Seems the folks at Movie88 aren’t actually paying any royalties for the redistribution of the movies. This article from MP3Newswire.net has an excellent description of the circumstances. The short version is this — laws in Taiwan require that a movie be registered as copyrighted within one month of being opened in theaters. Hardly any of the movies are registered and thus are effectively in the Taiwanese public domain. So Movie88, hosted in Taiwan, is technically compliant with local copyright laws.

It’ll be interesting to see what the reach of the MPAA is with regard to this. This situation feels similar to what the pharma industry has been fussing about this for years — companies in African nations that manufacturedrugs without respecting the patents.

I finally got through to Movie88 to see the free movie that they are offering. Since I don’t have a blazingly high speed connection, I opted to view “All Dogs Go To Heaven 2” at 100k speeds. To give this test a fair look, I connected through my home entertainment computer, which outputs 800×600 resolution video to my 27 inch television. (If anyone is interested in hearing about this setup, send me a note and I’ll make a post with the system details.)

To be honest, 100k video streams look pretty bad, but when viewed full screen on my television, I could see the possibilities. For those houses with higher bandwidth connections, 300k would probably look pretty decent. Sound quality wasn’t even that bad.

My recommendation — everyone needs to look at this. The price point is almost exactly right — at a buck, I could see myself buying a film that I would never pay $7 to see through my cable company. I love the on-demand aspects of this. When next I travel, I’ll probably use this from my hotel room. At a dollar, it’s a bargain to catch a flick when I feel like it.

It’s going to be virtually useless for anyone to go there for a few days, so be patient. When the demand slows down a bit, go to Movie88, where you can watch a movie, delivered on demand over the Internet, for $1. No kidding. If you want the story behind this, read this News.com article.

Now we all know that the MPAA is going to try to nail these guys to the wall, but there’s a deeper trend here that important understand. I mentioned in a previous post that the value of intellectual property was going to change as a result of the delivery vehicle changing from atoms to bits and this is yet another example. The fascinating result of this web site is that everyone is going to thrilled to have the opportunity to see these films, even at reduced quality through Real Player, on demand for only a buck. MPAA (and RIAA) take notice — this is a trend not worth fighting. It’s time to change your business models much the way that the news publishers did five years ago.

So I decided that doing this weblog by hand is too painful to continue. I took a look at Blogger and a couple of others but decided on Greymatter. It’s a pretty slick software package that’s written entirely in PERL. I’m running the site with Apache on Linux, so the installation was pretty simple. It has an easy to use interface that includes a commenting and voting capability. I haven’t enabled these features yet, but may in the future. Right now this weblog is read-only for the public, but I may choose to enable this in the future. The templating capability has allowed me eliminate the use of server-side includes for the sidebar and footer sections of the main page.

Any thoughts on weblogging software? Send me comments.