[citation needed]

I think plenty of people would pay to see it first and review it. Why will word of mouth not work? Remember, it's not paying for EVERYTHING, it's just for the purported "premium content". In fact, just like movies or DVDs or games, the creator may well pay some select group to use and review the content.

I mostly watch TV series nowadays, as no movies have really appealed to me. I used to use piratebay exclusively, but then I found most media companies provide "watch-for-free" content on their legit websites, with better quality at the cost of a couple 20-second commercials.

I feel like this is a reasonable compromise, and whenever possible, I actually watch from the site despite the commercials; advertisers get what they want, I get better quality and optional subtitles through streaming video (don't even have to wait 15 minutes to download with torrent), and the media company turns a profit to keep shareholders happy. I actually only found out about the Dollhouse series by sitting through one of those commercials in the middle of watching The Simpsons.

Apparently my TA from last year's Psych course would disagree. I had a paraphrase with inline parenthetical citation and correct correpsonding full reference at the end of the paper in the "References" section, but since I reused two out of the 10 words constituting the phrase in my paraphrase, it was considered plagiarism, since it wasn't an entire word-for-word quotation in quotation marks.

Author was fully credited, and the phrase was used for the fact it presented, not for its literary glamour. And yet the TA missed the point entirely and decided to crucify me for the "plagiarism".

I can one-up even that. I was screwed in a Psych class because, even though I included the parenthetical citation inline with the correct corresponding reference at the end of the paper, my paraphrase wasn't paraphrased "enough".

It was:

"According to Attwood (2000), ...blah blah blah".

It was a short fact used to support my main argument in the rest of the paper. The sentence structure I had was different from Attwood's. But since I used the same words, "imitate" and "model" that Attwood used in my paraphrase of Attwood's finding, it was considered "plagiarism" by some shortsighted plagiarism "guidebook". I had the parenthetical clearly prefacing the paraphrase, but apparently didn't mangle the phrase to my TA's satisfaction.

My actual argument didn't even depend necessarily on the extra fact, much less the specific, apparently untouchable holy words uttered by Attwood, it was only a 10-word factoid among many others used to support my argument.

I've partaken in the feud firsthand as an engineering student; when I dared venture into Psychology (a dirty medium between science and bullshit) I treated the final "research paper" as I would a true research paper, citing facts from other papers and developing new conclusions.

As it turned out, the TA didn't read any of the semantic content of the paper, but ended up crucifying me when one of the phrases I cited from a source wasn't paraphrased "enough". It was an inline quote, of the form "According to Attwood (2000)... blah blah blah". My sentence structure was entirely different from Attwood's, but four words were the same: Asperger, syndrome, imitate, and model. The first two were the name of the condition which was the topic of the paper; I suppose I could've replaced the latter two with synonyms, but I felt there was no point anyway; I cited the appropriate author, the full citation was correctly placed at the end of my paper, and I was simply using Attwood's fact to support my entirely separate argument.

Apparently, there's some cutoff line to how much you're supposed to mangle a paraphrase to not be plagiarism. I wasn't using Attwood's words to attempt to take credit for some beautiful literary artwork, I was using it for a cold hard fact. The apparent unhealthy fixation on having paraphrases conform to some stupid style guide defeats the purpose of the plagiarism policy, which is intended to protect IDEAS foremost. Furthermore, requiring roundabout ways of saying things only adds to the bullshit-level already stigmatizing the human sciences.

If a scientist publishes a finding saying "we measured 3.14 to 1% precision", and you cite that paper, you better "paraphrase" that finding as "they measured 3.14 to 1% precision", with no bullshit creative mangling like "they measured around three" or "they measured pi". We cite for semantics, not sentence structure. Taking extra time to mangle paraphrases only belittles the original author's contribution, and inevitably degrades the semantic content of the phrase.

On a side note, I was extra careful in my last physics-related mention in my psychology class; I couldn't afford to be punished for plagiarizing Newton's

"force equals mass times acceleration".

I suppose, this equally concise paraphrase in my own words was more appropriate:

"the quantity which has a quotidian manifestation as a displacing exertion can be shown to be non-relativistically equivalent to the quantity resulting from a product-under the standard definition of multiplication which defines an abelian group over the field of real numbers-of the manifestation of baryonic interactions with the space-time manifold and the abstracted compound quantity which is commonly computed as the second analytic derivative of the spatial components of any state-vector defined by a one-to-one and onto invertible transformation from unique plank-scale discretizations to disjoint numerical sets."

Also, I'm a fugitive because I jaywalked the other day.