BOXED OUT - ZXCV SHUTS DOWN

Surely, Winston Churchill, if he was alive, would offer a sincere elegy to "The Box" aka ZXCV.

As in: "They knew all about blood, sweat and tears. OTHER peoples' blood, sweat and tears."

Yes, their website now has a stiff upper lip bye-bye on it...with a link to Google's beloved YOUTUBE where, sans royalties, Vera Lynn sings "We'll Meet Again," to a collage of WW 2 images, including Churchill.

I'll bypass what you'd expect...an angry tirade against piracy. After all, one might argue that the Box mostly offered out of print stuff...but had some wavery policy of "allowing" certain new broadcasts to be shared. Box alone wasn't doing too much harm...it's just that Box plus Kickass and a few others...and you most definitely didn't need to pay high prices for premium cable or Netflix, or even think to visit BBC's own websites for free streams.

That the Box made a profit for its owners...(they charged people if they couldn't maintain a ratio) is just "the usual." Does anyone believe, as they did in the days of The Blogfather, that ANYONE uploads shit out of generosity? We know the truth. They do it because they get MONEY from whatever Zippyshare company the files are hosted by. They get "donations" and if they can get away with it, they simply charge money so people can access secret rooms or who knows, "sister" sites for drugs and prostitution.

I'll just note that Box was, like most of these Utopian websites, run by semi-competent little Hitlers who most definitely had their own strict rules. Instead of showing how things "should be run," they ran their business as badly as the BBC or Tesco or "The Office." They went ahead and dominated their members, censored posts, and had the typical Fascistic rules about how much you could download without paying. The very things that they complained about in setting up their Utopia...were the things they did.

Uncaring? Incompetent? They ran a set of contests in December. "Show us your Christmas tree..." "Write a Christmas poem..." "Write verse about how much you LOVE US..." and a few more. All with strict rules on the size of the photos and how members had to mention the site by name. The prizes were nothing...a few extra free GB to play with. So what happened? No prizes were ever awarded. The mod who was running all of this...just disappeared after posting, "Give me a week to judge the entries."

A competent person would've checked every day or two, weeded out the dross, and been able to announce the winners the day after the deadline ended. Nope. Didn't happen. Nothing happened.

Questions of "when are the prizes going to be announced" were ignored. That's what Fascists do. So much for Utopia. This happens quite often in forums. Another example. At another forum, a contest was announced with much hoopla. "Come on, everybody, let's all get involved!" What was it...post nude pix of your girfriend, create a song, upload a useful "crack" password..." Whatever it was, by the time the deadline came around, people were excited to know who won.

You guessed it. Nobody. After much grumbling, a mod sourly wrote, "Look, people, we all have a life, and Mod X is having a tough time at the moment and has no time for this anymore. Ever hear of the REAL WORLD?"

Yes, sure, the REAL WORLD run by bureaucracies, Fascists, Communists and idiots. Why didn't the mod say, "I'll take over the judging myself" or assign somebody? That would've made too much sense. And yet this clown was so convinced he was Putin doing everything right and nobody should question him. Or her.

Box/ZXCV was just as frustrating as BBC or HBO. And yet they set themselves up as some kind of "WE know how to do it right" website, with that little undercurrent of Robin Hood to make them seem oh so radical and revolutionary. It's a revolutionary concept, isn't it, to cut the profit for the company selling the "Two Ronnies" on DVD or via paid stream or iTunes...and offer it free...in return for "donations" or paying a ratio fee.

Now, let's not say that The Box, or it's long dead competition UK Nova were all bad. That would be hypocritical. They both served some kind of function for expats and for fans of British TV, and some parts of the forums were friendly. But...

In the end, Box/ZXCV shut down because they were cowards. The climate for "sharing" has actually gotten a bit too hot, and they didn't want to keep hiding, changing their name, etc. These "let's give away somebody else's stuff" people are very bold...if they're confident they can't be caught or punished. Obviously, the Box's Paypal account could easily be traced and the perps were not hiding in Croatia or Holland or some dreary place where nobody's paying attention to BBC or ITV complaints. They faked shutting down once...changing themselves from Box to ZXCV. They weren't going to do it again. When they offered the Monty Python "clean" version, there was the usual "don't share this..." admonition, to help preserve their under-the-radar identity. There was nothing about "free leech" or that they were going to shut down the site in a few weeks.

This is typical, isn't it? The forum owner blows up the forum in a huff, the blogger puts up a Zunset...the torrent site that took your money pulls a Kim Dotcom and takes the money and runs. Megaupload, two months before it disappeared, offered a sale..."six months for the price of three!" Oh yeah, the wonderful Kim Dotcom...HE wasn't a Putin or a Kim Jung-Un. He was such a nice guy...he wanted to add to his millions, add a few more cars to the fleet in front of his mansion...by deliberately stealing money he knew he wasn't going to have to repay. Paypal backed him up: "Sorry, you don't get a refund, Megauload is a service not a product."

The bottom line is at the end, 90% of what was available was shitty and not worth the time it took to download them. Box/ZXCV was mostly offering snooker, billiards, bad quiz shows and even worse soap operas. Everybody already had the good older stuff, and if the Mods decided to "allow" the theft of every Two Ronnies show or The Prisoner or Avengers...all of it easily available on DVD...that was no big deal. Download it and then what? Come back for "Mock the Week?"

It's entirely possible, considering the "We'll Meet Again" threat, that the ZXCV bunch will contact everyone with a "Psst...we're over HERE now..." But it's also possible that if cornered, they'll give up the names, Paypal accounts and e-mails of everyone who used the site or paid money to it...if that's a condition for avoiding jail. In the end, Utopia is not free downloads, and it's not a "friendly" forum that turns out to be full of petty cliques and people fighting or being incompetent. Utopia...just doesn't exist. There's a downside to everything. And even if you're rich enough to not need The Box and similar sites...it doesn't mean that entertainment isn't mostly disgusting. For every momentary pleasure, there's a much longer and more enduring period of misery.