Medvedev's call for bootlegging

We're in the same boat as the Russians to some degree. It took a long time for Woody Allen's last two movies to become available in the United States, and Roman Polanski's An Officer and a Spy still isn't available here. Even if you think Woody Allen was guilty of something, all his other films are freely available. Roman Polanski pled guilty but you can see everything else he's ever made.

The USSR had never part of the International Copyright Convention and after the break-up of the Soviet Union, people were freely translating American stuff. My brother was over there in the early '90's and has an unauthorized Russian translation of Bob Dylan's Tarantula. 

I mentioned before that I briefly talked to a Russian kid online who wanted to learn English well enough that he could make unauthorized translations of American movies. Which was fine with me. I knew of Russians who were doing their own translations of American comic books----I don't mean Marvel or DC. They were translating things like Scrooge McDuck. One of them was a Brony, an adult male admirer of My Little Pony.

And someone suggested that China could retaliate against U.S. aggression by bootlegging Hollywood movies and making them freely available worldwide on their own version of Netflix.

There's a tendency in Eastern Europe to dub movies with only one voice. One person translates all the dialogue. I assume they have more conventional dubbing available. People prefer it to subtitles in any case, and it makes it easier to do your own translations. 

In Mogadishu, some guys downloaded Blackhawk Down and charged people a few cents each to watch it on TV in a makeshift theater.

Dmitry Medvedev has allegedly called on Russians download movies that are unavailable there due to sanctions. I'm all for it. It may not even be a copyright violation. There was a company in the U.S. that distributed copies of movies that were otherwise unavailable here. I'm not sure I bought it, but they claimed there was a loophole in copyright law that allowed them to do it.

I remember long ago. Some Hollywood guy talked about the horrors of movie piracy. Why, before long, American movies would be no better soap operas! 

I tried to imagine a world where movies looked like soap operas. It wasn't so bad.

Several years ago my sister thought we should all see The Interview, the anti-North Korean pro-assassination "comedy", as a patriotic act. 

At least Medvedev was calling for people to download things they actually wanted to see. He wasn't suggesting they spend money then grit their teeth and force themselves to sit through crap they'd never go to otherwise.