THE DEVIN'S ADVOCATE: STOP PIRATING, DICKHEADS - Page 10

Actually, the whole thing was a surprise. They announced the album only a few days before release.

Trent Reznor did the same thing as well, albeit a bit differently by offering those who wanted to pay to buy varying levels of "special" packages with bonus/niche content. And it worked like a charm.*

Of course, this isn't 1:1 to films because of things like fanbases, etc. being different in the two areas. But it's enough of an example to consider in terms of future marketing/selling/release strategies.

*this is more where I think films could take note. Offering those who want to actually pay more really special stuff. Of course, these just get leaked eventually anyway. But it's still worth considering and toying with. Because there are still LOTS of people who like to pay for superior product in a legitimate way.

(Also, it's important to note that those albums don't cost NEAR what a major, or even a lot of minor, film releases do, and don't involve the sheer numbers of creative people that need to/got paid for their work).

Weirdly, with the advent of 3-D as a deterrent to piracy, I'd argue that movies because of this are getting worse - we're going to get giant spectacle movies and less quiet, introspective ones. There's no point in making a 3-D CRAZY HEART. Those will go straight to home video.

Like Steve wrote (and others have been writing), the trick is in figuring out how new models will work. You aren't going to get people to suddenly revert to the old model with moralizing, and the laws that the industry would like to have passed (and have already passed - DMCA, etc.) potentially affect perfectly legal uses of digital content, which should be unacceptable to anyone who has even a modicum of appreciation for creative freedom, etc.

Lessig proposes that the industry is in flux and will probably settle into a model in which you connect to instantly access content rather than downloading content (check pages 296-304 - it's about music piracy, but it's still applicable). And people will go for it even if it means paying, because it's going to be vastly more convenient as we become increasingly connected to the web*.

He wrote this in 2004, and you can now see his predictions coming true to an extent in services like Lala (RIP), Hulu, etc. The industry will figure out a way to make this work to its benefit. It always does.

* Incidentally, this isn't to say that this model is perfect, either. There are all kinds of problems with licensing content rather than owning it outright, etc.

So without piracy, you don't think Cameron would have made the hugely popular Avatar and inspired a bunch of other shitty blockbusters that would try to ride on its 3D coattails.

Okay.

Come on, studio heads have been talking about 3D as a piracy deterrent for the past few years now. Cameron may have inspired studios to dive in headfirst to 3D because of the box office but it's not an out-of-the-blue argument.

The interesting parts of the article for me were the clear definition of economic terms and analysis of the situation as it actually is, not as we hope it would be/should be. The author admits she doesn't have solutions; the remainder of the piece is essentially spit-balling possibilities. That's interesting too, but I don't think it's the meat of it.

However, you've essentially touched on the big subject: how will artists make a living? It's easier to see paths to prosperity for musicians and authors than it is for filmmakers. I don't like that the author essentially dismisses big budget films - there's a lot of worthy art in some of those big movies - and says we'll just have to get used to a world of much smaller films. That's...catastrophic, really.

I don't have any answers either. But what could morph into essentially a Patriot Act for intellectual property certainly isn't the answer. Did you know that some of the proposed legislation and treaty terms around copyright would allow termination of internet access for an entire household based on the mere *accusation* of infringement? Net access is now almost essential for engagement with the culture, and for some people, for their jobs. It's a ridiculous, dangerous proposal.

There has to be a sane, middle ground between such draconian measures and the ways of unrepentant pirates.

No, it's not a new argument at all. But time has told us that we hardly need the threat of film piracy to inspire shitty blockbuster movies that dominate the marketplace and squeeze out smaller films. Could you make the argument that piracy might inspire a greater focus on 3D movies, in particular, at the expense of smaller films? Maybe, but I think that's putting an awful lot on a recent trend that hasn't demonstrated its staying power.

Other than IRON MAN 2, the top three films of the year so far have been 3D releases. It's here to stay.

I agree, to a point. I think there'd be a lot to be gained from a leaner system* with an emphasis on creative, smaller films, but not at the expense of all big budget films, of course.

I watched Good Copy Bad Copy (recommended for anyone interested in, well, the contents of this thread) earlier this year, and there's a segment on the Nigerian film industry. While it's inspiring from a DIY standpoint, I have to admit that Western viewers, myself included, would probably have a very hard time coming around on films with budgets that low.

* Especially given the horror stories that some of the filmmakers have told in this thread about getting their work out there.

Someone needs to start cloning Shane Caruth's NOW.

Not everyone agrees. At least, last I checked. Maybe Devin's changed his opinion since?

I'm glad someone raised this point. There's a very good reason why the music videos I link to on YouTube or wherever are those uploaded by the artist(s)/label(s) in question. I must be the only person I know who does this and I continually find it amazing how no-one else seems to take this into consideration.

Porn's been absolutely pounded by piracy (show re-airs next Wed night). It's a big, throbbing case study in how an industry can absolutely feel the hard and fast impact of piracy. Sales are flaccid, nearly 50% less than last year.

Yep, you can't fluff those numbers.

Are we sure that the industry didn't just blow its wad in Q1 of this year

I feel defeated. Comparing music piracy to movie piracy is a waste of time no matter what; the difference in economics between the two forms is huge. Movies, even small ones, tend to cost more to make, and there's no comparable version of movies to artists touring.

I've sat with filmmakers whose excellent low budget movies didn't make any money and watched the look in their eyes as they've described reading hundreds of forum posts and Twitter messages from people who loved their film... and illegally downloaded it. All of this bullshit about illegal downloading being free advertising has done nothing for their bottom line, for their future prospects or for their general mental health. This film isn't going to show up in a town and play to a sold out crowd of pirates. It's just going to sit, unbought, as a failure on their resume.

There seems to be a weird consensus among people who support piracy, or who think it's the way of the future, and it's that the folks who make this content don't deserve to do well off of it. Maybe it's a hold over from the music industry, where being successful and making money do not go hand in hand, but leave the bitterness there. It's unfair that someone should make a movie that millions of people see and still have to work a second job. I believe that the people who work hard to make movies deserve to do very well from their labor, which is exhausting, daunting, time-consuming and a huge risk in the best of situations.

Keep ignoring what this means for society and focus instead on post-grad school theorizing and disingenuous calls for radical change. There's a generation that doesn't know how to earn what they want, that doesn't know the solid value of ideas, the value of stories, the value of entertainment. A couple of hundred of years ago it was almost impossible for a creative person to make a living being creative. Now we're headed back to that, and I'm having a hard time seeing how that's a good thing. In my world the idea of a poor kid with a gift for storytelling having a chance to perfect that skill and share it with the world is certainly better than a society where only dilettantes with expendable income get to be storytellers.

But keep fighting the fight to support piracy. Keep fighting the fight to advance the idea that creativity has no real economic function. Enjoy your YouTube future, where there's a million entertainment options, and they're either bombastic huge pieces of shit or painfully amateur zero budget productions. DaveB mentioned Nigeria - I've seen Nigerian movies, and that is the future in a world where piracy is rampant and acceptable. Enjoy!

Way to derail our technical semantics discussion with gut emotional truth.

It's a valid point. But music is where we first saw piracy arise and it's through music that we can make some vague predictions about where things are going. No analogy is ever perfect.

The appeal to emotion is such a cheat in this scenario on this board. It would never fly in a conversation about anything else here but movies.

That may be a consensus elsewhere, but I haven't seen it voiced here at all. Even those of us who are critical of the simplistic "piracy is theft/theft is bad" reasoning because of its logical failings and the implications it has for the law haven't expressed anything but sympathy for the filmmakers.

But our sympathy isn't going to solve the problem anymore than your indignation is.

"Post-grad school theorizing." Hey, someone told you I graduated! Thanks for the acknowledgment!

Anyway, I'll take theorizing and interrogation over self-indulgent, self-important moralizing any day. Do you actually think you're going to guilt enough people into making the industry revert to how it was, pre-illegal downloading?

No one's d... oh, fucking forget it.

You know who else liked "gut emotional truth"?

Hitler. Yup.

I still remember when an Adobe spokesperson encouraged a room full of 400 students to get an illegal copy of Adobe CS3 if they hadn't already. He said he wouldn't be there that day if it wasn't for the fact that so many people had downloaded it illegally over the years and that only a tenth of the companies out there would be using Adobe if it hadn't been so easily available.

I just shook my head in disbelief, cause many of the students would be starting their own companies or at least be working for them in the near future.

Afterwards some guy who wasn't working for Adobe but presenting some caliber software at the same event, said he hoped not everyone at Adobe shared that attitude.

It's just a shame that only virtuous consumers and artists are the ones who realize everyone's getting shafted. But, as mentioned earlier, that's the product of a pirate's "something to have on in the background/while I'm bored" approach to cinema.

A horrifying prospect. There's a Nigerian movie channel on Sky here. It's amusing, at first (the initial twenty seconds.)

You're right, Dave, I made an emotional plea about movies. On a movie site. Where people supposedly love movies. It's my own version of the Crazy Ivan - you would never expect someone to appeal to your love of movies here on CHUD.

You're better than this.

It was a joke.

You're better than jokes, Dave.

Okay, fine. No grad student nonsense here. That, right up there, is bullshit. My professional experience brings me into close contact with groups of people, aged 18-20, and gives me the privilege of having conversations with them about piracy, copyright, file-sharing, and the like. It's a big, big part of the class I teach. I can tell you, assure you, comfort you with the fact, Devin, that, despite my best attempts to point out flaws in our system of protecting intellectual property and to describe situations in which it might be ethical to openly break the law (read: most of them having to do with music), there is still a sizable segment of any classroom that I have stood in front of who will argue me down and tell me I'm wrong. "Kids these days" arguments piss me off to no end. It's buck-passing of the worst order.

Another thought for all of you - and I will admit near-to-total ignorance as to how films get made (though you fellows have taught me a lot), so let's play kind of nice, please - rampant piracy of American film is a problem, esp. outside of the United States. Many of you have pointed to the fact that this problem has a direct impact on the ability of small filmmakers to get their funding. The system (or, really, total lack thereof) that you've described through which filmmakers secure their various funding sources sounds sounds pure awful. I'm not trying to victim-blame here, but, while you're all down in it, talking about how to save the industry from piracy, might it also be worth having a discussion about how to fix the way funding is secured, to shore it up and defend it against the pitfalls that piracy creates? It's most definitely a discussion for another thread, but, man, I just had to say it.

I'm the only person I know who has ever purchased Photoshop.

The amount of people I know who have it installed on their computers is unreal.

Yeah I know. It's not that 95% of those people hurt Adobe in any financial way, but it's the lose attitude that will carry over to other stuff.

But this just seems like saying that because it's a crappy system anyway, piracy is OK. It's deflecting the issue away from the people doing something illegal onto something that's an entirely different issue, and incorrectly paints the pirates as some sort of noble crusaders who are trying to buck the system when they're just people who want to see stuff for free.

I thought the thought process from Adobe there was that they only are losing a fairly small amount of cash because a large chunk of those people pirating at home simply wouldn't buy it if it wasn't available via piracy, and that small amount of cash would then be offset ten fold when those pirates learned the software and got a job at a legit business that then had to buy them a real copy for their work.

I seem to recall hearing a simliar argument from a software engineer I knew years ago who worked for Microsoft. The understanding from him was that MS intentionally turned a blind eye to users pirating Office at home, because they knew if it wasn't available via piracy they'd just use something like OpenOffice. But when they got to use it at home for free they got comfortable, and that drove the demand for Office at work where companies actually paid for legit copies.

I'm not justifying piracy, mind you, just explaining what I always understood the rationale to be on the part of those companies.

No. No no no.

That's not what I'm saying. It is entirely possible for a) piracy to be immoral and b) the non-system through which films are funded to be a mess. Don't put words in my mouth - where did I call anyone who engages in piracy a "noble crusader"? Where did I even come close to that? And, again, I acknowledged that it's a different conversation for a different thread, but it's something interesting I've managed to learn from this nightmarish mess.

It's fascinating how every attempt to bring detail and reflection to this conversation goes through an English-to-Dickson translator as "I support piracy!"

Yeah, these people aren't the new face of democracy or whatever. If they were, you'd think they'd be advocating for maybe universal health care or more restrictions on corporations instead of "Gimme free shit."

But, OH MY GOD, no one said this! NO ONE.

Christ.

I liked back in the thread when Nordling and Dickson went all crazy about Jews for like two pages.

I'm not saying anyone did! But some of these pirates are using this civil disobedience angle to defend their downloading and I'm calling it out as horseshit.

YOU ARE A NOBLE AND BRAVE SOUL, ALAN "NORDLING" CERNY FOR SAYING WHAT OTHERS HAVE BEEN TOO RELUCTANT TO SAY IN THIS THREAD.

EVERY THREE POSTS OR SO.

I think it's hilarious how personal you're taking this, DaveB.

Dave can't even type because he can't unclench his fists. You guys ruined him.

You said "Some of you said piracy has an impact on filmmakers getting funding." You then go on to say, "The system through which filmmakers get funding sounds awful and should be looked at." Which seems to me like saying, "Piracy wouldn't have such a negative effect on funding if the funding system wasn't so screwed up." But you know, as screwed up as it may be, the funding system is legal. Piracy isn't. Shouldn't the priority be on addressing the illegal activity that's costing filmmakers jobs and money and opportunities rather than tilting at something that, while not perfect, makes it possible for them to make their films in the first place? It's like having an avalanche block a road and wondering why the road went that way instead of digging out the survivors.

I don't know how false it is, that's at least what surveys show. And again, it doesn't matter how wrong it is or how outraged you are about it - that's just the way it is. And that has nothing to do with trying to defend piracy. It's just a simple fact. You're not going to make people stop downloading stuff by calling them dickheads and sulk about it.

Trying to scare of pirates by taking a few of them to court will probably make a good deal of people stop, but many will just keep on like before and find new and easy ways to stay anonymous while doing it.

It's not like we're talking about a bunch of teenagers watching a shitty camcorder version that someone shot during a showing. There are workprints, screeners and other dvd quality versions of films out before they even open in cinemas. People working at cinemas set up "private showings" were they can film the screen in the best way possible. It seems more effective going after the ones providing the material than all the downloaders.

No. No it shouldn't. Attention should be directed to wherever we're likely to have the most effect. If there's a more direct route to making the system better for creative types, then that's where we should be looking. "Illegal" isn't a talisman for action.

I simply don't believe this. Obviously not every single younger person is a dyed in the wool content thief, but attitudes towards this have changed massively.

Digital distribution is to theft as the pill was to sex. It's hard to argue that attitudes towards sex have changed in the last fifty or so years, and changed in a MAJOR way. That's because the pill laid the groundwork for the sexual revolution, and we've gone from Lucy and Ricky sleeping in separate beds to fairly explicit sexuality on broadcast television all within my father's lifetime.

I'm not saying that the sexual revolution was bad, or equated sexual openness to theft but simply saying that moral codes get overwritten FAST, and the internet has done that for theft. Even the kids who argue against piracy in your class hang out with friends who pirate left and right; would they have been as comfortable hanging with a crowd of shoplifters 20 years ago? The attitudes towards consumption have changed - more consumption for less expenditure - and it's only getting worse.

I disagree. I used to think that making it easier for people to get access to movies and games - putting them in a cloud based streaming system, etc - would curb piracy.

Then I saw the story I linked to in this advocate, where a game company that put a games bundle (with an 80$ value) online for pay-as-you-wish (with money going to charity!) found that 1/4 of people wished to pay nothing.

People don't just want it easy, they want it for free.

DaveB points out the discrepancy between the penalties for theft in the real world and piracy, but he doesn't point out the other differences - if I steal something in the real world there are other real world implications: I am shamed in my community. I am a criminal. There's weight to that which goes beyond the monetary fine.

There's no weight to stealing movies on the internet. Nobody looks at you funny for it.

Honestly, this would stop just about all of it in the US at least. Almost to a person, every one I know who's a big fan of torrenting/pirating shit that you could easily just buy at a retailer and/or see in the cinema looks at it from a strictly financial point of view vs. the risk involved. "Why in the hell would I 'waste' my money on all this shit when I can easily get it for free? And I'm not going to get into trouble either."

And again, to a person, they ALL pretty much stopped doing it when they got that first letter from their ISP telling them to knock it off "or else." That's to say nothing of what would happen if there were widespread reports of people getting sued or fined for this sort of thing.

It wouldn't come to a screeching halt, but a significant chunk of these people would stop doing it.

That leaves (what I believe to be) a very small chunk who would continue out of some misguided effort to "stick it to the man."*


*note: the same "man" who's providing them with the content they so clearly love and clamor for. Fucking idiots.

Obviously it would scare people off. And I'm sure it will do that here in Sweden as well, when they eventually manage to sort out all the legal stuff. We've had a law allowing companies to get the names behind suspected IP addresses for a year now, but the ISP's have refused to realease any names, so no one has even been tried for it yet.

As you say, a small chunk would still continue to do it, but if they manage to get away with it, what's to stop other people from learning how to do it as well? Following them is a whole generation of tech-savvy kids who have grown up seeing this as something completely normal. They probably won't have any problems remaining anonymous on the web. I don't even know how to get them to see things differently.

We're already spoiled when it comes to music. I don't remember when I last bought a cd. These days I just listen to free streaming music that's completely legal. And if they manage to stop downloading, what are they going to to about streaming movies and tv? I just don't see how anyone can expect to stop this.

I mean, yeah, that's a marvelously rhetorically tortured way to look at what I said. A way that I addressed already -

When a bridge collapses or a road gets buried in an avalanche, you both dig out the survivors and find good ways to make sure it never happens again. This is not an either/or proposition here.

Then I don't know what to tell you. Seems we've moved into the realm of the personal/anecdotal/emotional here, and that is my personal experience. I won't argue with you - attitudes have definitely changed. But I think that shift is societal, not generational. Let's not pin it on people younger than us.

What do you think the demographic of the average internet pirate really is, though?

Hey, that's a great question, actually. I'm going to try to find out. Give me a bit.

I'd be more curious to see some numbers on the age ranges of people who purchase Blu Rays/theater tickets/DVDs. Just how many people under the age of 21 actually purchase physical/proper film media?