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.
