredibly fallacious argument on at least two fronts.

Yeah, i'm with most of you guys here, I am pretty much against piracy for obvious reasons. I don't illegally download film and I make a concious effort to encourage other people I know to do the same even though my efforts often fall on deaf ears. I think it really comes down to how you feel about the industry as a whole. Do you respect the industry enough to contribute to it whilst potentially gaining satisfaction from somebody's work? Or do you just enjoy films and not really respect the industry and thus download whatever you want at anytime without guilt? I think that's the question cinephiles should ask themselves.

I'm not gonna lie, I don't really respect the music industry for a lot of reasons. I've download music before in the past, and I still continue to download music. Why? Because, quite frankly, I don't really respect the industry that much these days. I don't try to justify it as I know it's wrong but I am comfortable with doing that as it's simply not an industry I respect. I think for those who download films, it's probably the same mentallity.

By the way, BitHQ is having open registrations right now.

Both. Society and morality are both "bad" in this respect. I actually just presented a perspective (not even an argument, just a perspective designed to reveal your prejudice) which demonstrated the "badness" of the former.

If Lime is wrong on two levels, then both of you are equally matched, because just look at your post here. First you say "it can't be seriously morally justified" by a moral code that "recognize[s] property the way most people's does", which is a blatant appeal to ad populum. Now, either you think morality or a moral code is just what most people happen to believe (relativism) or you are simply committing a fallacy. A third option is to simply argue that the "theft" aspect of morality is universally correct, or at least for this particular instance of pirating. Secondly, you say that "it can't be morally justified" by "someone's moral code", which essentially means nothing, since a moral code's relation to justification is actually one of assertion---not in need of justification. You might as well say "it can only apply to the moral code if it applies to the moral code". Nice tautology there.

This is basically my point. Not that it is completely impossible to justify movie piracy (it isn't), but that doing so more or less necessitates some extreme anarcho-Communist worldview about property. However, most of the people who download movies still respect the notion of property on some level, and I'm appealing to that fact.

Neither; the "most people" part is simply a preemptive thing. It's related to the statement above where I'm pointing out that, yes, you can "justify" it if you entire worldview is out of whack with most of humanity's, but if you have the same kind of base moral code that most free people do, you can't. There is no insinuation that morality is actually created by popular opinion, however.

My arguments against movie piracy are almost invariably about exposing what I think are hypocritical or inconsistent defenses of it; they are not arguments about what I, personally, think morality is. They wouldn't be useful arguments that way, because the entire point is to show that they violate the moral code of the person I'm talking to, not my own.

I actually said "it can't be morally justified unless someone's own moral code fails to recognize property the way most people's does." I qualified it; I didn't say it couldn't be justified by anyone's moral code.

However much your logic might be normalized by some kind of social induction, "extreme" is still your opinion. It is certainly not extreme to the people who believe it---who just so happen to be the people who you are arguing against.

It is simply because you choose to believe that human social reality is the most/the only significant reality---thus rendering "other realities" effectively less real---that you refuse to include in your induction process nature's own properties of flow of which we are undeniably a part, i.e. however much we might want to cut ourselves off from it.

This is simply factually wrong. I'm sure any sociologist today would mention that the growing popular unrest with the very concept of intellectual property is very real and only bound to get worse with the slow freeing of public opinion from Capitalist "wisdom" and the slow de facto expansion of the public domain through internet circulation---I believe I mentioned this kind of limit before to you in person the last time we talked. The analogy I made was with Marx's proletariat revolution, and yes, like Marx, I want this limit to be saturated.

Or do you still refuse to believe that there is such a period as Late Capitalism or the Postmodern where the dense interconnections spawned by Modernity itself begin to feed back on themselves, indeed to cannibalize themselves, or perhaps something even more unexpected?

"There are more things in heaven and earth, [Yoda],
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

It is not any failing of either myself or Lime but rather a failing of yours that you cannot properly imagine an authentic---how do you put it?---"anarcho-Communist" perspective in relation to art. If you must, then think us hypocritical. But understand this deadlock only presents itself because of your immersion into particular notion of "common wisdom", your familiarity with a particular language-game. It is not really impossible, as you admit, to hold a self-consistent justification, so the perceived improbability of this being true is merely your own prejudice and lack of imagination---or should I say empathy? :3

I think you've known me long enough to know that there are certain tendencies within me to lean towards what you might call "extreme", but which many, many philosophers, average citizens, entire nations have not considered as such. I do not use this to justify my case. Surely we are outnumbered in this respect. But there is simply no reason to assume hypocrisy simply because you cannot put yourself into my shoes. Allow me this Otherness. Believe in the radical expressiveness of the human---or at least believe in its radical monstrosity.

Okay, I just spend a while trying to break down that sentence, but my analysis skills are not good enough to even begin pick apart all of its possessives and qualifiers... But in general it's actually quite a bit of fun, so I'll just leave it as the following. I converted your "unless" construction into an "if and only if" and took the contrapositive.

"[Someone's own moral code succeeds in recognizing property the way most people's does] if and only if [it can be morally justified].

On first glance, it still seems tautological and your qualifier, as you call it, "the way most people's does" still implies relativism, ad populum, etc.

I'm pretty sure 90% of what you're saying has nothing to do with what I'm saying, so I'll try to keep this short and to the point:

We don't know that. Harry Lime hasn't stated his opinion on this, which is precisely why my statements have been so anticipatory and qualified: because he's not making testable statements or elaborating on why he thinks movie piracy is acceptable. Re: extreme, see response below...

As for "extreme" -- sure, it's my opinion. And one could also say that a view is "extreme" simply because most people regard it as extreme. The word can be used this way without any other connotations and without having to believe that "human social reality is the only significant reality."

Basically, you're taking an instance in which I use a word that can sometimes summarize a society's response to an idea, and somehow extrapolating that into the bizarre notion that I must therefore believe that a society's collective opinion is the only one that matters. That simply does not follow, any more than citing an individual means I believe them to be the only person worth citing, or the only place I can imagine producing something worth citing, or any other wild flight of fancy that does not logically follow from the initial statement.

You say it's factually wrong, and the evidence you present to support this is...what? Some nebulous indicators that suggest we, as a society, are grappling with some of the complexities of intellectual property. That doesn't render the statement factually wrong at all. It doesn't even come close. The existence of the Creative Commons license (which I encounter often, as a web developer) has literally nothing to do with the claim that most people who download movies still respect the right to own property.

Also (though I don't want to get bogged down in these tangential points), there seems to be some tension in criticizing qualitative judgments based on society's collective opinions in the previous quote, and citing shifts in society's collective opinions as meaningful evidence here.

I think this probably doesn't exist, and if it does it probably won't create the kind of society you think it will. But this has nothing to do with the topic at hand any more. Like any good argument, the argument I'm trying to make has basically nothing to do with what I believe, personally. If you want to talk about whether or not Capitalism is winding down, we have threads for it, or threads for it can be created.

Alright, now this stuff is getting straight-up silly. At no point in any of my responses did I suggest that I can't "imagine" these other worldviews. In fact, I suggested the exact opposite: by including the qualifiers that I did, I was explicitly anticipating them. So this critique is entirely backwards.

I am forced to use preemptive qualifiers and make these assumptions (properly divulged, of course) because Harry Lime has, for whatever reason, not actually stated his position on any of this stuff. So, I've anticipated several responses by saying "unless X, Y." Maybe he believes in X, and maybe not, but when someone withholds their actual opinion and only tosses out vague claims, this is the only manner in which I can respond. It doesn't mean I'm propping up society as a perfect arbiter of all that is good and right, and it doesn't mean I'm saying anarchists and Communists don't exist. It means exactly what it sounds like it means: unless you believe this one thing, you're probably contradicting your own moral code when you do this second thing.

But I don't assume hypocrisy with you, because I know you are, in fact, a Communist (shh, don't tell will!). I assume hypocrisy with most people who download films because I think most of them are not Communists.

My arguments are -- and I've made this quite clear in many threads -- addressed to anyone who thinks they can pick and choose which types of property to respect and not contradict themselves. I think that's an illusion. If you're willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater and can justify movie piracy because you think the entire notion of property is bunk, then yeah, congrats, your worldview is internally consistent, albeit at the price of being extremely outside of the mainstream.

The confusion is clearly with the use of the word "morality." Of course you believe the statement is tautological: you think morality and one's moral code are always the same thing.

Whatever confusion there is can simply be cleared up by replacing "morally justified" with "justified in a consistent manner," or somesuch. The point is the use of willful blindness about the logical implications of one's beliefs on property because to confront them would be inconvenient.

In reverse order.

1) I precisely don't think "morality and one's moral code are always the same thing". You do. Or at least Lewis does.

2) Both Lime and I said independently of each other at one point in time that "property was theft". You were the one who accused him of joking. I can tell you for certain that Chesterton was not joking when he said "thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it" in The Man Who Was Thursday. Right after he goes onto to characterize the intellectual radical (or the poet) as the most dangerous kind of man. That's me and Lime. We are not even so horrible as thieves to participate in the logic of property. We reject that logic altogether.

3) By the way, I don't really know Lime or expect him to show up for many hours, so if you want to omit him from all my previous lines go ahead.

4) So you say "unless you believe this one thing, you're probably contradicting your own moral code when you do this second thing." You might as well say "unless you believe this one thing, you're probably contradicting this other totally unrelated thing". Your point here? I can probably guess: for you morality is not just "one thing" but a huge deal that spans all of space and time, so it's vulgar for you to compare Anarchism and Communism with morality. For me, it's not.

5) You are wrong that "the existence of the Creative Commons license (which I encounter often, as a web developer) has literally nothing to do with the claim that most people who download movies still respect the right to own property". A simple thing such as establishing an arena for sharing creative works in the same manner as academia has been doing for centuries automatically changes the way people relate to property. Take ANY FIELD of academic study for instance. ALL KNOWLEDGE is open to anyone who wants to put a citation at the end of the their paper. No money is exchanged. No permission is even required (although sometimes this is a requirement for creative commons but NEVER MONEY). All you need to use and modify all the information in the world is just a simple, anonymous citation. I don't know when the last time you wrote a paper was, but it MAKES YOUR PAPER BETTER to have other people's work in it. Your paper benefits from its COLLECTIVE VOICE. To say that the sharing of creative content has nothing to do with solidarity or collectivism is really foolish or just, as I've been saying, incredulous. My god, it even says "Commons" in the title as in a SHARED SPACE.

6) I clearly didn't give you much evidence, but maybe this is a discussion for another time, because those were just the two most recent examples that came to mind.

7) I also ask you to consider the idea that the act of filesharing in particular CAUSES people to think more collectively.

8) Your entire worldview is constantly oscillating between societal wisdom as ultimate wisdom (a la Lewis and moral law) and societal wisdom as some contingent, relative perspective. So yeah, if I do project one into the other, then it is merely because of this confusion.

I'm going to speak for Lime now because he's a man of few words.

Harry Lime: "Downloading any and all movies from anywhere which doesn't destroy your computer - ."
"Stealing something not on my computer which I love and belongs to me - No Comment." (He didn't really "say" this last sentence.)

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