The news of the tragic death of Gene Hackman (RIP!) reminded me that even tho I had always wanted to watch it, I had never seen the French Connection. I did a web search to find out who was streaming it, and I noticed in the search results that archive.org had it on their site. Just Watch said on their site that Amazon Prime could stream it for free. My wife has a Prime account, so I made a mental note and decided to go to Archive.org and watch it there since I’m sitting at my computer. It loads up and starts playing, no problems, and then at about 10 minutes in, my browser throws an error, and Voila! just like that the video is gone, suddenly no longer available. I get immediately suspicious and log in to Prime, and no, in fact, I cannot stream it for free, but I can rent it for $3.99. Nobody on this planet can convince me that Amazon’s greed didn’t have something to do with it getting yanked from Archive.org…

Opportunistic assholes.