Ripplin wrote:
I still have an old episode of Inside Edition that spoke about the rampant bootlegging on TPM in 1999. It's really interesting, especially the part that says they're allowed to sell up to a certain dollar amount. :s They go into shops wiht hidden cameras and try to buy copies. There are others that have them spread out on the sidewalks, too.
Would be more then happy to digitize that for you.
Recently digitized a copy of the Dateline piece "Phantom Taping" from 1999 on the topic. The laws these reports choose to talk about are interesting, in the Dateline piece they claim it's not illegal to purchase bootlegs, which I guess gives them clearance to do this type of reporting, ie buying pirate versions and talking about them. There's a few other oddities in the Dateline report, more on that later, the screen caps say it all. That's another thing on the random to do list, see if I can get those reporters to talk about their remembrances.
The blanket spread out with tapes is a common sidewalk thing. Makes it easy to grab'n'go.
Have recently been going through PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) http://www.pacer.gov/
getting some of the public records for the various related trials. Trying to get a better sense of the vastness of the US Government records. Although it's one case, that case had decisions made by multiple departments and each department has it's own FOIA submittal issues. What's nice about PACER is in any quarter if your searches/results stay under 10 bucks (.08/search/page) it's free. So far have 'USA v. Hoaglin', 'USA v. Lumada, et al', 'USA v. McCausland'. Will get some more when there's time. Started looking into 'USA vs. Spatafore' but records past a certain number of years go into long storage, so will have to write a letter to get those. There were a bunch of other records for this guy, they had him on a payment schedule but after a few years it took him under and there are some bankrupcy documents...
Attempting to identify the version Spatafore had, unfortuantely the waybackmachine didn't exist back then. Need to find some other archive system. Also looking for old .nzbs. Anyone heard of a place collecting those, even though they are unuseable?