Saturday, December 13, 2003

Not Just a Train Ride, An Adventure

It's not stealing when you download a movie, it's copyright infringement. Here's an interesting article about the recent court decision about the topic in Canada. It says downloading music is legal in Canada, but that uploading it is not. Here, I've been feeling guilty for leaching music off the internet and giving it back. Now I know that I've just been obeying the law.

I haven't given up on going to the theater altogether. In fact, Tracie and I went to see a movie at the Globe Cinema called, "Shattered Glass". A true story about a writer for a prestigious Washington D.C. magazine who basically started making stories up to advance his career. Of course just like the two guys in Medicine Hat, the writer is eventually discovered. It was quite a good movie, but an independent film. Unfortunately, most people will not get the chance to see it, unless Blockbuster purchases a bunch of copies on DVD.

We have decided that we will likely only be going to independent movies from now on. Of course we will be making exceptions for the Elvis movie, "The Return of the King" and the new Harry Potter movies as they are released. The thing is with those movies there is some value in seeing them on the big screen, like James said, he's a sucker for Dolby surround sound. With most movies, the surround sound doesn't make that much difference. In fact with most movies, there isn't even much of a story. This is one of the reasons we will be sticking to independent films. The movie generally has a good plot, and besides that, the admission price is lower.

Anyway, the train ride wasn't really an adventure, but there was a native gentleman sleeping (possibly passed out) on one of the benches on the train. He was unknowingly causing quite a stir among the other passengers. We realized that there wouldn't be much of a point to kicking him off the train, because he would just get onto the next one anyway. Really all he wanted was a warm place to sleep it off for a while.

-Gary Milner, advocates fighting tickets and downloading stuff off the internet.

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