Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Sumsum about piracy

Piracy is something that's always on my mind: how it seems to be something that companies fear and revile and the average internet user is gravitating towards. Piracy is becoming simple enough that you could teach grandma how to find every episode of Mattlock online in one exasperating afternoon. Perhaps not quite, but it's getting there. At the very least you'd need several exasperating follow up appointments in which grandma asks you what the start button is.

But it's gotten to the point that I know that I could find pretty much anything I want online. Often I don't even have to download it, just have to have the patience to comb through links. As a defense, companies continually offer up arcane practices that just make it more difficult for the person willing to spend the money to want to spend the money. Ask any PC gamer about the hassle of DRM. Some practices veer into the bizarre and incomprehensible. Have you ever tried to watch an imported movie on your Mac? You can't.

The fear for the companies is the loss of revenue (which light research will show that fear to be invalid). Understandable, though all signs seem to indicate that he who steals the most also buys the most. This must mean that there's a discrepancy in the way a company perceives piracy and the way an active pirate practices piracy. To the company: I'm stealing something. I want, for free, that which costs money. To the pirate, there are vast objective realities to contend with which the modern company ignores or does not perceive.

1. The pirate isn't actually taking anything of value. Anyone who has dealt with computers for any period of time recognizes that the material value of the things on their hard drive is almost nill. The physical value of my hard drive is a couple pounds (maybe) of metal and plastic. Like 2 dollars of physical material. This document that I'm typing up right now will be represented as a magnetic blip on a plate of aluminum (aluminum, right?) somewhere on Blogger's server. The actual value of this is nothing. It's made of almost-nothing. That Transformers 3 movie you (hopefully mistakenly) pirated? The same value of this document, except it's magnetic blip is bigger. Every pirate knows that these things don't actually have a value attached to them, and “stealing” them doesn't rob the object of its value. Rather, that null-value is doubled and spread. TF3, as terrible of an idea as it is to take up hard drive space with that movie, has more value if you and I have a copy as opposed to just me. Moreover, if you, I, and a guy in Liberia all have a copy, it's worth that much more.

2. Companies make it too damn difficult to figure out how much you like their crap. ITunes (how the balls do you capitalize that for initial sentence position?) has finally caught onto this, at least a little bit, by offering a minute and a half long sample of their music. Which really does go along way. Instead of spending 5 minutes, at the longest, sampling an album to figure out how badly I want to throw my money at it, now it's at least a 15 minute process. And it has won me over a few times. They still insist on a 30 second preview of movies, which makes no sense. If a song get's almost 2 minutes, shouldn't a movie get a 10 or 20 minute preview? Especially for TV shows where all they show you is the intro. Blah blah blah. Like I said – companies make it too difficult to figure out how much I might like their crap. HBO is perhaps the most sterling example of this. Their stuff (I guess for reasons that make sense to content providers like Comcast) is totally exclusive to satellite and cable companies. When my wife and I were trying to figure out if Deadwood was a show worth buying, what recourse did we have but to find a 3rd party site that streams Deadwood without HBO's permission? Piracy is a great way to figure out what you want to spend your money on. This has the added benefit of survival of the strongest: the best stuff continues to thrive while the forgettable stuff will get forgotten. If it wasn't for someone hosting that first Cloud Cult album on their site for free, I wouldn't have bought the other seven or eight. Because of that one act of piracy, Cloud Cult has made far more off of me than they could have hoped to otherwise.

3. I already briefly mentioned this, but piracy acts as a way to make sure the good stuff gets out there and gets supported. There is an avalanche of evidence to support this. An independent report in Australia found that those that pirate the most music also buy the most, which means that when the industry institutes psychotic measures to protect their property, they only effect those that are buying the least. By not catering to a pirate's mindset, they're only hurting themselves. In almost every venue that I could find, this is true.

There are problems, and I do want to talk about those, particularly with our culture's newest fetish for digitizing non-digital formats (like books and comics). If I get to it, that could be next post, because that's where I think things get interesting.

But for the sake of the now, what are things companies could do to thrive? Well, first off is the mistaken notion that people don't want to pay. Not so. Most people, probably everyone except for that malicious minority that view stealing as holy writ, start at the legal venues and work down from there. For example, The Wind, a super obscure silent film, was my wife and I's first date. I wanted to buy it, so I check Amazon, eBay, and even Best Buy (though anyone who still buys from Best Buy should be put down. As a mercy) to no avail. I genuinely wanted to pay money for this thing, but it simply wasn't out there. But I found some 3rd party site hosting it. A movie that I bet one in 300,000 people haven't seen, and this website was hosting it.

That said, companies should make everything they have available for as cheap as possible. I'm not talking like iTunes cheap, because for seriously: most of that music isn't emotionally worth ten bucks. All their crap should be treated as a massive 24 hour clearing house: everything priced to move. I'm not talking renting a movie from YouTube for 4 bucks (way to sellout, Google. Oh, and we still get ads before our videos? Fantastic.), I'm talking about buying a video for 4 bucks. You want the newest Lady Gaga joint? 2 bucks. The biggest hurdle for many pirates is availability, the second pricing. Make the “legal” choice so free and easy that going to The Pirate Bay feels like a hassle.

You know all those TV shows you totally love? Like Malcolm in The Middle (get real. I'm the only one who likes that show) or Pirates of Dark Water? Or even the stuff you kind of want to forget about, like Skeleton Warriors or that stupid sitcom about cavemen. It's all sitting on some harddrive in some studio taking up space. What about all those amazing soundtracks you heard play in movies, like The Neverending Story or Sunshine or Return to Oz (you can tell what kind of consumer I am)? They're also collecting theoretical dust on some guy's hard drive. All this stuff should be out there for cheap. If the average consumer went to Amazon or iTunes and saw that with that 20 dollars they planned to spend on Transformers 3: The Criterion Collection, they could walk away with four soundtracks, a whole TV show, and a download of Inception, I guarantee that person'd spend 40. Good luck trying to convince that person to spend 40 (and only get 2 things, if they're lucky) where they had only planned to spend 20 (and get one thing).

I dunno. I got more to this. But I need food. Maybe I'll come back tomorrow and talk about how stupid it is to create physical items like they're supposed to be digital.

3. I already briefly mentioned this, but piracy acts as a way to make sure the good stuff gets out there and gets supported. There is an avalanche of evidence to support this. An independent report in Australia found that those that pirate the most music also buy the most, which means that when the industry institutes psychotic measures to protect their property, they only effect those that are buying the least. By not catering to a pirate's mindset, they're only hurting themselves. In almost every venue that I could find, this is true.

There are problems, and I do want to talk about those, particularly with our culture's newest fetish for digitizing non-digital formats (like books and comics). If I get to it, that could be next post, because that's where I think things get interesting.

But for the sake of the now, what are things companies could do to thrive? Well, first off is the mistaken notion that people don't want to pay. Not so. Most people, probably everyone except for that malicious minority that view stealing as holy writ, start at the legal venues and work down from there. For example, The Wind, a super obscure silent film, was my wife and I's first date. I wanted to buy it, so I check Amazon, eBay, and even Best Buy (though anyone who still buys from Best Buy should be put down. As a mercy) to no avail. I genuinely wanted to pay money for this thing, but it simply wasn't out there. But I found some 3rd party site hosting it. A movie that I bet one in 300,000 people haven't seen, and this website was hosting it.

That said, companies should make everything they have available for as cheap as possible. I'm not talking like iTunes cheap, because for seriously: most of that music isn't emotionally worth ten bucks. All their crap should be treated as a massive 24 hour clearing house: everything priced to move. I'm not talking renting a movie from YouTube for 4 bucks (way to sellout, Google. Oh, and we still get ads before our videos? Fantastic.), I'm talking about buying a video for 4 bucks. You want the newest Lady Gaga joint? 2 bucks. The biggest hurdle for many pirates is availability, the second pricing. Make the “legal” choice so free and easy that going to The Pirate Bay feels like a hassle.

You know all those TV shows you totally love? Like Malcolm in The Middle (get real. I'm the only one who likes that show) or Pirates of Dark Water? Or even the stuff you kind of want to forget about, like Skeleton Warriors or that stupid sitcom about cavemen. It's all sitting on some harddrive in some studio taking up space. What about all those amazing soundtracks you heard play in movies, like The Neverending Story or Sunshine or Return to Oz (you can tell what kind of consumer I am)? They're also collecting theoretical dust on some guy's hard drive. All this stuff should be out there for cheap. If the average consumer went to Amazon or iTunes and saw that with that 20 dollars they planned to spend on Transformers 3: The Criterion Collection, they could walk away with four soundtracks, a whole TV show, and a download of Inception, I guarantee that person'd spend 40. Good luck trying to convince that person to spend 40 (and only get 2 things, if they're lucky) where they had only planned to spend 20 (and get one thing).

I dunno. I got more to this. But I need food. Maybe I'll come back tomorrow and talk about how stupid it is to create physical items like they're supposed to be digital.

Monday, June 27, 2011

No more Looney Tunes

I really wanted to blog each episode of the Looney Tunes show. I really did. The problem(s) is(are) that 1. The show is so keenly unmemorable that it was difficult for me to hold the show in my head long enough to blog about. I haven't even watched the last three or four episodes – I'm not sure how many they're up to – but I have difficulty remembering the three I did see. You know why it's hard? Because nothing says funny quite like Yosemite Sam not firing a gun and being an irritating house guest. And something about a bitchy she rabbit. Speaking of which, did you see Bugs cross dress? Horrifying. Horrifying in the original? Not at all. In this one it is, but why? Namely it's because Bugs has been relegated to the position of your uncle, and not the creepy one. When your creepy uncle cross dresses, it's not that bad because he's already creepy, but when the uncle you like cross dresses you're forced to reassess the entire nature of you in relation to him. And it's not pretty. They made Bugs so humdrum and vanilla that anything just outside of normal is vastly unsettling. This would be like Roseanne doing anything.

2. The second reason I didn't/couldn't/wouldn't keep up with it is that I don't particularly enjoy reviewers who make their name reviewing crappy stuff. And there are a ton out there. And it's always the same with these guys: they act like they've been put on by an unkind universe or a sadistic boss and reviewing is the only recourse in life, so, “I'll do it, but I won't enjoy it.” And then they're snarky and it's a linguistic arms race as each reviewer races to come up with the best insult or colorful metaphor to describe how terrible their topic is, and by extension, their life. It's a tired routine, and I can't wait until the internet gets over it.

The point is that reviewing something you know is bad and then telling people why it's bad feels unnecessary. The real trick is reviewing something people assume is good (anything by Michael Bay or James Cameron of late) and telling them why, actually, it sucks. Perhaps there's some element of that in The Looney Tunes Show. There are people who labor under the mistaken notion that it's good, but I don't feel like the numbers justify it. I would be surprised if the show is still around in the fall.