I recently discovered that this fine actor’s older, obscure movies and TV productions are on YouTube. Yea!
You can buy some of his older movies on Amazon.co.uk and play them on any dvd player set to region 1, is it? I’ve done that too.
So, apart from admitting I am one of these very crazy ladies obsessed with the man who played Mr. Darcy, ( he’s just one in a long list, starting with Dr. Kildare in grade school, and Ilya on the Man from UNCLE (I’ve watched reruns of that show lately. They are adorable, those two) What am I blogging about?
Fear, I think.
You see a friend of mine, who has the same Internet service provider as I do, just received a letter warning her about illegal download made on her IP. A weird Kafkaesque letter,
Madam, Sir,
We received a complaint affirming that activities associated with your IP address may infringe intellectual property rights of a third party.
We would like to remind you that the reproduction of protected material constitutes an infringement to the exclusive right of its holder. This behaviour could expose you to legal action from this third party and to a judgment to pay damages. Generally, you must obtain the permission or rights in order to reproduce any protected material.
Please note that (Company Name) will not take any action against you, but if legal actions were to be brought against you by the plaintiff, we would have no other alternative except than hold you responsible for any damages you may have caused. We thus ask you to cease any activity that may be considered an infringement of a third party’s intellectual property rights.
Here is the infringing material according to the complaint: (They list the details.)
(It was a bittorrent download of one TV show, the kind the kids all think is untraceable and legal.)
The last paragraph of the letter is the most Kafkaesque. It says they cannot tell you the name of the complainant as they have not told the complainant your name and won’t unless they get a court order.
Ironic, as this company makes a great deal of money on such downloads. (In Canada, we do not have unlimited downloading.)
Scary, considering that a single mom somewhere in the States just got hit with a million dollar fine, or something. Here’s the news item:
(We parents consider this a cautionary tale, or more aptly put, OUR WORST NIGHTMARE but the kids who are much better at mathematics, see it is a one in a million event.) My friend phoned her service provider, and they told her they send out 30 such letters a day.
Hmm. My husband and I are not Internet downloaders (but you’d be surprised who is and it isn’t just college kids.) I like to pay my way. I went to see Mamma Mia in the theatres about X times, (too embarrassed to give exact number.) I bought the movie off my TV when it came out. Then I bought the DVD and then the BlueRay DVD. I burned though many versions of Pride and Prejudice and other favorite movies in my day. (The trouble with DVDs is that they become unusable after a while, AND they often have annoying ads at the beginning.)
My husband, who works in TV, can’t stand looking at anything but the very best quality, (he only watches HD) so he detests stolen copies. He won’t even watch the DVD’s friends have brought us back from Asia, which may or may not be illegal. Hard to tell.
Now, just yesterday, I saw on the Guardian (where I went for Wikileaks info) that it was snowing in England. (My aunt had phoned the day before from London and told me it was very cold.) So I went to BBC webcams to see the sights across England and found that most webcams were down.
Sad, I thought. A year ago they were mostly working. Now, this may be because people got fed up maintaining the cameras for free; or it could be because some law was passed making it expensive or potentially legally hazardous to have a webcam (in the Land of CC TV, hard to imagine) but I didn’t get to see Surrey coated in snow. Too bad. Or Carlisle Town Center, where I used to visit regularly, as that is where my Dad lived as a youth.
As an education writer, I’ve been writing about the potential of the Internet for years. We got on the Internet in 1997, the very minute it became available in Canada, because my husband thought it might be useful for me as a writer. (It wasn’t really, that was a pipe dream.) Our kids weren’t at all interested. Their friends didn’t have it.
You see, parents in those days were wary of Internet. But then Dr. David Johnston, former President of McGill and present Governor General of Canada, came out with a report that said the Internet ( and its potential as a democratizing force…a tool that would level the playing field for all Canadians) was a MUST-HAVE, critical to your child’s success in school, at work and in life. (In other words, if we didn’t get wired our children would be LEFT BEHIND (our worst nightmare 2). So, we parents got onto the Information Superhighway in droves (most Canadian families were wired by the year 2005) and we sighed collectively in relief to think we’d done our duty with respect to our kids.
Then our kids (collectively speaking) got hooked and became addicted to downloading music and tv shows and now we’re being sent not-so-veiled threats as our dear government is about to push through a serious copyright bill (Bill C-32) that will change the way honest, law abiding, hard-working citizens can use the Internet in Canada.)
The Information Superhighway is not turning into a place that will make us all equal, it is turning into a place with toll booths up the ying yang, also speed-traps and (soon, no doubt) special fast lanes for the rich and the politically influential, like Corporations. (I’m certain Free Wi-FI zones will be eventually banned.)
( I got a 110 dollar speeding ticket yesterday for going 64 in a 40 mile an hour zone. Caught at the bottom of a steep hill, where everyone gets caught. So, sure, I was guilty, but I was not in any way doing anything dangerous. It was a speed trap, pure and simple. To make money. I was on my way to Hawkesbury to buy cheaper Ontario wine, which, strictly speaking, is not kosher. )
The Wikileaks business may be the nail in the coffin, I think, an excuse to tighten up the Net a la Chinois. (Today, it is claimed that Sarkozy invited Harper to Remembrance Day Celebrations to help him politically and not because of the slaughter of Canadian soldiers at Normandy. )
So it goes, as Vonnegut says.
But if I get a threatening letter, say from Procter and Gamble who might not like the fact I deconstruct Ivory Soap (99 percent pure) and associate it obliquely with the eugenics movement, I imagine I’ll take this blog down in a moment. I can’t afford the risk. Pity. This Internet as a democratizing force, may be but a blip on the historical landscape.
And, now that they’ve got everyone hooked, kids, adults, even seniors, by promising a us all a place where we can pay our bills easily, and check out IMDB for instant gratification about movie trivia, but also where we can ALL have a political voice and get a leg up in society, should that be our thing, we (ordinary normals) may be left with, ahh, just the other thing… bread and circuses and no privacy and CC style surveillance of our leisure time activities in our own homes. And we won’t have to download Turner Classic Movies to experience plain, old fashioned Germany in the 30′s-Hollywood in the 50′s style fear.
Nice.
Here’s an irony. I gave some of my essays many years ago to be posted on a small, personal website, which eventually was sold to a giant media corporation and they now use my essays and I cannot get them to stop. Even though I asked. So a GIANT MEDIA CORPORATION is using my work without my permission.
