Kids In The Hall Admit They 'Pirate' Their Own Shows, Because They Can't Get Them Legally

from the copyright-law-in-action dept

In a TorrentFreak article about a Czech TV station hosting unauthorized copies of the TV show Fringe on their server (the show appears on a competing station, and an employee had missed some episodes so he downloaded — and then hosted — them), there’s a mention of a recent interview by Keith Olbermann of the famed Canadian comedy troupe The Kids in the Hall, where Dave Foley admits to having downloading “unauthorized” copies of his own shows via BitTorrent due to the difficulty of getting legal copies. He jokes:

“So I eventually just downloaded the whole series on BitTorrent. So I illegally downloaded. So come after me FBI!”

We hear this sort of thing all the time, and it sort of highlights the ridiculousness of some of what’s going on today. When the easiest most efficient ways for content creators to get access to their own work is illegal downloading, perhaps it’s time to realize that criminalizing this activity is a mistake, and the real problem is trying to force everyone into less efficient mechanisms?

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Comments on “Kids In The Hall Admit They 'Pirate' Their Own Shows, Because They Can't Get Them Legally”

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20 Comments
Anonymous Coward says:

Just wait for the shills to come in saying, “B-but iTunes store!!! They just want free stuff!”

Not all content is available for easy distribution.
Not all content is priced reasonably based on its (infinite) supply; not to mention price already paid for commercials and product placement.
Not all content is available regardless of region.

Anonymous Coward (as David Attenborough) says:

And here, we have yet another example of the famed and enlightened Michael from the Naples-a-Galette-flatbread family in the wild. Here he is sharing what appears to be an appropriate notion of that affects many stagnant companies nowadays- that interwebs remain a more efficacious and compelling method of circulating commodity components.

In such a climate, the question remains- what would an exiguous compotent that people would pay for?

Danny says:

Damn...

You see this is what happens when content owners are more concerned with making money than pleasing fans. There are several shows I would love to have on DVD (“Living Single”, “Roc”, and “South Central” for starters) that were never released because they weren’t profitable.

So good going there. Thanks to their money grubbing greed they would rather their shows be locked away in vaults for all of eternity (or until they degrade beyond salvation) than for them to get something of a second life from DVD sales.

Anonymous Coward says:

Maybe my hearing is starting to go, but I could swear the one who talked about dowloading the stuff said he did so because “they kept forgetting to send me the DVDs”. Sounds to me like he had ready access to free legal copies of his shows, which access was “messed up” only because a worker-bee forgot to send them.

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