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Re:Need for Speed Underground 2 online in the browser by hobofan on Saturday November 07, 2026 @08:16AM (#50404318)
I think the piracy scene has in many aspects always been romaticized to some degree.

With movies more so than with games, the piracy scene and the organized/commercalized bootleg scene were never far apart. Few people sit in a cinema with a camcorder "for the love of it", while many people will do the same thing for a few hundred bucks.

Re:Need for Speed Underground 2 online in the browser by sigmoid10 on Saturday November 07, 2026 @08:29AM (#50404396)
The movie ripper scene in particular doesn't need any love for the game, because anyone with the balls to do so can walk into a cinema and set up a telesync. Breaking copyright protection on a game is something that required an enormous skillset that was unachievable for most people before AI. In particular stuff like Denuvo is a constant battle of wits with the DRM people.
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Re:Need for Speed Underground 2 online in the browser by ssl-3 on Saturday November 07, 2026 @03:19PM (#50407683)
In that realm, the terms as I understand them:

Cam: Some regular at audience-level aims a camera at the screen, usually with poor results. Easy to detect when the person in the next row gets up to go to the bathroom, if nothing else.

TS: "Telesync". Usually an inside job by a projectionist or similar, often with excellent audio (but sometimes not). Camera is usually very stable with an unoccluded view; these can be hard to detect if a viewer isn't paying particularly close attention.

Screener: Once upon a time, people with influence in things like the Academy Awards were sent physical copies of films to watch and judge a film at home. These copies were called screeners. Not as often a thing these days (with limited-access online streaming being a largely-solved problem), but they could be both very high-quality and very early. Sometimes, they included things like a periodic scroller or crawler that informed unaffiliated viewers that they were not allowed to be watching the thing they were watching. Sometimes, they also had one-off watermarks that were intended to show the source of a leak[1].

In the realm of leaky films, screeners were/are usually the superior format by a wide margin.

[1]: https://waxy.org/2014/01/ellen_degeneres_walter_mitty_screen...

Re:Need for Speed Underground 2 online in the browser by brink on Saturday November 07, 2026 @08:44AM (#50404475)
CyberLeek with the GTA6 fiasco is a great example.

They started with a mission "for the gamers" to preserve consumer rights and force Rockstar to publish physical copies of the game, and it ended with them streaming nudes of the main character to pump their meme-coin.

Re:Need for Speed Underground 2 online in the browser by Grombobulous on Saturday November 07, 2026 @09:24AM (#50404802)
It's rightfully romanticized when companies fail to make their products easily available for purchase and usable far into the future.

Will EA sell me Need for Speed Underground 2? Nope! They won't even acknowledge it exists on their website:

https://www.ea.com/games/need-for-speed

Just look under the "Need for Speed Games" menu.

I think this is what makes movie piracy a lot less romanticized. For the most part, Universal Studios is willing to sell me an old movie for a fair price. It's mostly the software and especially the game industry that is hostile to this idea.

I think copyright law should be modified to have more consideration for the rights holder's commercial abandonment. I would change it to add these parameters:

If a copyrighted work was sold to the general public at any point, and the rights-holder no longer sells that product in a way that a reasonable person would purchase and consume that work or is no longer for sale in a manner consistent with its original form of sale, people are then free to copy and redistribute that work for non-commercial purposes, although they may collect donations for the purposes of covering distribution cost so long as they don't make those donations a prerequisite for the end consumer's access of the copyrighted work.

Re:Need for Speed Underground 2 online in the browser by vel0city on Saturday November 07, 2026 @12:03PM (#50406084)
> For the most part, Universal Studios is willing to sell me an old movie for a fair price

So I can go to the store and buy any of these? No? Huh. Sounds like this is largely untrue for most films ever produced commercially.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Universal_Pictures_fil...

Re:Need for Speed Underground 2 online in the browser by boston_clone on Saturday November 07, 2026 @09:35PM (#50409980)
I’m not a lawyer or anything, but aren’t these all public domain?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_in_the_United_St...

Re:Need for Speed Underground 2 online in the browser by vel0city on Saturday November 07, 2026 @11:32PM (#50410430)
They are under public domain. But they still could theoretically distribute them. Theoretically, pretty much anyone could, but most of this list is just essentially lost to time. They couldn't even if they wanted to for a lot of these.

But sure, let's go to more modern examples. Are all of these easily acquired "new" these days?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Universal_Pictures_fil...

Re:Need for Speed Underground 2 online in the browser by frmersdog on Saturday November 07, 2026 @02:59PM (#50407518)
If you transpose back to a similar time period, post-nascence, of the film industry, they were basically trashing irreplaceable film reels for kicks.