LERN 2 INTERNET: IS PIRACY WRONG OR LOL?

I would rather die then watch a downloaded movie or listen to a copied album. That is all.

Actually I don't give a damn because I'm such a damn rad bro, which is just as well otherwise this would be a pretty short post. Let's be real about it - everyone has pirated something or other. People who swear by buying their favourite artists CDs will illegally stream a TV show. People who buy DVD boxsets wont think twice about illegally downloading a whole artists back catalogue. Your parents used to illegally record crap on their VHS players. Even Granny Sadsack and Papa Shrew have lent a book to a friend. We're all pirates. But are we all wrong?

As always, I pride myself on being not very well informed about the specifics or legality of a subject. I just humbly offer you my amazingly insightful insights and some nutritious lols. I also try and shoehorn in jokes about willys, breasts, and some pop culture references.

Here are 5 willys, 2 breasts, and 1 pop culture reference.

In this case though, does anyone even understand what the facts are? What exactly are the cyber police policing? Uploading? Downloading? Streaming? Fair Use Violations? Fuck noes. Does anyone even know someone - directly know someone, not a friend of a friend - who's even gotten themselves into trouble for pirating stuff? No, me neither. These are some seriously serious business questions and together we will explore the arguments for and against. And similarly to when your dad phoned you up drunk at 4am and told you that the day he pretended he was proud of the Most Policies Sold certificate that you were awarded by the call centre was in actuality the saddest day of his life, the truth will come out.

If the cyber police are reading this, I want you to know that I have never, ever downloaded anything in my life and it was all my flatmate.


1) "BUT I PAID FOR X SO ITS OKAY FOR ME TO PIRATE Y"

This is the backbone of many a pirates argument. Last week I watched the major motion picture The Terminator and then I wanted to watch Terminator 2: Judgement Day. Naturally. But I couldn't do that because my copy of the DVD is at my parents house. Disaster. It's also not available to download on Sky Anytime. I've paid for it, so I should be able to download that film from somewhere and watch it, yes? Well, in actual fact, no. The Man sees that as stealing.

I bet The Man sees this as stealing too, even though
 he ain't done nothing! Monsters!

My understanding of the bulk of piracy lawsuits is that it's the making a copy, which will get you into trouble with the FBI or whatnot. The few times that someone has been successfully prosecuted for copywrite violations have been when that someone's uploaded something. So, what do? Yes, you can tell your torrent program to throttle your upload capacity, but then you'll be so far down the list of peers that you'll never get to see if there's any actual quality boobage in Black Swan. (There wasn't. Actual ballache). But if you've already brought a license for a film or whatever, then why can't you watch that sonofabitch whenever you want to? Now I'll never know if Arnold Schwarzenegger says, "I'll be back" in Terminator 2, unless I go to my stupid parents stupid house.

The other flavour of this argument normally tastes like this. This guy who totally wasn't me went to the cinema with some friends to go see the major motion picture Prometheus. Now this guy (we'll call him, Butch Tomahawk. He's really handsome and cool) had to pay £10.50 to get a ticket, £1 for the stoopid 3D glasses, but - don't worry - because he totally saved money on the Odeon Combo Deal, where a popcorn and a coke are only £7.50. Amazing savings are amazing. My maths isn't great but that's nearly £20 just to go to the cinema. Now Butch was really chilled out about this (he's really laid back and cool, ladies) and figured it sort of breaks even on a long enough timeline because he streamed the last 2 seasons of Game of Thrones for free.

This guy's legit.

Other variations include:

• "Well, I brought their first album, so I'm pirating this one."
• "Well, I went to see them live once, so I'm downloading all their stuff."
• "Well, I paid for the content on VHS or some other format, so I'm pirating a digital copy."
• (Butch even reckons that he's justified in pirating stuff because he thinks that council tax is too high. What a maverick!)

The running theme here is this sense of entitlement. I want this. I deserve this. It's wrong, but tbh, fairplay to the unwashed masses on this one. We all work damn hard for our money and it doesn't go very far. So if there's a wealth of free media just a click away, get your grubby little paws all over it. Just don't waste your time on Black Swan, okay? PROTIP: Natalie Portman is far more slutty in that Closer film.


2) "BUT WHAT ABOUT THE EXCITING NEW BANDS?!!!1"

Fuck them. Do we really, really need moar stupid bands? I think after Grace, Jeff Buckly pretty much /thread on music. True story. I don't care about exciting new bands who pretty much all sound the same and all look the same and are all pretty much shit.

An actual Cool New Band or a generic stock photo of
an imaginary Cool New Band? Who knows.

I feel bad for them, truly. Some are fantastic, genuinely talented, and passionate like a poem between lovers. And in another time and another place they would've blown up. But these days exciting new bands are everywhere. I draw retarded-looking cartoon animals on boxes for a living. I'm the only one who does this in the street that I trade out of. Business is good. Now imagine if that street had like 20 other jerkoffs all drawing retarded-looking cartoon animals on boxes. It's a finite market. There're only so many drawing's of retarded-looking cartoon animals on boxes that customers need.

Or look at it this way - if you knew that you'd be spending days and days working on something that your customers could steal right off the internets in less time then it's taken you to read this sentence, then you need to rethink the viability of your trade. The light at the end of the tunnel for musicians came with live shows. But I'm sure that I read somewhere that ticket revenues are down on previous years. There's just too much music. And when the bulk of it sounds like variations on a theme, then it's even harder to be heard. I think that all the bands just need to STFU and be put in cages to fight to the death like a cockfight. Like a Pokemon battle, but with weapons and stuff. I'd pay for a ticket to go and see that gig.

"$20 on the skinny crybaby with the sadface,
shiny hair, and tight jeans!"

Obviously, my friends who're in bands are an exception to this and I have the utmost belief, love, and respect for them. Genuinely.


3) IF YOU PAY NOTHING FOR SOMETHING THEN IT HAS NO VALUE

This is a heavy concept but bear with me. Cast your mind back to that feel when you were a kid and you had to save up to buy a CD or a video. I remember I saved up for this animated Street Fighter 2 film on VHS. I remember it well because my dad had to double-park outside Woolworths and we had a big row about it, but far moar importantly, Chun Li got her breasts out in some shower scene. I mean, they were cartoon breasts - but any port in a storm, amirite? I also saved up to buy a George Michael tape (I didn't have a lot of sex at high school). Anyways, I played both of those to death, man. I played that album Older so much that the tape warped towards the end and started playing the track on the other side.

Fast forward a decade. I know people who have gigabytes of music figuratively gathering digital-dust on external harddrives. Half of it never even gets played. The other half is skimmed through. Because you didn't have to pay for it. And because your only investment in it is the time you spent setting up the links or the torrent or whatever, it has no value to you. What do you care if the content is weak and you didn't get your moneys worth? It didn't cost you anything.

"I'm here to download everything and fuck bitches.
And I'm all out of bandwidth."

4) YOU WOULDN'T STEAL FROM A SHOP (BUT YOU TOTALLY WOULD)

What if this shop has absolutely everything you wanted, no walls, no tills, no security, and they delivered? This shop is called, 'internet' (they've got a really thorough adult section too).

That whole thing at the start of older DVDs about, 'you wouldn't steal a handbag, you wouldn't steal a car, etc' - no, you wouldn't do that, because you'd get lynched for the handbag and arrested for the car.

"How do I download a car?"

But It seems as though downloading stuff is pretty much under the radar - as long as you don't go bonkers with it. I have friends who agonise over proxies, p2p blocklists, and private trackers. But then I have other friends to whom the thought of masking their traffic doesn't even cross their mind. They just do whatever the hell they want like Fred Durst, if Fred Durst was all about downloading Family Guy and not all about being the most positive role model for strong, white males the world over.

I wonder what it's truly like to be the bad man,
to be the sad man, Behind Blue Eyes.

5) THE CONTENT DISTRIBUTORS ARE ALL HITLER Q__Q

In my adult life, I've brought 5 copies of Alien. 1 on VHS, 3 on DVD (I lost some), 1 in a boxset, and 1 special edition version in another boxset. That's about 4 too many. By the holy tears of Princess Diana, why am I paying for the same content 5 times? And that's not even the half of it. If you want to download a copy for your phone - pay up. If you want to watch it overseas, you'll need a DVD coded for that region - pay up. We're currently being force-fed Blue Ray, like a kitten getting a thermometer shoved up its bumbum, and I'm like, 'just leave it alone, it's had enough! There's no more room!'

"Grab the cat, I want to listen to that Nirvana boxset."

In a few years it'll be 3D versions. After that, it'll be something where they just copy it directly into your brain like the Matrix or something. I don't know, I'm not a scientist. I don't know any other industry that can get away with selling the exact same content over and over again, other than the entertainment industry.

How many different boxsets, special editions, rare versions, or singles collections have popular musicians released? It's just the exact same situations repackaged and bundled with a bonus track or B-Side ad infinitum. And it's my limited understanding of it that it's not even the artists themselves who're doing it - it's these shady, suited, serious business guys in the background in boardrooms and stuff who are just milking us dry, until our tuts yield only dust.

There are 100 million CDs here.
But only 50 songs.

This is why the bulk of us pirate stuff - because we're sick of paying over and over again.

And when you do buy original content, it's prohibitively expensive. £20 for a trip to the cinema? £50 for a new game for your Ecksbawks or PS3? £30+ for some superduper music boxset, with all the singles evar, a poster, a pin page, a really edgy book of the bass players poetry, and a limited edition photo (maybe in Sepia and stuff)? I got suckered into that one back in the day when I brought a Die Hard boxset with a limited edition film still. Imagine my antilols when I saw the same set around a friends house and the still was exactly the Goddamn same. It's almost like the entertainment industry was taking advantage of me! I digress, the internet offers a much more tempting price for all this content - this price is £0.


CONCLUSION:

Whichever way you look at it, piracy is wrong. It's stealing. Now I'm sure none of us are losing sleep over Chris Martin and Paltrow running out of gold for their Extreme Gold Bar Jenga tournaments with Jay Z and Beyonce, or Jay Kay running out of champane for his champane powered Lamborghini, or Prince William running out of money to keep Kate Middleton in his life - but it does effect up and coming artists and content creators.

Okay, William doesn't do anything, but
would she be with him if he worked at PC World?

But in someways it's levelled the playing field between new artists and established acts. They just have to be creative. Grassroots marketing and viral campains are so successful that it's gone full circle and even conglomerate businesses are copying this promotional strategy. Who could possibly forget this incredibly underground and authentic promotion for the PSP from a fan with absolutely no ties to Sony whatsoever absolutely whatsoever?

Even though the internet united with one voice for one magical moment in time and said, "I'm not sure if this is legit" upon seeing that video - it still got the word out. So was the ad campaign a success or a failure? I think I may be giving Sony too much credit here - that they purposely released that video to get busted, but maybe. Like an ad within an ad within and ad. An Adception, if you will. But maybe.

These days you can just lock yourself away from the world and become a one man music label with just a laptop, a dream, and a bit of talent. You can record everything (probably on pirated software, amirite?), build your fanbase, promote yourself, organise a tour, and sell your content directly to your fans. If you buy a fancy pants HD camera from Prince William at PC World then you can create and film your own movie. If you're a hawt girl, people might even buy your content if you deliver unto them nutritious noodz. People can write books, then completely bypass all the dicking around with agents and publishers, and just sell that Cat: Legend of the Feline book they've been working on in their basement directly via Amazon.

We're all big boys and girls. If you're pirating stuff then it's stealing. You can debate as eloquently as you like that it's not, but it is theft. This truly is the golden age of getting something for nothing. Be careful. But just enjoy it, people.

Sooner or later The Man will figure out how to end the party.

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