Category: Piracy

Big Tech Still Full of BS on Piracy

Following the loss of Robin Williams, my kids were in the mood to re-watch Disney’s Aladdin.  We thought we had a VHS copy of the film, but I bet mine is not the only household with a few VHS jackets containing the wrong tapes inside.  (See kids, this is why we put things back…) Anyway, not so much with the tape, I never did get around to buying a DVD; and so I checked Netflix and iTunes, neither of which had the film in its libraries.  I’ll order a DVD or something the next time I think of it, but I share this otherwise unremarkable anecdote because it seems to me that many very serious people would have us believe that what happened to my kids as a consequence of this postponed desire is quite extraordinary.  They lived!  They even shrugged off the deferred desire to watch that particular movie and resumed their otherwise normal lives.

What I’m saying might seem obvious to the average reader, but it turns out highly-paid, fully-grown professionals would equate the mundane experience I just recounted with deprivations like hunger, thirst, or disease in order to justify media piracy as though it is the only rational response to whatever barriers stand between the consumer and 90 or so minutes of entertainment.  The self-righteousness with which this premise is consistently proclaimed and repeated — and taken seriously by lawmakers — is nothing short of an embarrassment in a world where an estimated billion people don’t have access to safe water.

Recently, TorrentFreak reports that Google, Facebook, and Microsoft rejected Australia’s anti-piracy proposal, and as usual, the CCIA is playing another variation on the familiar theme that piracy is a consumer reaction to producers’ failures to deliver unfettered access at a “fair price.”  To quote:

“…CCIA director Jakob Kucharczyk says that any new scheme should employ a “holistic end-to-end approach” and be coupled with efforts by content providers to give customers the content they need at a fair price.”

First of all, as a former corporate communications guy, let me say for the record that when someone employs a redundancy like  “holistic end-to-end approach,” he’s blowing smoke straight up your ass.  These are words used by people who either have no solution to a problem or do not seek a solution to a problem because they don’t acknowledge that there is a problem.  That’s what’s happening here.  The CCIA, speaking on behalf of Silicon Valley, is saying piracy is a) not a problem, and b) if it is a problem, it’s the producers’ fault because consumers aren’t getting what they want.

The funny thing is I agree prices aren’t fair.  They should actually be considerably higher in most cases.  $1.29 for a song in 2014 is equivalent to $2.35 in 1990 just before us Gen Xers — yes, we were actually the first adopters of all this stuff — got online.  Has the cost of living for the several people who made that song possible gone down? Of course not. Granted, prices and wages have failed to keep up with the cost of living across many sectors, which is why we’re seeing a shrinking middle class, but it isn’t going to help if the next generation of consumers buys into this ridiculous narrative that they’re getting a bad deal on discretionary purchases that are widely available and already quite cheap. Spotify for music is just one way the consumer is certainly not getting hozed; unfortunately, though, songwriters and artists are; so there’s a problem that needs a “holistic” solution and fair pricing that’s legitimately fair to the next generation of musical artists.  But of course, that’s not what Mr. Kucharczyk meant.

It’s understood that this is how big, corporate interests play hardball.  The Internet and consumer electronics industries have a financial stake in continuing to reduce the value of professionally produced media until the musicians and filmmakers and other creators around the world are left with no choice other than to make deals with the only devils left standing.  Now, I personally think these guys are straight up pigs, but the only way they’re going to get away with owning the universe is if the consuming public allows them to do so by believing this story.  But I actually don’t believe people are quite that cynical or naive.  Sure the short-term lure of instant gratification without cost is tempting, and it becomes easy to rationalize; but bit by bit, people begin to understand that it is patently absurd to love iPods and HD TVS without any media to play on them.

Helen Wong Shares Views on Piracy

Dear Helen Wong and especially the Editors of The Daily Californian:

On today’s opinion page, I see that you have decided to share your thoughts (we’ll call them thoughts) on the subject of piracy, predicated on your desire to see the film Captain America: The Winter Soldier.  After trying unsuccessfully to view this film through a legal and relatively cheap channel, you found yourself forced to pirate the film via a torrent site, a technology you say you’ve come to rather late. Indeed.  This experience prompted you write some of your observations on the subject of piracy, and the editors of your newspaper thought these worthy of publication.  But, Helen, not only are you late to the game of using pirate sites, you’re even later to the game of expounding on your bullshit rationalizations for doing so.  I mean, Girl, your statements from beginning to end are so six years ago.  I quote:

“Theft refers to the removal of the original material, while piracy means making a copy. If music were to be treated as physical property, then laws that absolutely prohibit illegal downloading would have to be passed. That’s not the case.”

This is how your whole article reads.  It’s filled with careless generalizations like these three little sentences that suggest you’ve found a tattered copy of the pirate manifesto somewhere but haven’t bothered to do any research or even more than a few minutes thinking on the issues implied.  “Laws that prohibit illegal downloading would have to be passed?”  Does it occur to you that if there were no such laws, the downloading would not be illegal? That’s just careless writing.  But tell me you’re not late to using Google because you certainly might have expended just bit of effort checking to see if, for instance, Amanda Palmer’s “success story” has any holes in it, or discovered that Radiohead’s Thom Yorke has actually been very vocal in recent years about some challenges in the digital age. Most importantly, a bit of research might have shown you that the subject of piracy as a promotional vehicle is, at best, controversial but that most producers of works don’t see it that way.  In fact, in your offhand and typical comment about “Marvel and Disney having made enough money,”  as a justification for your actions, you didn’t even bother to check that Disney is not a producer of the film but is a distributor.*  This information is freely available on a website called IMDB.

Now, I know I’m being unkind and that everything implied in the paragraph above would require some effort.  You would have to ask yourself journalistic questions like, Do I have my facts straight?  Is what I’m writing current or outdated?  And in so doing you would have to spend up to several hours coming up to speed on the subject of piracy and perhaps then offer some original observations on the matter.  Had you done this, Helen, the most important lesson you would have learned is that journalistic writing, like filmmaking and other creative crafts, require work to do well, and that work has value.  Had the makers of Captain America skimped on process as you did in this article, it would not be a film you’d be interested in seeing, which brings us to the matter of its presently limited distribution.

Captain America:  The Winter Soldier cost $170 million to produce, and if you think that’s too much, perhaps they should cut some corners like skip the process of compositing.  You don’t know what compositing is? Let’s just say that it’s one of several hundred steps performed by skilled professionals in order to make this film something you were eager to see in the first place.  All those steps cost lots and lots of money — 170 million dollars lots — and you are in absolutely no position to know whether or not the investors have made the kind of return required thus far for them to invest in the next Marvel project.  It may seem greedy for the film’s owners to limit the distribution to sales for the time being, but there’s a window of opportunity when a film like this recoups its investment from a big pie chart of revenue streams (e.g. DVD sales), and then the film becomes available through cheaper channels.  You’ll find this is a pattern consistent with the distribution of many products.

Here’s a thought, Helen.  While waiting for this or any other film to become available as a low-price rental, I might suggest checking out any of several thousand movie titles you have yet to see in your young life that are available right now through various affordable and free channels.  Alternatively, you might also Google the word “library,” and discover that you very likely have one of these mythical facilities in your community and that they either have or can get you a DVD of Captain America: The Winter Soldier that they will let you borrow for free.  But I know you wanted to stream it to your computer in the very moment you felt the whim to see it.  I hear that.  My kids do the same thing sometimes.  They want what they want when they want it.  But sometimes they have to wait for what they want, and in the meantime, they often have other experiences of equal or greater value.  In the meantime, they learn to be citizens.  Just like my twelve-year-old has to do her homework, she’ll one day learn that somebody has to do a thing called compositing in order for her to enjoy a high-tech action movie and that journalists have to do some research before they write articles worth reading.

*Disney does own Marvel Studios. I should clarify the point that it is all too easy to just point to big names and forget that there are multiple entities with real-life employees involved in these types of films.

Lionsgate Aggressively Pursues Leak of Expendables III

Well, what have we learned about pre-release piracy and its likely impact on this past weekend’s lackluster performance of Expendables III at the box office?  About two weeks ago, someone who had access to a DVD-quality file of the franchise’s latest installment leaked that file for the purpose of upload to illegal file-sharing sites; and prior to film’s release on August 15, it had been viewed an estimated 2.2 million times.  Some industry watchers will say that piracy clearly played a role in this case, damaging critical opening-weekend sales; others will point to the possibility of “franchise fatigue” and say that, with or without piracy, fans of the original Expendables might not have turned out for Number Three in profitable volume anyway.

For sure, we can expect folks to solidly assert one view or another depending on their opinions about piracy (and perhaps of the franchise itself), but the truth is that we probably can’t know with any certainty how many ticket sales did not materialize due to the leak.  What we can know, however, is that is that it shouldn’t bloody matter with regard to the larger conversation about piracy.  I say conversation generously because it isn’t a conversation any more than arguing with my seven year-old about bedtime is a conversation.  As I said in my last post about this story, pre-release piracy is a dick move; and if nothing else, it would be grand if stories like this leak would help place this narrative that piracy is “about something” into the lunatic fringe where it belongs.

I’d like to point out that the two million plus “fans” who chose to watch this film before its release will not be the targets of Lionsgate’s aggressive legal pursuit of the players responsible for the leak.  As such, it would be great if we could mothball this tedious tale writ by the whiny defenders of piracy (including Peter-I-hate-prison-because-they-don’t-serve-vegan-Sunde) that continues to cast individual viewers as victims in this context.  To the contrary, Lionsgate is very much out for blood it seems, but they’re gunning for the people who actually stole from them and profited by doing so.  In fact, the production company last week was granted permission by District Court Judge Margaret Meadows to force the likes of Google and GoDaddy to provide the identities of site operators who had been hosting copies of the film, and a round of subpoenas was sent out.  This was in addition to Lionsgate already filing suit against six file-sharing sites for hosting copies of the leaked film.

There’s more, and there will be more to come from this story.  This kind of piracy is a particularly big deal.  It begins with an act akin to embezzlement, someone in the production chain taking a product with a $90-million-dollar price tag and selling it to a black market before it even reaches the legitimate market. That’s not a social agenda in action. It’s not about diffusion of culture or the democratization of access or free speech. It isn’t a response to “Hollywood’s failure to adopt new distribution methods.” Whoever stole the original file wasn’t thinking about any of that crap, he was just doing it for money.  And he stole from his friends and colleagues.  That’s all this is about.

So, no, the viewers of  the pirated Expendables III will almost certainly not find themselves in the crosshairs of Lionsgate’s lawyers, but there’s no avoiding the fact that without their participation, piracy-for-profit simply wouldn’t exist.  If you don’t want to see a movie, don’t see it.  Let films like any other product live or die in a legitimate market on their own merits.  If you do want to see a film so badly that you just have to watch it online before its release and without paying for it, then at least have the decency to shut up about it. Because it’s just a dick move. Nothing more.