Smarmy Jerkface Dot Com

With everything going on this week involving copyright infringement, government legislation, criminal indictments and retaliatory hacking, I felt the need to provide a voice of reason… because some of you people are out of your goddamned minds.

The questionable pieces of governmental legislation, SOPA and PIPA, are dangerous. They’re dangerous not because they’re designed to remove pirated materials from the internet, but because they are so poorly worded and barely even understood by those in charge of passing said legislation that the protests against them are absolutely necessary. The power in those bills is so broad that just about anything could be removed from the internet at any time without any due process whatsoever. They need to be stopped.

Opposing these bills does not mean you are pro-piracy though. That’s important to point out. Because there are actually three factions in this fight: the government rushing to pass the poorly defined bills, the rational people who want them to slow the hell down and realize that what they’re doing will do more harm than good, and then the people who would be so totes angers if they can’t steal their My Little Pony episodes anymore and will have no choice but to hax0rs the world because they think everything should be free.

You do not have the inalienable right to steal movies, music, games, books, or TV shows. You do not have ANY right to steal movies, music, games, books or TV shows. There is nothing in the constitution protecting your right to be entertained. If you steal these items, you have no right to get angry at those upholding copyright laws. You can feel disappointed, sure, that your gravy train of free entertainment is over. But mad at “the man”? No sir.

Many pro-piracy arguments revolve around the assumption that “the studios” charge “outrageous sums of money” for “mediocre products”. This may be true. In fact, it pretty much is. Content holders think their products are worth WAY more than they actually are. Doesn’t mean you get to just take it because you don’t think it’s worth paying for. Argue the semantics of stealing a physical object vs. a digital object all you want. You’re still stealing it, and you have no right to do so.

Are the studios to blame for many of their own problems? You can certainly argue that. Charging outrageous sums of money to companies like Netflix just because they’ve stumbled upon a streaming model that people actually want is egregious. If you give people reasonable options to access your content, most people will use those options. I pay for HBO, however my satellite provider will not allow me to watch HBOGO on my TV because it conflicts with their agreements regarding their On Demand selection. HBOGO has content that is not available On Demand. I would like to watch this content on my TV, like other people with similar technology and television service, but I’m not allowed. This is the kind of nonsense I’m talking about that drives consumers mad.

Do I download from torrent sites? Yes I do. Come at me bro. But I would welcome my day in court to defend anything I’ve ever downloaded. Is all piracy wrong? In the eyes of the law, yes. And I can accept the consequences if it ever comes to that. However, these are my rules:

1. If the movie in question is out of print, not available on any streaming service or has never been released on a current video format, then that’s something I have no problem with downloading. If I cannot give the original creators or current copyright holders any money, then it should make no difference how I obtain the product in question. Last year the wife and I watched The Legend of Billie Jean. It was not available on any streaming platform, and had only made it as far as VHS as far as home video is concerned. I could have bought a used VHS copy on Ebay or Amazon for $50+, but what good does that do? Give some yahoo who found the tape at a flea market some scratch? No. Instead I found a high-def capture from a television broadcast of the film a year or two earlier. So we watched that, and it was glorious. Had it been on DVD at the time, we would have just bought it. Didn’t have that option.

To be clear, I’m not talking about downloading a Blu-ray rip of The Expendables because it’s late at night and you don’t want to drive to one of your 47 local Redboxes or pay the $8 a month charge for Netflix. Downloading anything so readily available from dozens of legit sources is piracy.

2. If my DVR flips out or there’s a service outage of some kind, I will download a television show that was missed if I have no other option. Am I going to pay iTunes or Amazon $2-$3 because my $180 satellite TV service went to shit one night? Hell no. I pay my satellite bill and I wasn’t going to watch any commercials in that particular program anyway. And Hulu’s new restrictions about new episodes of a series not being available until 8 days after originally airing? Do you know how retarded that is? By that logic, you can never watch a show live again. You can never get caught up with a weekly show, forever one episode behind until that series ends its run.

3. Is there any modern way to play my classic video games? Say, the Atari 5200? No? Most TVs don’t even have the right connections anymore? Well I can download the library and emulate it on a device of my choice. That’s perfectly acceptable to me. Again, there’s no way to give the original creators or current copyright holders one single penny for that kind of stuff, which I would happily do if there was the option.

Am I “in the wrong” in all three of these instances? Technically yes. But if my source for out of print movies suddenly got shut down, I’d be disappointed but not filled with furious anger against the US Government. The government does a metric ton of shady shenanigans, but going after Megaupload via criminal indictments isn’t one of them. If they don’t have a case, they won’t get convicted.

If you don’t like the policies and practices of the studios, then don’t support them. Use your money on something else, like a vacation or a sporting event. That’s how you change things. Stealing something you don’t think is worth paying for still attaches a value to that item. The studios tally up illegal downloads and assign a dollar value, concluding that they just lost X amount of dollars and then employing more and more efforts to get people to stop stealing their product. If you remove that number from the equation, THEN you’ll start to see some real changes in the way content holders value their product. If there was no piracy and studio profits continued to spiral downwards, they’d change their business model.

The point I’m trying to make here is simple: pay for your entertainment. And if you support Anonymous and their retribution against those involved in the recent Megaupload indictment, kindly go fuck yourself.