Piracy .. Food for thought.
Sunday, February 7, 2010, 12:58 AM
Posted by Davo
I know this will stir a bit of controversy and perhaps resentment, but I am just writing this as an interested observer, so don't shoot the messenger!!
I don't condone piracy but I've been tempted to write about this for quite a while, so here goes.
I've never understood how the term for Blackbeard the Pirate sailing the high seas and stealing gold and jewels is in any way related to someone who is supposed to copy copyrighted material. It just doesn't seem the same to me and there also seems to be a lot of hypocrisy, double standards, exaggeration and plain lying.
The MPAA, Hollywood and others claim that they lose billions of dollars because everytime someone downloads a movie off the internet, they lose the revenue that people would pay to go to the movies.
Let's say "Joe Blow" downloads movies, songs and programs from the net without paying anyone for them. I guess that makes him a low life pirate!
Joe downloads 10 movies a week, watches them and then deletes them from his computer. Apparently he has "robbed" the multi-billion dollar movie industry of 10 admission tickets to the movies. What if Joe is just a hard working guy who can't afford to go to the movies?
So according to the movie companies, they've lost $200.00. But we all know that it's not true because in Australia it would have cost Joe about $200.00 to go to the movies and watch them, and since he's just a poor working schmuck, he couldn't afford it anyway. It does make one wonder how the movie industry arrives at the multi-billion dollar losses to piracy that they claim??
Another interesting point:Video piracy is equated to going into a store and stealing a video.
If you steal a video, you are taking a physical object that belongs to someone else, whereas if you copy/download a movie - the original owner has not lost anything - he still has what he originally had.
What about software piracy? Copying a program and using it without paying for it. Well, in most cases the same principle applies. A lot of the "pirated" software is by people who can't afford to buy it. Has the owner lost anything? Well, you might say that he has lost the sale from one of his programs. Possibly. But he still has his original program - has not lost any physical object and if Joe the "pirate" couldn't afford the program the no sale has been lost.
Consider this:Go to your local library, borrow a video, watch it and then return it.
or
Download the same movie, watch it and then delete it.
Where is the difference? In both cases you have watched a movie that you did not pay for. The first way you did it "legally", while the second way you did it as a "pirate". But the end result was the same - you watched a video without paying for it!!
Oh No! You've just robbed Hollywood!!The Internet was originally designed as a means for free communication between Universities in the U.S.(ARPANET) (see Wikipedia) and was "donated" to the world by the U.S. as a means to benefit all of humanity. It's now "devolved" into a place for money grubbing multi billion dollar industries to make even more money from. Hollywood (amongst others) now use what should have been a free benefit to mankind as a means to increase their fortune, and then get high and mighty when the people the net was intended for find a way of passing Hollywood's movies around for free! I guess they can't have it both ways!!
No doubt this is a debate that will never be settled. Although, despite the movie company's extravagant claims concerning the billions of dollars lost to internet piracy, they still seem to be able to pay $40 million for ONE actor in a movie, spent $300 million making a movie and STILL walk away with an extremely healthy profit.
How many times does an actor need to be paid 20 or 40 million dollars per movie?
Hell! If I had $20 million, my wife and I could live quite comfortably for the rest of our lives (and so could our daughters). It begs the question -
Just how much money is enough??I do know that when music file sharing started back in 1998, it was supposed to be the end of the music industry. Well, here we are 12 years later and the music industry is going stronger than ever. Despite the movie company's crying poverty and doom and gloom, they too will survive p2p file sharing and just have to learn to live with it instead of fighting it.
There's a saying, "Once something's been invented, it can't be uninvented". We cannot go back - the internet, piracy, hacking, file sharing etc are now part of our everyday lives and NONE of it will go away.
Food for thought??