Interesting article on Comment is Free this morning. The Pirates’ Code, by one Ned Beauman, tries to figure out why stuff gets pirated in the first place when there’s no financial reward. For example, recording, editing and encoding TV shows so they can be distributed by BitTorrent within hours of broadcast or risking their jobs by leaking preview copies of albums and movies. He notes the somewhat bizarre news that torrent tracking site The Pirate Bay, which recently formed its own political party in Sweden, is planning to buy the legendary micronation Sealand off the Suffolk coast. But the real question is what motivates the thousands of others who make it so easy for the likes of us to get stuff from the big media companies in the first place?
This has puzzled me too. I figured out a while back that there are online communities (warez groups) who rip and encode stuff to agreed standards but why they made their word available to everyone outside their gangs remained a mystery.
Beauman reckons it’s indicative of a general disillusionment with the mediocrity of the entertainment industry, which might seem a little odd given they’re spending their time distributing stuff they apparently don’t like. If you’re sick of seeing endless shite movies being released why would you risk prosecution by pirating them? “They want to strike back against this regime of mediocrity in the only way they can. The executives from the film studios and the record labels treat them like drooling cattle, and they want to prove that they’re not.” In other words, by releasing Hollywood stuff for free the pirate is helping to bankrupt Hollywood, stripping its power away and forcing it to take notice that its customers don’t respect it anymore, if they ever did.
It’s stretching things a bit, certainly, but there’s a grain of truth in there. I recently bought a couple of DVD box sets for the first time in my life, seasons 1 and 2 of The Wire. I could have downloaded them but, having sampled season 3 illegally and being blown away by it, I decided I wanted to support this sort of TV in the hope that, however small my actions, it might go some way to encouraging less of the shit and more of the quality. Despite having downloaded and watched seasons 3 and 4 I intend to also buy those box sets when they come out, partly for the quality (the leaked episodes of season 4 are a bit ropey) but again because I want to thank them financially. Buying stuff has become something of a political act, culturally speaking. Same goes for my eMusic subscription – I’ll pay for the music I respect on terms that don’t insult me even though I can probably get it for free somewhere else. The only language these people understand is money so I shall talk to them in that language.
Interestingly this attitude reminded me of Decadent Action, a slightly tongue in cheek counter culture movement from the 1990s that reasoned the best way to overthrow capitalism was by having everyone spend beyond their means.
“We use the simple economic principles of supply and demand with their intrinsic link to inflation to establish our theories. The state must control these factors to run the economy efficiently; throw in the wild card of massive irrational overspending on seemingly random luxury goods and the government is unable to take control. This will lead to hyper inflation and large scale social unrest, leading to the collapse of the monetary system and disintegration of the state apparatus.”
I’m pretty darn skeptical about this stuff given that western society seems to live in a permanent state of debt these days, but the high profile given to the Bank of England raising interest rates to control inflation by encouraging saving would seem to indicate rampant spending on nonsense isn’t well liked by the powers that be because they can’t control it.
Piracy – it’s not theft, it’s a political act intended to overthrow the cultural hegemony of a morally bankrupt entertainment industry.
Or not.
(long time lurker first time writer..)
the ’scene’ groups don’t make their stuff available to everyone. just as they get stuff leaked from recording studios, etc, their rips are leaked by people inside the scene onto p2p and bittorrent sites – which the scene don’t like one bit, because it draws attention to them. in their ideal world the stuff they rip would not go outside the scene (which is run on a share-and-share-alike arrangement – you rip this, someone else rips that, both’re happy).
anyway, a lot of content on bittorrent sites isn’t done by groups at all, but are personal rips – any fool can rip a CD to a good standard using freely available tools like EAC and LAME.
I don’t think the problem is with endlessly shite movies, as you put it – if people watch them, they can’t be that bad, and i’m not going to tell people what to watch – but with things like copy protection (a friend of mine bought a cd t’other day which wouldn’t play in her computer – or her CD player!) and DVD region codes (price-fixing at its finest -plus if you live in australia you’ve no choice but to pirate some movies which never get released there). the mediocrity is their inability to recognise that these things are useles and annoying to the customers who they think they can treat as ‘drooling cattle’..
There is a pretty good arictle that Wired did a year or so ago, I’m just trying to find the link
ah here we go, this pretty much sums it all up really, tis all about respect.
Respect and access to more stuff, it seems.
Thans for that, though it’s a bit old and doesn’t really touch on the TV bootlegging. How, for example, can a near perfect rip of Lost make it onto the Torrent sites within a couple of hours of broadcast, every week?
Smigs: Welcome, sir! Thanks for the insight.
You seem to think that paying for entertainment is a form of charity — “if I like the movie/TV show/videogame/song, and I’m feeling flush, maybe I’ll pay for it once in a while, as a sign of support.”
This is an interesting form of self-delusion.
Imagine you have a baker on your corner who happens to be blind. It’s easy to steal bread from him, and you do, every day. You get so used to stealing that it begins to feel routine. You rationalize it by telling yourself that the bread is not as good as it could be, so you shouldn’t have to pay for it. Then, one day, the bread tastes particularly good. You’ve got a few extra bucks in your pocket, so, for the first time, you actually put money in his jar as a special “reward” for the baker. How virtuous you feel! Since stealing has become the norm, not stealing suddenly feels meritorious! Soon you imagine yourself to be a *supporter* of the baker’s best efforts! You’ve been doing him a favor by stealing from him all these years!
No, you haven’t. You were a thief, and now you are a hypocrite, too.
I’m not saying that. I’m trying to understand why people, including myself, behave in the way they do. This is one possible explanation but it’s by no means the only one.
Something is going on here. You can lable everyone who indulges in a little bit of electronic piracy a thief if you want but it’s not going to get you anywhere in figuring it out.
For the record, I’ve kept that Peekvid thread open because it amuses me to do so. If it starts spilling out of the playpen and into the rest of the site I’ll shut it down and start deleting comments. This isn’t a threat, just housekeeping.
“For the record”, the topic you chose is “Political Piracy”. The above comment pertains directly to the topic.
If you want to delete comments instead of debating them openly, that is your right. It’s your blog, after all.
*****
“I’m trying to understand why I behave in the way I do” is a fallback defense that suggests you are incapable of discerning right from wrong, or lack control over your own actions.
I doubt that this is the case. Having read your blog, you seem to be a very intelligent adult who knows exactly what he is doing. You are probably capable of understanding that your actions have consequences in the real world for real men and women with real children to support. There are over 1 million people in the entertainment business worldwide. Most of them are not rich. Most are working-class technicians: grips, electricians, working actors. Piracy has already impacted their livelihoods, most notably in places where it is rampant, such as Hong Kong. This trend is accelerating all over the world. Ironically, it’s the global movie business — the Brazilian, Chinese, European filmmakers — that are the most vulnerable. They’re the ones that are feeling the pinch first.
I can tell you why you behave the way you do. You steal because you can. You steal because it’s easy. You steal because you’re not brave enough to shoplift a DVD in the store.
Then you rationalize your actions after the fact by telling yourself that it’s only movie executives and stars you’re hurting. You come up with elaborate “Political” arguments for what you;re doing.
This is even sadder than theft. It’s self-deception. If you want to steal, go ahead and steal. But don’t lie to yourself about it.
“For the record”, the topic you chose is “Political Piracy”. The above comment pertains directly to the topic.
If you want to delete comments instead of debating them openly, that is your right. It’s your blog, after all.
*****
“I’m trying to understand why I behave in the way I do” is a fallback defense that suggests you are incapable of discerning right from wrong, or lack control over your own actions.
I doubt that this is the case. Having read your blog, you seem to be a very intelligent adult who knows exactly what he is doing. You are probably capable of understanding that your actions have consequences in the real world for real men and women with real children to support. There are over 1 million people in the entertainment business worldwide. Most of them are not rich. Most are working-class technicians: grips, electricians, working actors. Piracy has already impacted their livelihoods, most notably in places where it is rampant, such as Hong Kong. This trend is accelerating all over the world. Ironically, it’s the global movie business — the Brazilian, Chinese, European filmmakers — that are the most vulnerable. They’re the ones that are feeling the pinch first.
I can tell you why you behave the way you do. You steal because you can. You steal because it’s easy. You steal because you’re not brave enough to shoplift a DVD in the store.
Then you rationalize your actions after the fact by telling yourself that it’s only movie executives and stars you’re hurting. You come up with elaborate “Political” arguments for what you;re doing.
This is even sadder than theft. It’s self-deception. If you want to steal, go ahead and steal. But don’t lie to yourself about it.