A Message to Movie Pirates

It might be unfair to blame Johnny Depp for the rise in online movie piracy, but he certainly has a hand in making the whole “pirate” image cool.  Just look at the hacker geeks of Pirate Bay who try to twist profiteering and theft into Matrix-like mystique.  Just look at the whole “pirate underground” that try to fool themselves into thinking that by cracking DVDs and stealing the intellectual properties of others, they are somehow “sticking it to the man”… or whatever cool people now say.

Selective reasoning excuses most people from the “harmless” act of downloading a movie here or there.  Indeed it’s hard to find an article online that does not apologize for the vice of being too lazy and/or cheap to hit up the Blockbuster vending machine.  Even at the caveat that it is blatantly illegal they blame the industry for failing to keep up with the technology and offer the same convenience that free, instantaneous downloads offer.  This despite the fact that the home entertainment industry has now surpassed space travel in the rate of technological advancement.

But ask the Bit Torrent Bandit and they’ll tell you that the movie industry is crooked and only a fraction of the money goes to the people who actually made the movie… as though somehow giving nothing is nobler than giving too little.  They’ll argue in pretzeled logic to say that the industry is actually aided by the increased exposure to new directors and actors that illegal downloads offer… as though people who like the new director they just stole from would do any more than illegally download the rest of their movies.

Copyright laws and enforcement tactics struggle to keep up with the advancements in technology.  Vehement opposition to any efforts to further police the Internet stall progress on meaningful legislation.  Even in a tepid political climate the problem is almost unsolvable through legislation because the technology moves quicker than the legislative process.  Meanwhile the movie industries of the world are losing billions annually.

We’ve seen this play out before, of course.  Newspapers are almost fully antiquated and the news industry struggles to find a way to redefine itself.  The recording industry has seen sharp drop offs and sought new avenues of profit in the twenty-first century.  Freelance photographers find themselves in unending wars with unscrupulous bloggers who just go to Google Images and grab whatever they find.

The new market in music has been hailed as a new era of choice, demolishing once and for all the gatekeepers that stood between the fans and the bands and broke the backs of the payola promoters.  Many point to the new venues the Internet has offered for the visual arts and weigh the cost of copyright infringement a small price to pay for it.

But the same advantages don’t translate to movies.  A beautiful photograph takes one dedicated photographer who is either skilled, lucky or some combination of the two.  A good song takes an inspired songwriter, a handful of musicians and, with modern technology to assist, very little in the way of professional help in mixing.  The man-hours involved in the creation of these works of art are invisible in the shadow of the effort that goes into the making of a movie.  To craft a two hour film hundreds of people devote thousands of hours over months if not years.

Perhaps more importantly, the creation of a great film takes the convergence of at least a few brilliant minds.  A single songwriter and a great melody can overcome a bad bassist and crappy mixer, but even an ingenious script can’t shine in the hands of bad actors.  A brilliant director will always be limited by the abilities of their set decorators, make up artists and costume designers.  For a true work of art to emerge, a dozen or more artists must work together and at least as many egos must be juggled.  An incredible amount of work and resource go into the creation of even a mediocre film.

The savvy Internet Pirate has an indifferent response.  “So what?  Let the budgets of those actors and actresses drop.  Dig into the pockets of those bazillionaire producers.  It’s all a crooked institution to begin with.”

The MPAA has tried to illicit sympathy by reminding us in Nancy-Reaganesque PSAs that when you steal a movie you’re not just taking from the celebrities.  You're also stealing from the key grip and the caterer.  Somehow depicting the broken souls who were sucked into low paying jobs by an industry that promised them fame and delivered them manual labor failed to inspire the national “Aw-shucks” moment they were hoping for.

But perhaps there is a better route altogether.  Forget about the investors in the films themselves for a moment and consider what these Bit Torrent Buccaneers are stealing from you: Explosions.

Illegal downloads are on the rise, which means that movie budgets will soon be on the decline.  No reasonable argument can be made to the contrary, though the superheroes of geekdom certainly find unreasonable arguments when confronted with that fact.  Money is being lost.  When you download a movie you aren’t stealing from that film, but rather the one that the production company makes next.

This means fewer explosions, fewer space battles, fewer car chases, shorter fight scenes, less computer animation and less 3D.  Many film buffs are salivating at this, but be forewarned: The artsy Oscar pictures will lose their budgets first.  The movies that only do well with the critics are kept afloat by the big budget blockbuster.  For every Last Station there is a Snakes on a Plane to thank.  It will be harder and harder to afford an exemplary cast and at the same time budget constraints will limit the number of takes a filmmaker can afford.  The need for faster turnaround will harm every aspect of filmmaking from preproduction to post.

When people steal movies online, they are stealing them from us.  I am certainly not alone in my love for cheesy action flicks that are light on plot and heavy on post-mortem one-liners.  I want to see Terminator part 9 and the eighth remake of King Kong and I don’t want to sit around and talk about the good old days when they could afford to crash a yacht into a building for the sake of making a Keanu Reeves movie watchable.  I want to see ever bigger vehicles crashed into ever bigger stationary objects and I want to see ever more beautiful Bond cars get destroyed by ever more diabolical machines.  And explosions… glorious explosions as far as the eyes can see.

And I don’t want to lose all this to a bunch of hacker geeks and lazy consumers who have convinced themselves that copyright infringement doesn’t count if everybody does it at once.  Despite its crooked reputation, Hollywood is the leading employer of artists in this country.  Movies are a convergence of arts like no other and tens of thousands of painters, sculptors, musicians, dancers and specialty performers earn their living because of the film industry.

Arts like dance, classical music and painting largely rely on government subsidy to stay viable in today’s world.  We see the cultural value of such things and choose to insulate them from the fickle tastes of consumers.  Cinema is the lone bastion of breathing, thriving art left in this country and we could already be seeing the waning edge of its golden era.

It is easy to apologize for the movie thieves.  It is easy to forgive a kid in some random dorm room uploading a movie he would otherwise never have bothered to see.  It is easy to lose sympathy for the hard-hearted media moguls that charge you $13 to see some crappy remake of an old crappy television show.  It is easy to overlook the losses as movies continue to set box-office records with movies that offer nothing but headache inducing special effects and plots that could fit on the head of a pin.

But a valid argument can be made that American cinema represents a cultural investments in art unprecedented in world history.  Each year dozens of spectacular works of art can be found sifting through the sea of drivel that makes up the annual Hollywood offerings.  They may be the minority, but movies have the power to shape our cultural values, draw our attention to the inequities of the world, challenge our preconceptions and unite us under our common humanity.

Every time a movie is stolen from the wild, wild web the potential of future film is diminished.  As the budgets shrink and the returns dwindle, you can expect whole genres to disappear and you’ll likely see them go in order of importance.  Documentary films will suffer first with experimental films right on their heels.  Proven sellers like sci-fi, comic properties and low budget romantic comedies will hold out the longest but even they will visibly suffer in a short time.

Until a radical shift is made in the way that Internet piracy is policed, all we can hope to do is plug a few holes in the ship.  We can’t stop it from sinking through grass roots activism, but we can slow it down.  The first and most obvious step is to stop downloading movies without paying for them.  A number of providers are fast at work making it easier and easier to view movies legally and pay only nominal fees or monthly service charges.  By using these legitimate services you are sending a clear message to the film industry to keep investing in ways of making legal digital transmission easier.

But the most important thing we can do is to change the social stigma of Internet piracy.  These hackers are hard at work trying to make themselves look like cool freedom fighters so clearly image matters to them.  By shooting down the self-serving arguments about corruption in Hollywood and the evil specter of the MPAA we are deflating their public persona.  By reminding them that they’re just a bunch of profiteering computer nerds that weren’t athletic enough to go into real crime we can counteract the hacker “mystique” they so desperately cultivate.

And if you’re not swayed by the arguments to keep cinema alive, consider one other vital front in this battle.  The freedom of the Internet is largely dependant upon finding viable solutions for copyright infringement.  If everyone who protested measures like COICA put equal effort into finding ways to clamp down on piracy, perhaps such draconian measures would not be necessary.

Is COICA really that bad?

Nope.  It’s not.  Sorry fear-mongers and Chicken Littles of cyberspace, but the bill currently being touted as a dictatorial takeover of the internet is far from the monster that it’s being made out to be.

I posted a blog on this yesterday, which earned me an unexpected round of angry emails from both far left and far right kooks.  I should say that I’m flattered by all of it, though disappointed that none of them chose to voice their objections on my comments section.  From the tone, I’m guessing they were fearful that posting a contradictory opinion here might earn them a top spot on the Illuminati black list.

I'm just putting this in to scare them.

So sorry to disappoint this spattering of vociferous opponents of COICA (many of whom expressed a curious ignorance of the limits of anatomy related to which extremities can be lodged in which orifices), but I am not with the Men In Black or some secretive disinformation agency.  I’m just some dude who likes to write.  Hell, my new sworn enemies now make up about half of the total readership of this blog so I’m really happy to have you.

Especially “Axlgreez” who said (original spelling and choice of homophones):

“Your obviusly just too dumb too see whats relly going to happen if they pass that bill…”

I must admit, it hurts to have one’s intelligence called into question by a guy who can’t figure out spellcheck, but after a day’s worth of research, I’m confident that he is mistaken.  As you may recall from my previous blog, I did not come out in support of the bill itself.  Rather I objected to the alarmist language that was being used to describe it.

Political discourse

Much of the banter seems to be coming from normally reasonable Aaron Swartz, a kind of level-headed software mogul that started earning cred on the web when he was fourteen.  He is usually one of the first to sound the “Red Coats are Coming” alarms when a law is proposed that in any way affects the autonomy of the internet.

It seems that he, like many, simply disagree in principle with the idea that the internet should be governed at all.  I suppose this is a nice notion and it has more or less worked until now, but it is unrealistic to think that things can continue as they are.  Illegal downloads are already decimating the entertainment industry and aggregate sites have effectively destroyed 75% of the nation’s print media.

Now what will the birds poop on?

But who owns the internet?  What right is it of theirs to take it away?  If the US government wanted an internet, they could have made their own, right?  Except that they did.  The big bad government that now wants to come in and regulate things is the entity that funded the creation of Darpanet (Al Gore’s contribution notwithstanding) and it was the US government that cultivated its accessibility across the country.

 And what, precisely, do they want to do?  They want to reserve the right to quickly shut down sites that exist for the sole purpose of sharing pirated movies.  These bittorrents are bleeding Hollywood (and slowing down connections for everybody who still obtain their movies the legal way) and it is utopian to think that it will stop without legislative action.  Keep in mind that the backers of this bill are the MPAA, the Screen Actor’s Guild and others that are seeing their bottom lines drop out because of this blatantly illegal and ubiquitous practice.

I still don't feel sorry for him.

And how, precisely, do they want to do it?  Well, here is where everyone is getting in an uproar.  The government wants to be able to “blacklist” urls.  After running this by a few friends on IT forums, I’m confident that their methods are fairly weak and that the legislation would undoubtedly fall far short of its intended outcome, but the very thought of the government “blacklisting” sites is rubbing people the wrong way.

Now, I freely admit that there are solid reasons to object to this bill and I don’t begrudge anyone their opinion, but fear-mongering is fear-mongering and when I see that, I call it into question.  Not only are the opponents of this bill not proposing any solutions, but they are also blatantly mischaracterizing the nature of the legislation.

For exhibit A, I present the website demand progress and their “COICA Fact Sheet”.  Now this “organization” consists, apparently, of one guy.  Seriously.  If you click on the “the team” tab at the top of the site, it only gives you one name; the aforementioned Aaron Swartz.  So let’s take a look at the facts.

"It's about time!"

It reads like most exaggerated, panicky newsletters with obvious but unstated agendas.  It presents the points in a series of questions that you, the curious reader, are supposed to be asking yourself.

It begins by linking to the actual law with hopes that you won’t bother reading it.  It then proceeds to mischaracterize the nature of the bill to suggest that it will be applied without due process.  He does pay lip service to the fact that the actual banning of a url could only be done by court order, but then ignores that in the next sentence with a vague statement about a second list that will be subject to none but the Attorney General.

Of course, the law does call for this second list of suspected-but-not-quite-yet-investigated sites, but it does not ban them.  It even spells out the need for transparency as to what urls are on that list and a process that a url owner can go through to have their site removed from the list.  Swartz skirts this fact with two sentences:

Internet service providers (everyone from Comcast to PayPal to Google AdSense) would be required to block any domains on the first list. They would also receive immunity (and presumably the government's gratitude) for blocking domains on the second list.

Notice that we’re only a few sentences in and we’re already getting the word ‘presumably’?  He neglects to mention that there is nothing at all in the bill urging isps to ban urls on the second list.  The list that they’re talking about essentially already exists, though they do say that isps can insulate from the possibility of prosecution by restricting access to known piracy sites.  Google forbid…

But so far nothing rises to the level of alarmism.  It takes a one more whole sentence to get there.  The next question that we, the increasingly anxious reader are supposed to ask is “What kind of domains can go on the list?”

Here, Swartz gets slippery:

The list is for domains "dedicated to infringing activity," which is defined very broadly — any site where counterfeit goods or copyrighted material are "central to the activity of the Internet site" would be blocked.

This is an interesting choice of verbiage.  The first part is true all the way up until the word “which”.  At that point he begins blatantly lying and anyone who bothered to read the first few paragraphs of the law will notice.  The law actually defines a domain “dedicated to infringing activity” as a site that is “primarily designed, has no demonstrable, commercially significant purpose or use other than, or is marketed by its operator, or by a person acting in concert with the operator, to offer…” and then goes on to define copyrighted material in legalese.

legalese

“Central to the activity of” versus “has no demonstrable… purpose or use other than” are radically different interpretations, really.  Now, to be fair, the words he put in quotes did actually appear in the text of the bill, and in that order.  But only in reference to sites that meet the above criterion.  It’s the equivalent of a movie producer shortening the critics comments from “the cinematography was so bad I found myself missing gripping my stomach and near vomiting” to “…gripping…”

This makes a pretty big difference as to how one would look at the law.  Under Swartz’s definition a site like You-Tube could be blacklisted since trading copyrighted material is possible (and thus, some could argue central) to their site.  Under the actual definition used in the law it is limited to bit torrent sites or other such bastions of piracy.

Next, the hypothetical reader goes on to ask “What’s so bad about that?” and Demand Progress has you in the palm of their fist.  He starts with a few falsehoods born of his flagrantly fabricated definitions and then tosses in this little gem:

The guy arguing accusing others of fascism
shouldn't use a fist in his logo.  I'm just saying...

And even without a court order, sites can get blacklisted just by order of the Attorney General -- and the bill encourages ISPs to block those sites as well. ISPs have plenty of reason to obey a government blacklist even when they're not legally required.

Next he tackles the skeptics in the crowd with the question “Isn’t the word censored a little overheated?”  He dispatched with these concerns with a couple of quick lines about how there is no due process in the bill (there is) and a calm, level-headed sentence that compares this bill to the fascist measures in Iran and China.

We'd get less freedom but cooler dragons.

At this point, he figures he’s really got us going because the next interjection from his meta-reader isn’t even phrased as a question.  It’s an exclamation, complete with exclamation point: “But it’s just limited to copyright!”

Now if you have any illusions that I’m being too hard on this guy, you’ve gotta hear the reply he offers.  It’s such conspiracy theory rhetorical crystal-ball gazing that I’m at a loss even to satirize it:

How long do you think that will last? Once the Attorney General has a system set up for censoring the Internet, everyone who has a problem with a website will want to get in on it. How long before it's expanded to block Wikileaks, pornography, gambling, anarchists, supposed terrorists, and anybody else the Attorney General doesn't like that day?

Keep in mind that this guy is setting himself up here.  This is not a captured conversation on some forum somewhere.  This was the best he could do when he was asking himself the freaking questions.  He seems flustered by his own dialogue device.

So if you want to send me an angry email for calling attention to this nonsense, by all means, do exactly that.  If you want to send me an email debating the merits of this law, by all means do that.  Heck, if you want to rant and rave and misspell curse words at me, that’s fine too.  But out in the real world, we should be having an honest discussion here.

The power to ban urls is not one that we should give the government lightly.  We should have an open discussion about it and I’m glad the senate delayed the vote yesterday.  But while we’re talking about it, can we stick to reality?  Can we talk about genuine possibilities without insinuating that the Attorney General would be using this law to black list the kid who dumped his daughter’s band site?  Can we use the actual language of the bill when quoting the bill?

I don’t care how bad an issue is or how passionate a person fighting against it is, you never make the conversation better with propaganda.  Aaron Swartz is a genius, not a ranting lunatic.  He’s too smart to think that what he’s saying is true but apparently he doesn’t think you are.

That’s all I have to say about COICA… I’ll be back to funny stuff next time.

Aaron Davies

http://www.blognoscor.blogspot.com/

COICA - They're coming to take our internet... again.

So I opened up my email this morning and had not one, not two, but three dire and urgent warnings about the proposed fascist takeover of the internet.  Just a glance at the subject lines suggested that we were on the verge of becoming the next China, Iran or North Korea.  This understandably concerned me on several different levels (not the least of which being that I don’t care for Korean cuisine), so I took it upon myself to do a bit of research.

I mean, what the heck is that?

The culprit, as it turns out, is a Senate proposal called S. 3804.  This bill, “deceptively” called the “Combating Online Infringements and Counterfeits Act” or COICA, was described as follows in one of my numerous alarming emails:

“This is the kind of heavy-handed censorship you'd expect from a dictatorship, where one man can decide what web sites you're not allowed to visit. But the Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to pass the bill this week -- and Senators say they haven't heard much in the way of objections! That's why we need you to sign our urgent petition to Congress demanding they oppose the Internet blacklist.”

Censorship?  Blacklists?  Well, I thought, we must get to the bottom of this.  The bill was cleverly disguised as an effort to curb rampant online copyright infringements by giving the federal government the power to ban urls that “engage in piracy and copyright infringements (which threaten) to cause far-reaching harm”.

Seems fair enough on its surface, right?  To those people who invest money and effort in crafting music, artwork, photography, movies, short films, blogs, poems, stories, novels or anything that might be described as “intellectual property”, it might seem something of a godsend.  After all, right now the only thing prompting people to actually pay for movies is ignorance, outdated morality and/or a slow internet connection.

$4 worth of movies right there.

Opponents of the bill warn that it is a foot in the door toward a complete government takeover of the internet.  It provides them that all important first step toward determining what content we can and cannot illegally download and once we give them a bit, they’ll take a terabyte.  A veritable who’s-who of internet pioneers even drafted an open letter to congress warning that “an incredible range of law-abiding sites can be blacklisted under the bill” and “this legislation will risk fragmenting the Internet’s global domain name system, create an environment of tremendous fear and uncertainty for technological innovation and seriously harm the credibility of the US in its role as a steward of key internet infrastructure.”

Of course, they fail to say how this transformation might occur.  They also neglect to mention that (a) there is already plenty of uncertainty in the fields of technological innovation (kind of the nature of the business, really) and that (b) the US has very little international credibility as a steward of key internet infrastructure.

America's International Credibility

Now, I’m not informed enough to say whether these grandiose fears are justified or not.  There is certainly nothing in the language of the bill to warrant them, but I am leery of anything that earns the support of Orrin Hatch (R-Utah).  Perhaps this is the beginning of the end and perhaps (and far more likely) it is not.  But I didn’t post this blog to argue the details of the bill nor even whether the legislation is necessary.  I’m just sick and tired of hearing that every bill that remotely involves the internet amounts to censorship.

Net neutrality has come under serious fire in the past few months and that has internet users understandably riled up.  The idea that payola could make its way into ISPs is a very serious concern and could spell the death of the internet that you and I have come to know, love and illegally download other people’s copyrighted intellectual property on.  There are legitimate concerns here and they should be taken seriously.  But does this bill rise to the level of community outrage that is has created?

It is not realistic to battle against every attempt to legislate the internet.  Billions of dollars are being lost every year to online piracy.  Some speculate that Avatar might be the last mega-budget blockbuster because of the declining receipts both in the Box Office and in home rentals.  Sure, movies are still setting new box-office records, but that’s only because they’re charging us $15 a ticket these days.  Actual attendance at the theater is down considerably over the last ten years and there is little hope it will rise again.  Think about it like this: As budgets go down movies will become even worse than they are now.

Stealing movies from the internet is not a right.  Hell, it’s not even legal.  Basically this proposed Senate bill would simply give the federal government the ability to enforce existing laws by shutting down websites that are engaged in illegal activities.  If somebody wants to protest this law, it would be easy enough to do so under the “It’s stupid and it won’t work” argument without having to bring in accusations of totalitarianism and dictatorship.

I am far more concerned about the ridiculously inflammatory language used to describe this bill than I am by the bill itself.  The Huffington Post, normally a bastion of impartial journalism (I’m kidding… HuffPo is to news what McDonalds is to food) warns that the bill’s language is too vague, giving the Senate the power to blacklist any website where counterfeit goods or copyrighted material are "central to the activity of the Internet site".  And apparently there is a problem here?  Look, don’t get me wrong, I’m not looking forward to having to get actual rights to use the pics on my blog, but as a creator of intellectual property, I’m somewhat comforted by the idea of this law.

Respect online copyrights.

As it stands, the internet is the wild, wild west when it comes to copyrights.  If you can’t steal your favorite movie you just need a newer computer.  Up to this point I’ve heard only virulent objection without proposed solutions.  Should we continue to weed out the remaining incentives for writers and directors until all films have the impeccable quality of a “Charlie bit my finger”?  Should we look at new ways of protecting against these types of massive downloads?

Or should we throw our hands into the air and start screaming that the thought-police are coming?  Thousands of tweets are going out today that simply say “The Senate is passing a bill to censor the Internet and nobody’s spoken out against it yet!” along with a link that directs you to some online petition or another.  Of course, the fact that thousands of these tweets are going out somewhat diminishes the idea that “nobody’s spoken out against it yet”, but why interject facts into perfectly good paranoia?

There is a legitimate problem with legitimate financial consequences going on here.  We could have a mature discussion about it, or we could dress it up in terms like “blacklist”, “fascism”, “censorship” and “dictatorship”, but is that going to help solve the problem? 

His own company provided me with this pic...

And if we want to complain about the proposed law, let’s at the very least focus on the real problems of it being untenable, unenforceable and misguided.  Several weeks ago the feds forced Craig’s list to shut down their prostitution providers pages (I’m sure that’s not what they called them, though for the life of me I can’t imagine why not) and all prostitution stopped at once, nationwide.

No… wait… that’s not how it worked at all.  The e-hookers simply moved their ads to other sites, which is precisely the result we could expect from COICA.  The old fuddy-duddies in congress aren’t typically cutting edge when it comes to the internet (does the term “series of tubes” ring a bell?) so it’s hard to imagine that this law would be able to keep up with us free-wheeling internet savvy pirates.  If they shut down You-Tube (about as likely as You-Tube deciding to shut itself down) we would simply move to another less known and less regulated site.  In fact, that’s already happening now that You-Tube is patrolling their site to remove copyrighted material.

The way the law currently reads I, as owner of a website, am completely absolved of any obligation to concern myself in any way with what people put on my site.  That is a ridiculous business model that cannot last.  All the COICA bill will really do is put some teeth behind it the next time the feds have to tell Craig’s list to stop being digital pimps.  It will incentivize the site operators to be a bit more vigilant about ferreting out the illegal content and it will probably result in significantly fewer copyrighted movies, songs and videos being illegally uploaded.

But it will also shut down all the bit torrent sites.  It will actually inhibit our ability to steal stuff with impunity.  I can’t help but feel that anyone dressing this up as a freedom of speech issue is in denial about their own complicity when it comes to rampant download theft. 

Ah, the innocence of my youth...
(we ignored it then, too)

So let’s save terms like “Internet Blacklist” for a time when they make sense.  Sure, we’re talking about blacklisting certain urls here and thus it is technically an apt term, but it carries connotations with banning content for political reasons.  If NBC got in trouble for playing the whole Star Wars trilogy without securing 20^th Century Fox’s permission, we would not say that NBC was being censored.  Until they are talking about banning things for being too un-American or too forward thinking I’m not going to concern myself too much.  Let us not confuse our right to express ourselves with our right to watch streaming downloads of movies that have not even been released in theaters yet.

And if you’re unconvinced, keep in mind that eventually we will need this fervor because eventually the government might try to do what it is that we are currently accusing them of trying to do.  If we scream “censorship” every time they try to pass an internet related law it is going to lose some of its bite when we actually have to stop censorship.


Aaron Davies
blognoscor.blogspot.com


Please pass this blog along.  Mass hysteria will surely ensue if you don't and you will feel responsible.