Jul 30 2009
Brad vs. Pirates
I’m kind of a Twitter and Facebook fanatic. I like to see what people are doing, saying, and thinking out in the world, and both of those applications cater to my need for people knowledge. They are also great for market research, and to that end, I have a saved Twitter search for “Road Trip-Beer Pong,” which updates me when anyone says anything about the movie. On Tuesday, I awoke to discover dozens of tweets offering links to illegal downloads of the film, which apparently was leaked overnight. This is not a unique situation. Nearly every movie made is leaked to the internet, these days. And most pirates don’t bother to think about what they’re doing — it’s free, they want it now, and it’s easy. Those who do think about what they’re doing believe they’re “sticking it to the man” atop the rich, powerful, corporate studios.
While the studios do lose a lot of money because of piracy, it’s artists like me who really take a hit to the pocket book. Each sold DVD generates a very small payment to many of the key creative people who made the movie. These “residual payments” help artists pay the bills between jobs, because contrary to popular belief, the vast majority of writers and directors are not hopping from one seven figure contract to another. Most film artists are middle class folks, living on a budget, doing the best they can in an expensive city to get by week-to-week as they fight for their next gig.
So, for two days, using Twitter, I decided to send a personal message to each pirate who admitted to downloading and watching my movie. My message wasn’t about their opinions, good or bad. It was about their actions. And at first, most were astounded to hear from me. Then they got angry. “How dare you challenge my right to steal?” was the general attitude. Or, “your movie sucks, so who cares if I steal it?” They got really mad when they found out I was reporting their user info to Twitter and the Anti-Piracy folks at Paramount. I was threatened, black-listed (from future robbery, I guess, because they never actually BUY anything), called a tool, a twat, a cry-baby, and told to #$%& off. One guy suggested I was an idiot for relying on residuals — that I should instead ask for more money on the front end. Sheer ignorance. The system doesn’t work that way at all. And that’s my point. People will always steal. My goal was to put a face on who they were stealing from, and they didn’t like that one bit.
A few guys wrote back to apologize. Several people had legitimate questions. And a lot of people were glad to tell me that they liked the movie. But the internet haters can’t stand sequels like the ones I’ve done — though they watch them anyway. They think I somehow sold the studio a sequel to the movie they love. No, the studio approached me with the idea to write a sequel to a popular movie based on their solid marketing numbers. I need to pay a mortgage and buy groceries like everyone else, the folks at the studio are good people whom I like and respect, and so I took the job. And for that, the haters call me a sell-out hack, as they flame me from their mother’s basements.
AFTER they stole the movie and took the time to watch it, the pirates preferred to tell me how bad it is, with choice vocabulary, as opposed to discussing the reasons why they felt obligated to watch it two weeks before its release, thereby stealing from my family. One guy said I should be thanking him for the free marketing. One guy tweeted that he loved the movie, even quoting dialogue, then as soon as he heard from me, he flip-flopped into a total hater “who wouldn’t buy it from the dollar bin.” Hilarious.
These last two days were enlightening and exhausting. Shouldn’t someone speak up when the opportunity is there? So I did. Part of me regrets it, part of me doesn’t. The movie is still out there. People are still tweeting about stealing it. Paramount is doing all they can to fight back, and we’re lobbying Twitter to crack down on piracy, which is expressly against their sign-up rules. But now it’s time for me to get back to work, making more product for them to steal, so I threw up the white flag.
People laugh at those pre-trailer commercials against piracy in movie theaters. And I know this sounds like a sanctimonious Sally Struthers charity commercial to some, but before you click to download, please remember that regular, hard-working people — not just rich celebrities — are paying for your movie experience out of their pockets.
I’m really glad you wrote this. My boyfriend does an absurd amount of downloading of music, movies, software, etc, often at my request. I’ve always felt bad about it, I knew what we were doing was wrong but it was so easy and so nice to be able to save thousands of dollars and still be able to enjoy all the media I want. Since I didn’t really know anyone involved in the movie or music industry (until I met Preston, and thus you), it never hit home to me that what I was doing was effectively stealing from thousands of honest, hardworking, middle-class people. Reading this puts a face on those people, and absolutely makes me want to start getting the media I want the legal, old-fashioned way.
Stacy, you just made my week. Thanks for taking the time to let me know. Preston is on fire right now, but at some when he’s not, and that point always seems to come, he’ll need those residual checks to come in the mail and cover the gaps.
And thanks for writing!
Though I’m not exactly innocent of downloading online (I don’t have a money tree in my back yard like many hope for!), I do at least try to control who I’m downloading from. I can understand why people want to “stick it to the man,” but I myself don’t want to give the finger to the “little (wo)/man” either by stealing independent artists’ work. As a writer, I’d be pretty upset if someone copy and pasted my work and sold it, so I can imagine how upset a musician or struggling filmmaker would be if the same were done to them. I prefer to just buy indie artists’ albums on iTunes or from a local record store and get the vinyl, which usually includes free MP3 downloads anyway. Though my wallet isn’t exactly overflowing with cash, at the end of the day it makes me feel better to know that my hard-earned money will in turn become hard-earned money for someone else who deserves it.
Anyway, thanks for posting this, and I’m totally RT’ing it!
Bravo! I have a friend I am working on a sit com idea for, and he sees no problem with piracy. he believes you have to be famous to worry about that sort of thing.
Thank you so very much for this blog! I’m an author, I write strictly for the electronic press, and the amount of piracy is just amazing. Sometimes books are up on the sharing sites the day they are released, and it hurts. It hurts not only for the fact that someone is effectively stealing my work, but also it hurts in the pocket book when it’s already so hard to get by.
And sadly, there seems to be no answer but perhaps what you suggested: to put a face on the people who are really hurting because of this practice.
For those who download…even just a little bit, ask yourself this question: If that book, movie or song was behind a glass window, would you break that window to steal it? Would you shoplift it from a store? Illegal downloads are exactly the same thing.
There’s been at least one study where they found that people who pirate (music in this case) are 10 times more likely to spend money on media than people who don’t. Personally, I don’t download pirated movies (quality matters too much to me), except in the rare case where I’ve already seen the movie (either on TV or in the theater) and just want to watch it again right at that moment. If there’s a legal version (on YouTube, Netflix, or Hulu) available, then I’ll watch that one first. Only if those aren’t available do I resort to a pirated copy (and generally it’s a streaming one, not a download). And if it’s something I find myself watching often enough, I usually buy it. I buy DVDs on a regular basis. And I buy CDs and individual tracks from iTunes, probably more often than I download from other sources.
Here’s the thing, too: I’m more likely to purchase something from an artist who makes their music available for free. Whether that’s streaming on a site like MySpace or Last.fm or as a download, if I can try it out first, I’m much more likely to pay for it. I think the same is true for artists all over the place.
I hear countless stories on an almost daily basis about artists who have benefited from pirated works. I can’t remember off the top of my head who it was, but a certain novelist said he sees a noticeable increase in his sales every time a new pirated version of one of his books is released. He went from being a mid-list author to a best-seller and he attributes a large part of his success to the pirates who have “stollen” his work (he’s even gone so far as to put “pirated” copies out there himself).
I’m not saying that it’s right or that it always results in a benefit. I’m just saying that it’s not necessarily always a *bad* thing for those involved. If it gets your work out there to a larger audience, that can mean increased long-term success. So those residuals will only keep growing in the future…
Just a quick comment. Without speaking to the morality of the issue, I have to point out that the “piracy is stealing” mantra that intellectual property proponents put out is not working mainly because it is not accurate. This is purely a semantic argument, but if you want your audience to be sympathetic, you will have to rework the argument slightly to make it effective.
Technically, the people who download and watch your movies are not stealing your work, the person who made of with your goods in the first place did. This is the traditional layperson understanding of piracy and bootlegging; selling knockoffs of IP diverting funds from the producer to people with no connection to the original work. Pirates and bootleggers package IP as their own and sell it, directly undercutting the legitimate market. Money and profit are the clear motive.
It is important to understand that this is not, for the most part, what is going on the all-the-world-for-free crowd. While there is a measurable financial impact, even the “pirates” for the most part have no intention of making money for the nabbing of a movie before its release. Profit is not their motive. It is also hard to accuse the public are “supporting” piracy, because for the most part, neither party is exchanging money for the transaction. A guy that buys a “Bolex” watch knows he is not paying the original manufacturer, the grandma that watches a video streamed to her computer from a movie site for free does not. This is a factor in why the public isn’t biting on the piracy-is-theft PR and why file sharing is rampant.
This does not make the person who sees their work appear all over the internet (while their pockets stay empty) feel any better, but it is important to understand if you want to forge an effective moral argument. Because no money exchanged hands and the recipient of the work didn’t break into your house, you are not flipping that moral switch in their minds when you use the word “theft”, and no amount of public education or lecturing will change that. My advice is to drop that line of argument and come up with a better one that taglines the act in a more accurate way.
If that book, movie or song was behind a glass window, would you break that window to steal it? Would you shoplift it from a store? Illegal downloads are exactly the same thing.
No, they aren’t.
Wow, that’s a whole lot of words to say “i’m an idiot.”
As someone who works in the film industry (but doesn’t get residuals) the pirates can make all the excuses they want but at the end of the day if they are experiencing something that is being charged for but they didn’t pay then it’s stealing. They tend to spend their time trying to come up with reasons why it’s not stealing – ‘it’s ‘technically’ not stealing, I’m helping spread the word and ‘market’ it for you, I’d never buy it anyway, I’m a poor student, etc.
They fail to realize that even though it’s not physical it still cost money to make.
Would they ’steal’ a car? Do they make anything physical at their job? Unless they’re paid for blood or sperm they are not. Would they like to work for 6 months and have their boss tell them they won’t be paid because they didn’t actually create anything physical.
Do they really think artists, studios, writers, etc. will continue to work and create things if they can’t get paid? At that time they’ll be spending their days watching someone falling on youtube, playing their old Atari games and reading tweets, hopping to find a story.
Sure you can save a lot of money by not paying but you can say the same thing about anything – cars, gas, food,house, etc Just because you want have it but don’t have the money to buy doesn’t make it right to free access.
Everyone “downstream” of the pirating act is culpable. Even though YOU were not the original theif of the product, you supported the thievery by downloading the ill-gotten movies, muisc or books, or when you purchased those $5 CDs and DVDs.
Of course this kind of theft is not new, it’s just evolved and grown thanks to technology. And…it’s not going to go away.
Media pirates are like garden pests. You know you cannot dispatch all the pests without inflicting some unintended damage to the entire garden. So, the goal is to simply manage the pests as best you can, trying to keep their numbers low enough, so that you still have something worthwhile to harvest.
Thanks to everyone for writing in with thoughts and support. I’m trying not to be dogmatic and to truly understand the situation, but to HokusPokus: I disagree. The message must be clear and succinct. Piracy is stealing, and not just from corporations. I don’t know how sugar coating or massaging will help.
This is your brain on drugs. Smoking will kill you. Piracy is stealing. I really don’t see any other way of looking at it.
I created a product. It is set to be released for sale Aug. 11, and now thousands of people are watching it early and for free. How should I not feel robbed?
HokusPokus’s point that “pirates” (do we really need quotations here) aren’t the ones guilty of stealing simply because: (1) profit is not the motive, and (2) they aren’t the ones “who made off with the goods,” is itself is an exercise in semantics and ignores blackletter law.
First, we all know that in order to legally download movies you have to pay for them. By downoading but not paying for movies you are profiting. You can’t deny it. I paid for it, you didn’t–therefore, you’re in a better financial position than the rest of us who paid for the movie. End of story. If you read the Federal Tax Code you’d be amazed at what constitutes profit.
To that point, contrary to your misconstrued perception of criminal law (likely derived solely from Law and Order), motive is irrelevant. Sure, motive helps when trying to prove that someone commited a crime. But, at the end of the day, circumstantial evidence (which is all motive is and, more often than not, is inadmissible) and criminal elements (i.e., the common law or statutory law that you must satisfy to prove that a crime has occured) are separate things. In this case, all you really need is: (1) mens rea (intent) to commit the criminal act, and (2) the criminal act. Thus, if your intent was to download a movie that you did not pay for your intent was to commit a crime. When you acted on that intent you completed the crime.
Second, by downloading the movie without paying for it you have engaged in a criminal conspiracy. The interesting thing about criminal conspiracy law is that there need not be a common intent among the co-conspirators. In fact, the co-conspirators don’t even need to know each other and, they can be guility without ever having communicated with each other. To be guilty, they simply need to have been involved in the conspiracy in some way. Accordingly, by downloading a movie that you did not pay for, you took part in a criminal conspiracy along with the guy that “made off with the goods”. Stop trying to distinguish yourself–you’re a PIRATE.
If you really want to have an opinion that holds water, you should try: (1) reading the various laws that govern this issue, and (2) going to law school so that you can understand how the laws apply (because you obviously don’t). Minds much brighter than yours (as well as those in your self-affirming chat rooms) have already wrestled with the issue and have come to one conclusion: Watching a movie without paying for it is a crime. Your very own word play cannot avoid this reality.
Simmer down folks, again I am not making a “pro-piracy” argument, what I am merely pointing out is that because the terms “piracy” and “theft” already have well understood meanings in the public consciousness, expanding their definitions to include modern intellectual property issues are tricky.
I am not a Lawyer, nor a viewer of Law and Order, but as I understand it copyright law and infringement have grey areas, with even the Supreme Court writing “interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud.” The public seems to intrinsically understand that there is a difference as well.
My only point was only to say that this is as much of a PR war as it is a legal issue, and that conflating IP offenses and theft is making the problem worse in the public understanding, not better. Leaping to the words “theft” for every type of copyright infringement is not helping the industry. It clouds the issue and it simply doesn’t resonate with the public as well as proponents would hope. It is overused and thus people just tune it out.
My position is to fine tune the argument, as infringement itself can be a criminal act and thus doesn’t need further gravitas (hope I’m using that word correctly there). I don’t have to explain here that there are real victims of infringement, and that it has an impact on real lives. But theft and infringement, while close in meaning, are not the same thing, and you lose people by trying to make that link. I am a proponent of making the better argument by choosing you words carefully.