High Number Of Oscar Screeners Hit Pirate Sites

“Why is papa so sad?” “Because he’s been downloaded 500,000 times without getting paid for it.”

While you and I have had to pay to see all this year’s possible Oscar contenders (some of which haven’t even been released outside of NYC and L.A. yet), members of the various nominating guilds have been sitting at home and watching these films for free on screeners provided by the studios. And even though the movie industry tries to keep these screeners from getting out, a record number of them are readily available through pirate torrent sites.

Among those looking to score pirated copies of the year’s biggest titles while they’re still in theaters, these screeners are a prize find, as they are significantly better than some version shot on a Handycam in a movie theater.

They often come with watermarks or other identifiers to discourage sharing and to help the studios’ anti-piracy police in tracking down the source of the leaked screeners.

Now TorrentFreak reports that not only are there a large number of torrents available for many of this year’s Oscar contenders, and some of them appear to be free of watermarks.

For example, one can find a screener version of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies that has had the studio watermarks scrubbed before it was made available. In its first 24 hours online, at least 500,000 users downloaded the movie, which has made more than $225 million in the U.S. and more than $725 million worldwide since opening in mid-December.

TorrentFreak also looked at pirated screeners available for several other Oscar favorites, including Birdman, The Imitation Game, Selma, American Sniper, Unbroken, Night Crawler, Big Hero 6, Into the Woods, and Big Eyes — all of which can be found now on various torrent sites.

So how are these movies getting out there when leakers face the threat of being exiled by the studios to a small MGM-owned island off the coast of Djibouti?

It’s not known which roommate of which member of which guild stole his friend’s DVDs and shared them with the world, but TorrentFreak reports that nearly all of the above screeners (with the exception of The Hobbit and Big Hero 6) originated from the same source.

Lending credence to the notion that this is some amateur who decided to share this content with the world, TorrentFreak says that the encoding of the files being shared via BitTorrent is “choppy,” implying that it’s an inexperienced pirate who ripped these files.

I once briefly had a roommate who was in one of these guilds. He was a horrible person who I hope to never see again, but he was very free and easy with sharing his screeners of Oscar contenders. If he’s at all representative of the level of care given to these coveted movies, it’s surprising that there aren’t more screeners available.

by Chris Morran via Consumerist

NYC’s Ban On Plastic Foam Food Containers Goes Into Effect This Summer

(jyotidas)

Starting this summer, New Yorkers will no longer be able to point to a food container and annoyingly note that “Styrofoam is a trademarked term for insulation, it’s actually extruded polystyrene.” The initiative to ban what we’re going to go ahead and call styrofoam containers at restaurants and other food businesses was started by former mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2013, and is being carried out by Mayor Bill de Blasio. His office says it’ll finally go into effect this summer.

The July 1 start date will make New York City the largest city in the country to ban the containers, which have invoked the ire of environmentalists for a long time now.

“These products cause real environmental harm and have no place in New York City,” said de Blasio in a statement announcing the ban, according to the Associated Press. “We have better options, better alternatives, and if more cities across the country follow our lead and institute similar bans, those alternatives will soon become more plentiful and will cost less.”

This means no halal carts, taco trucks or restaurants of any kind can use plastic foam cups or takeout containers, and plastic packing peanuts will disappear from store shelves in the city as well.

“While much of the waste we produce can be recycled or reused, polystyrene foam is not one of those materials,” said Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia. “Removing polystyrene from our waste stream is not only good for a greener, more sustainable New York, but also for the communities who are home to landfills receiving the city’s trash.”

NYC will begin banning restaurant plastic foam in July [Associated Press]

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

GameStop: Industry Needs Market For Used Downloads If It Wants To Keep Charging $60

(Marike79)

While GameStop brazenly believes it can weather competition in the used game business from bigger retail competition like Walmart, the company faces a more deadly foe in a future marketplace where most games are downloaded. Currently, there are no industry-supported methods for reselling digital games, but GameStop says it will have to happen — not just for its bottom line, but so that game publishers can continue charging top dollar.

Your typical new video game title initially sells for around $60; more for editions with additional content and other premiums included. Many gamers justify this expense — many times the price of an average theater ticket, music album, e-book, or downloaded movie — with the knowledge that they can eventually bring back that game and recover some of the cost.

This is why there are more than 6,000 GameStop stores, where millions of regular customers flip used games into new ones over and over.

But if you buy a game through Xbox Live or the PlayStation Store, you currently have no way to resell that game to someone else, even if you could somehow prove that you didn’t retain a copy of the files.

Thus, that $60 you spend on a new title will be never be offset by money made from reselling it. So you either have to get used to always paying full price for titles or wait until a digital marketplace drops the price, which can be months after release.

“All of a sudden you have a situation where publishers can’t charge $60, which we think will be bad for the ecosystem,” GameStop President Tony Bartel tells BusinessWeek. “You don’t see many digital items being sold at a $60 price point. Movies are $5. Songs are 99¢.”

Execs at GameStop say the company has talked to game publishers and console makers about how to create a marketplace for used digital content that would pass muster, but it doesn’t look like you’ll be able to resell that file of Dragon Age: Inquisition you bought from the PlayStation Store any time in the immediate future; so you might as well start that replay, this time as a knight enchanter.

In 2013, a federal court sided against one company, ReDigi, that was creating a marketplace for people to resell their mp3 music files. The company is currently appealing its case.

Both Apple and Amazon have filed patents for used digital content marketplaces. The Amazon idea involves users having their newly purchased content — whether it’s a movie, game, e-book, or music — in a “personalized data store.”

The customer could later resell these items to others, at which point the files would be removed from the original customer’s data store.

The Apple system is similar but also includes a way in which the original copyright holder for digital content could actually get a percentage of the resale price. That’s virtually unheard of in the world of physical resale, where consumers are generally free to sell anything they own for whatever price they want without having to pass on a buck to the copyright holder.

One analyst recently wrote that the only likely way in which the gaming industry signs off on digital resales is if that marketplace is provided by the same online stores that sell you the digital download to begin with.

“In the unlikely event that a digital buy-sell-trade marketplace is agreed upon, the publishers will likely opt for the PlayStation Store and the Xbox Games Store to cut out the retail margin that GameStop enjoys,” explained the analyst, according to BusinessWeek.

Extra Lives: Can GameStop Avoid Blockbuster’s Fate? [BusinessWeek]

by Chris Morran via Consumerist

The Onion Accidentally Publishes An Actual News Story

Evidence of the oops! (The Onion)

It’s rare, but it happens, folks: The Onion has gone and made the mistake of identifying real news as fodder for satirical fiction. Because with the amount of Comcast customer service calls gone horribly wrong we’ve heard about, we’re pretty sure that plenty of people have experienced “the remote backwoods of the cable company’s automated phone system” only to find he or she has “blindly stumbled deeper into the uncharted hinterlands regarding appointment scheduling and equipment installation options…” Sadly, It’s a terrifying, and yet very real place. [“Caller Enters Remote Backwaters Of 1-800 Automated Messaging System” at The Onion]

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

JCPenney Announces 40 Store Closures, But Holiday Sales Were Up

(The Caldor Rainbow)

JCPenney is looking slightly less doomed than previously anticipated. This week, the department store chain announced its holiday season sales results, which were slightly up over the same period last year. There’s bad news, too, though: about 4% of the company’s stores will close this spring, a total of 40 stores in 19 states, with a total of about 2,250 jobs.

The company announced this week that holiday season sales increased 3.7% in comparable stores over the same period last year.

The good news for the chain is that customers are coming back after the company’s attempted makeover into a strange coupon-less retail vision that confused existing customers and failed to draw new ones. The company gradually learned how to put items on sale again, made over its stores, and even found a qualified person willing to serve as CEO.

You’re probably here to find out if your local JCPenney store is closing, though. Here’s the list, courtesy of Huffington Post.

These J.C. Penney Stores Will Close In 2015 [Huffington Post]

by Laura Northrup via Consumerist

Sprint Adds 1 Million Accounts, But Not Because Of Price-Slashing Or Free Data

(Spidra Webster)

In recent months, Sprint has been trying to lure customers away from AT&T and Verizon by offering to cut their bills in half (or really only about 20%), along with introducing smartphone data plans that give away tons of data that most people will never get around to using. And today, the company announced that it added nearly 1 million net accounts during the most recent quarter, but the fine print shows that these subscribers weren’t the ones targeted by Sprint’s marketing.

The good news for Sprint and its investors is that 410,000 of the net 967,000 new accounts in this quarter were prepaid customers who are much more lucrative for wireless providers because they pay upfront for their devices and are generally less of a drain on a company’s human resources like customer service and billing.

The biggest chunk of Sprint’s new customers came via the wholesale market, where Sprint sells access to its network to wireless service resellers. Unlike the prepaid accounts, wholesale sales result in thinner profit margins.

Though Sprint claims that it recently saw “the highest number of postpaid gross additions in three years,” the net result of those additions was only 30,000 new customers, representing about .05% of the company’s estimated 56 million accounts.

An optimist would point out that any positive growth for Sprint is good, especially since the company lost 336,000 postpaid customers only a quarter earlier.

One question is whether these new customers will stay with Sprint. Another big question is how much Sprint is paying — through increased marketing and promotional programs — to obtain these customers.

by Chris Morran via Consumerist

Health Officials Link Measles Outbreak Back To Disneyland, California Adventure Park

(frankieleon)

Some unlucky visitors to Disneyland and its adjacent California Adventure park have been bringing back more than a pair of mouse ears from vacation, health officials say in California, with a current measles outbreak getting traced back to the theme parks. Yes, people still get measles.

So far there have been nine cases of measles confirmed in people who visited one or the other of the parks in late December, Reuters reports, with state health officials urging anyone who might’ve been exposed to contact a doctor.

All the cases were in people who visited one or both of the two Anaheim parks between Dec. 15 and Dec. 20, said Ron Chapman, director of the California Department of Public Health.

There are three more suspected cases in other people who were also at one of the parks in that time frame.

“If you have symptoms, and believe you may have been exposed, please contact your health care provider,” he said, noting that people with measles can be infectious for nine days after contracting it. “The best way to prevent measles and its spread is to get vaccinated.”

Infected patients range from 8 months to 21 years, and six of those people were unvaccinated for measles (two for being too young). Only one patient had received the appropriate vaccination.

Measles brings a fever, cough, runny nose and red eyes, followed by the infamous red rash that usually starts on the face and spreads downward.

The chief medical officer for Walt Disney Parks and Resorts said the company is working with the California health department to provide information and assistance.

California health officials link measles outbreak to Disneyland [Reuters]

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

Smart Sleep Number Bed For Kids Banishes Monsters With App

Smart appliances and Internet-connected household items are here on the market and on their way into our homes whether we like it or not, but here’s one unexpected smart product: a smart bed for children that serves as its own night light and banishes under-the-bed monsters using a smartphone app.

While our well-rested colleagues down the hall at Consumer Reports rate Sleep Number beds very well, they haven’t been able to test this kids’ version yet, which the company announced at CES to fit in with the “Internet of Things” theme this year. (Notably, they cut up some mattresses and weren’t able to find $2,000 worth of differences between two models. Your mileage, of course, may vary.)

In addition to being adjustable, the kids’ bed offers some features that may be useful to kids and parents. One important one is a night light emanating from under the bed that parents can turn off remotely. One slightly creepy feature is a sleep tracker that parents can use to check how well kids are sleeping…and a sensor that notifies them when the little ones are restless or jumping on the bed.

It’s the app features that gamify sleep that we find interesting, though. In addition to the app that gives under-the-bed monsters a face and lets kids vanquish them, Sleep Number also has a feature that “rewards” kids for sleeping well, with these rewards apparently coming in some digital form.

by Laura Northrup via Consumerist

Watch What Happens When A Woman “Manspreads” On A Crowded Subway

(Mic Video)

No one likes the person sitting on a crowded train or bus with their legs flung as far apart as possible in an exhibition of the behavior commonly known as “manspreading,” as it is most often the male of our species who decides he can take up three dang seats by himself. But how do people react to a woman indulging blatantly in seat domination with nary a care for her fellow commuters?

Not well, as seen in a video by Mic where a guy and a gal both set out to annoy people with their space hog moves. Gawkers gawk and haters hate by way of taking photos of the girl slouching all over the train, while most people don’t throw the dude much shade at all, in comparison.

Thank goodness there are still those out there willing to stand up for themselves so they can sit down, as one woman gives the guy a nice bit of attitude over his rude behavior.

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

Foie Gras Is Back On The Menu In California After Judge Blocks 2012 Ban

(kulinarno)

Californians with a hankering for duck liver will soon be reunited after more than two years, as a judge has put the kibosh on the statewide ban on foie gras, saying it was the federal government’s job to regulate poultry products, not the states’ role.

U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson permanently blocked California’s state attorney general from enforcing the part of the foie gras ban dating back to 2012, reports the Associated Press.

Chefs with a taste for the delicacy are happy, of course, while animal-rights groups, likely not so much. Opponents of foie gras call the practice of fattening geese and ducks for their livers cruel and inhumane, and have urged Attorney General Kamala Harris to fight the decision.

Yesterday’s ruling was handed down with enough time in the day for producers to ship foie gras to restaurants overnight, according to the attorney for one of the chefs and some foie gras farmers from out of state who’d challenged the law. That means Californians could be seeing it on the menu today and through the weekend.

Farmers in New York and a restaurant in Hermosa Beach had argued that California couldn’t enforce its rules beyond state borders in earlier lawsuits, later changing it to say that state law was pre-empted by the federal Poultry Products Inspection Act. That law says states can’t use their own labels, packaging or impose ingredient requirements that are different from federal standards.

California had argued the ban was imposed on products created by a particular process, but the judge rejected that.

“California cannot regulate foie gras products’ ingredients by creatively phrasing its law in terms of the manner in which those ingredients were produced,” Wilson wrote.

Ruling puts foie gras back on California menus [Associated Press]

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist