After receiving an email from WMDTalk, a site I reviewed some time ago, I got to thinking about video and music piracy. Trae now offers links to major movies for your online pleasure. I am duty bound to point out that this is not illegal because the movies are hosted in Denmark. So that is alright then.

Piracy is theft

I think the main reason that people rationalise stealing as "borrowing" or "sampling" is actually their response to the stance of a bunch of numb skulls in the video and movie industry. If you read the Motion Picture Association of America website, it makes for some interesting and sad reading that is so black and white as to be almost laughable, and no wonder people are circumventing their rules.

Who are the pirates under scrutiny?

This isn't aimed at major mobs who get hold of the master tapes before they leave Hollywood. I am talking piracy involving normal people. The MPAA website and people on the piracy trail offer plenty enough fertile pickings for a pisstaker who, by nature, mocks the behavior of people who say one thing and do another, or make a stance that is so full of holes you could drive a truck through it. (This is why I make fun of my imperfect self too, just to be fair.)

To the pirates I say

I am totally against stealing. Crazy as it sounds, I feel I have to say this, because many people of a certain generation think that stealing, when couched in other terms, and applied to online activities, isn't particularly wrong. I suggest that most people have never created anything worth stealing, so they don't get it!

So, my main gripe, irrational maybe, is that 99% of "pirates" have not an ounce of movie-making creativity in their own soul yet they dare take the work of someone who has spent years and millions making something from nothing, and take ownership of the DVD as though it were their own.

Call it a quirk of old age, whatever, but I try to see things from both sides. For instance, I know for sure that if I played truant, then made a copy of a student's school notes and said I was borrowing them to see how they worked out for me before I copied them and used them as my own, the ripped off student would be anything from indignant to pissed off. Is watching a pirated DVD any different?

Of course the student would say "Yes! When I watch (or copy) a DVD, I have no intention of selling it, or making a movie using the excerpts or doing anything except watch it. It is for personal use."

And then of course, the creative person in me would get totally cruel and say that me taking his notes and him taking a DVD copy is exactly the same, because neither would I do anything with his notes with commercial intent, but I still want to have his notes as my own to read and entertain me. (Not to do anything with them, just to have them, taking them for the hell of having them on my shelf is plain vindictive, and that isn't nice either!)

And anyway, maybe I wouldn't do anything with his notes, but the truant mate of mine who I gave them to might re hash them, and sell them to classmates... (I know a university professor who sold his notes to students, so it isn't too far-fetched a proposition!)

When is copying OK, according to Ed's own black and white stance?

If you already own a full copy and wanted to make a back-up, then at last, we are entering the constructive side of copying. And if you were doing research to see if you wanted to add to a paid-for collection, then at last we can look to the movie industry to stand up and move the debate forward.

MPAA are causing many issues related to piracy

I am not an unfair pisstaker and am not down on people for the sake of it. I need to point out, however, that the MPAA are a bunch of dinosaurs who have backed progress and piracy into a corner. For a start, they say that studentss with little world experience act against the law, (which is true) whilst making out that the entertainment industry is a pure entity operating on a level playing field (which they aren't.) They have ripped off so many individuals in the course of their history it is embarrassing that they stand for anything ethical. Every penny invested in movies has come from a legitimate source, every contract has been fair to both parties? Right! They have tried to prosecute politicians for downloading stuff?

Grow the number of collectors via "preview piracy"

And the really stupid thing about their piracy is theft stance is that the online world offers the film industry endless opportunities for massive additional incomes, if only they could think outside their ivory tower and embrace change instead of fight it.

For instance, one of the students' justifications for taking a copy is to preview something before buying. That is a bollocks argument for most, but a small percentage actually do that, you know. There are folks with collections worth thousands, and the availability of free previews on Limewire gives them a chance to view more, and get suckered into owning more. Admittedly that small percentage of modern day collectors was also small pre-piracy, probably smaller than today in fact, but the MPAA are thick not to recognise the chance to grow that collector base by miles using creative use of previews.

Unfortunately, the movie people delight in quoting the truth - People wouldn't buy more just because of free previews of pirated movies. Correct. But they only see the "preview" model against a backdrop of DVDs at their current prohibitive price level. What the MPAA fail to embrace is that if they made full movie previews easily available and dropped the price of a DVD, and maybe played around with resolution quality options, then shock horror, the barriers to entry would drop and millions more people would probably start collecting. Oooh, 3 things at once!

That is some food for thought. There is also the flat-rate download all the digital you can for $50 a year option, but that is too big a step, I fear....

A final twist

Here is another piece of sadness. When I said students, that implies young people, but I also include the following demographic - people old enough to be parents who were interviewed in the Indicare project

• PC-freaks (high computer proficiency, high level of illegal copying; 10,3 % of the sample; average age 25);
• hobby-users (low computer proficiency, high level of illegal copying, 33,6 % of the sample; average age 29);
• pragmatists (low computer proficiency, low level of illegal copying, 49,5 % of the sample; average age 34);
• PC-professionals (high computer proficiency, very low level of illegal copying, 6,5 % of the sample; average age 38).