News Groups - The Wild West of Theft

By The Producer

Pirch or Merc? I don’t know exactly what they are called but they are computer applications that scan newsgroups for movie files and allow users to post to those newsgroups. It is amazing what is going on in the world of News Groups today. It is a free for all steal-fest featuring some of the hottest audio, video and software titles around.

It all starts with the Robots or bots for short. Individuals start these short scripts which automatically post new movie, audio, and software selections to newsgroups. In the posts you can see where to find the movie, the file size, and the name of the movie. These are all full-length motion feature presentations up for grabs and many of them are the newest flicks that are only available in the theaters right now.

After downloading the selection onto a computer that user then burns the file onto a CD in the VCD format (a high-quality MPEG1). Then this user plays the CD on a MPEG / DVD / MP3 player. Wow, there I was watching Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back in my buddies living room. This movie is available only in theaters. Holy cow, if this is not copyright infringement that I don’t know what is.

Now there are a few prerequisites to join this elite crew of clever scammers. First of all you have to be a broadband user. There is no way a 56K user is going to download one and a half gig of data which is about what one full length motion picture takes. Second, you have to be some kind of sophisticated user to find the particular newsgroups that offer quality content and understand what the bot scripts are telling you, they are a bit cryptic. Third, you have to own a DVD player capable of MPEG playback.

DVD players of this sort run about 200 bucks more or less. A lot of prereqs to join the club but, once you are initiated you will be greeted with a world of unbelievable quality freebie new release mainstream and porno video, music and software. So much to choose from you will wonder what the heck is going on. Where are the police? Does anyone know about this?

When my buddy introduced me to this digital underground I was determined to figure out the who, what and why behind it. I am particularly interested because as you know, SoBeGirl Produces video content. I assume it is only a matter of time until my productions are stolen in the same manner as the ones I am seeing in these newsgroups today. The perpetrators are from all walks of life. There are suits and zit faced geeks fueling this black trade and no one has the power to stop them.

The Inside job could come from the guy who works at the local cinema or a marketing rep at Universal Studios. It may even be the 18 year old who sneaks his MiniDV recorder into the theater. Nobody told me where these stolen videos came from. I did some investigation and noticed the-tell tale signs to piece this story together and make some sense of it.

The act of stealing the video is not such a big deal. If that kid plays that MiniDV movie over and over for his own entertainment then who does it really harm? But when that video is compressed, so that it can be distributed on the Internet, then the trouble starts. Now what about those tell-tale signs? Yes, on one copy of Legally Blond (which is also only in the theater at this time) I noticed that there was a blurry horizontal line at the bottom of the screen. I remember way back when SoBeGirl used a Hi-8 recorder that these lines would appear when I converted the tape into digital streams. This is because those recorders do not use a full screen of DV resolution. The 480 max horizontal resolution falls short of the 500 plus for DV, thus the blurry horizontal line at the bottom.

So here I thought that this whole black market was just a bunch of goofy jokers walking into theaters with camcorders, going home to compress the video and uploading to newgroups for all to share. The quality of the movie was marginal but, getting to watch theater only flicks right now in the comfort of my home was worth it.

As we were watching Legally Blond my buddy was burning the next feature presentation for the evening. Great, a big bowl of popcorn and only the uncomfortable movie theater chairs were missing. Next in line was "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back". I wanted to see this movie in the cinema but never got the time so I was glad to be seeing it here and now. By this time I was getting used to the quality of Legally Blond and not thinking about the fact that color saturation was badly askew. 650 mb later we were watching feature number two. And low and behold this one was VHS quality. Some clever kid did not record this with a concealed camera. This was a digital copy of the real thing. It was what the movie houses get on reels converted to a digital format for mine and thousands of others pleasure.

It was so authentic that the marker prompts which let the projection booth guy know to change the reels were right there in the video stream. You know the countdown from 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 2, with that black circle dissected into 4 parts. It looks sort of like a radar screen with the line going around and around while the numbers regress. This was no amateur videographer here, this was an inside job. The words Universal Studios were present on the marker prompt section. In the theater we never see these cause the guy running the camera sees it first and then changes the reel. He or she will change reels three or four time during an average movie.

So, if you want to steal movies and software there is no better place than Internet News Groups. It is the Wild Wild West of the Internet available only to those Computer Cowboys with the hardware and knowledge to take advantage of it. It is composed of a group of users who contribute to the system because the system contributes to them. No one gets paid and there are no pats on the back. Just a big free for all share-fest featuring some of the latest video and entertainment available.