Easy come, easy go. Ridley Scott’s newest movie with Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington, American Gangster (imdb 9.1/10.0 – my grade: A), has been all over the free bit-torrent sites throughout the world – and it’s not going to be in theaters for another week! Of course, it might be posted one minute and gone the next – you have to troll the cyberspace and be persistent if you’re interested, but it’s definitely out there – screener DVD quality too, not the hand-held camcorder tripe. Read a couple more paragraphs about the situation here.
And for those of you in the oinky oinky know, there has been a free bit-torrent music sharing site called OiNK’s Pink Palace running for a few years now out of England. Well, OiNK got busted this week – and what’s ridiculous is that he’s being made out to be some kind of sophisticated, business-minded, copyright infringer making loads of bucks, when the guy still lives with his dad – and the police confiscated his x-Box (but not his Wii). The only money he ever made on the site was through “donations” through Paypal, but I’d never once heard of somebody actually putting any money in that cup. And from what I hear, all that money just went to upgrading his computer systems and what not. Good grief, I can just imagine the hordes of police descending upon this hapless, father and son household.
OiNK’s out on bail right now, but it’ll be interesting to see what happens: he’s not actually guilty of infringing on anybody’s copyrighted music, he just provided a sharing forum. I like thinking of him as a modernday pirate. If you are a nervous once-used-pink-palace person, you may find some of your questions answered here at this blogger’s FAQs. Or you can see some of OiNK’s own responses to questions here. Apparently the police who busted him knew very little about how computers and online sharing communities work and questioned him for hours – they also wanted him to help them set up a website of their own?!
