"Our Ripper, who art on Mininova / aXXo be thy name."

[missroserose]

A while back, Slate had an article on a popular BitTorrent uploader who went by the name of aXXo, and who has a sterling reputation for providing high-quality digital rips of new films.  Popular theory holds that s/he/they have connections to the film industry, which could explain how they can provide crisp versions of movies that haven't even made it to DVD yet; however the method, aXXo is apparently quite revered in the movie pirating circles. 

I found the article interesting from a social psychology standpoint, but the technological aspects didn't thrill me as I personally don't pirate films much myself.  I don't have anything in particular against the practice - yes, it's ethically questionable, but if the movie studios would bother to provide a means of reasonably-priced digital distribution I have a feeling that (just like the music business did when iTunes came along) most downloaders would happily buy legal copies.  However, when you're a home theater enthusiast, especially one on a crappy Alaskan bandwidth connection (where downloading HD movie files would take days), the lack of quality with pirated films becomes a pretty big issue.  And besides, Netflix has pretty much everything I'm interested in watching, anyway.

That said, I've recently started following the industry (especially the indie/alternative circuit) a bit more closely than I have in the past, and there have been a couple of films that were making the rounds of the festival circuit that I'm quite interested in seeing.  Unfortunately, neither were released in theaters here (no big surprise), and neither seems planned for a DVD release.  So, what's a young filmgoer to do?

Five minutes with Google and I had torrents open for both of them, both provided by - you guessed it - aXXo.  I still don't plan to pirate movies regularly, but in this particular instance I'm glad the option was there - and given some of the experiences I've had in the past with downloading fake or poor quality files, I have to admit it's nice to have a "trusted brand" to go to.  So, aXXo, although I'm not quite ready to declare you a god, I have to say - thanks for being there for me.

Comments

[amanda_lodden.livejournal.com]

I have a longer post about pirating rattling through my brain, part of which is: when information becomes so ubiquitous as to be free, the value will shift from the information itself to the trust in the entity providing the information. We already see it with website content; do you trust a random website or Wikipedia more? Wikipedia has made it a point to provide references and sources and cross-checking, therefore they are more trusted as "correct".

If the movie industry provided ways to download, even at cost, they would automatically have a leg up on the free sites, simply by being trusted to provide a high-quality non-fake version. (Right up until they start playing games to abuse the trust, like by padding a 2 hour movie with another hour of ads and previews that can't be skipped.)

[roseneko.livejournal.com]

I still say we're already seeing this with iTunes. You're paying for it, yes, but it's a reasonable price and in exchange you're getting assurance of a certain level of quality and legality, as well as a reasonable assurance that the product you want will be available, even if it's somewhat obscure (a common problem with BitTorrent is that, since a file's availability depends on how many users are uploading bits of it, less popular files can take weeks or months if there are few or no uploaders available). Movie executives are sitting on a potential gold mine here, but when people are already successful they're often loathe to change the formula they know works - especially when said formula is enshrined in any number of distribution contracts and setups that would require hiring attorneys and spending huge amounts of money to change. So, like any other situation where there's demand for a product but no legal availability, the black market steps in, and no amount of DRM or copy protection is going to change that.

The frustrating thing about being a person who sees the patterns that make up the bigger picture is that, when faced with an individual or organization that insists on only looking at or responding to the tiniest part of any given picture, you just want to beat them over the head and go "Look! Look at what you're missing! Can't you see why you're losing this war?"