WARNING! IRISH SETTERS! TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED, AND SURVIVORS WILL BE EATEN!
Purely a bluff, I assure you; the biggest hazard with a Setter is being licked to death, unless you disturb them on "thier" couch and try to take thier favorite Doggy Toys... burglers who steal Wubbies are NOT dealt with lightly.
In any case, I digress...
The knock was from the Postal Person, delivering a package for the Old Lady. And quite the package it was, too.
Covered with Chinese writing, it originated in Shanghai.
She explained that it was part of her current passion, the TV series NCIS. I find that secretly amusing... I know full well that ever since junior high school she has had a Damp Panty Thing going for David McCallum, who plays the coroner on the series.
She THINKS it's HER Little Secret... Out on EBay someone was selling a set of 30 CDs, the first five seasons. Normally that goes for about $300, but this was only $75 !
She opened her package, and Ohhhed and Ahhed appropriately... and asked rhetorically just WHY the CD set was so cheap.
"That's simple" I said. "It's a bootleg copy".
She looked horrorstruck. "No Way!!! It can't be... it just CAN'T be!!!". She refused to believe my pronouncement.
This is a woman who makes her living managing computer systems at a major university. Every day she deals with problems caused by El Cheapo copies of software that come out of the bootlegging dens of the Far East... she knows full well that the theft of intellectual property is a major industry in China.
It had frankly never occured to her that TV programs are being bootlegged too.
Opening the inner package, she finally BELIEVED. The discs were in Tyvek envelopes and carelessly tossed into the slipcase box. On closer examination, the labels on the discs ALL said "Episode 1 -12".
Dealing with video as a professional, I can see things in the discs that she can't... they look fine to her, but I can see the faint haze that is caused by a deficient signal to noise ratio.
Every time you dub something, the noise floor goes UP about 3 decibels on the copy. Since the noise level starts out at maybe 60 DB down on the original, you can go a few dubbing generations before things get objectionable... but you CAN see the degradation.
This was clearly a legitimate copy that had been dubbed several generations in the analog domain. I wouldn't give it a pass at work... too degraded for air use.
I'm rather indifferent to bootlegging this kind of stuff. Back in college, one of my most treasured possesions was my collection of bootlegged Bob Dylan LPs.
Once you got known as a "Regular" at the record shop, the guy behind the counter would trust you enough to drag out plain, white LP covers that were stashed under the counter.
By buying bootlegs, you could get copies of cuts that weren't available any other way... "outtakes", stuff that was left over and dropped from legitimate album sessions. Somewhere, some unscrupulous recording engineer had dubbed the master tapes from recording sessions, and passed the outtakes along to his friends. Essentually, somebody decided to press 'em into LPs, and sell 'em.
If you wandered an early 1970s college dorm and heard WHO KILLED DAVEY MOORE or JOHN BIRCH SOCIETY TALKIN' BLUES coming thru a door, you KNEW you were listening to a bootleg.
Personally, that doesn't bother me... the Dylan bootlegs, tho probably coming from organized crime sources, were the ONLY sources for a lot of Dylan's more obscure performances. But this is different, and disquieting.
The stuff coming from the Far East is almost always commonly available... perhaps grossly overpriced (Windows comes to mind immediately), but legitimately available nonetheless.
In short... IMHO there is NO even vaguely reasonable justification for it. A lot of people deal in this stuff, and do so with a full knowledge of what they're doing.
For me, there's a definite connection between this sort of piracy and the kind we're seeing off the coast of Somalia.
WE perpetuate the piracy of intellectual property by making it profitable. And shipping companies perpetuate piracy on the high seas the same way; they're treating piracy as just another cost of doing business, and they're willing to pay that cost... Right and Wrong be DAMNED.
Well... off of my soap box. Here endith this sermon...
Gavno the Ugly