Why Digital Piracy Is A Good Thing
by General Stuff
If you have been to a movie recently, you have seen the ads. In one, an Average Joe tells us he has been working on movie sets for decades, including on shit-sucking films such as Dick Tracy and The Big Chill, and he takes pride in his work. And by downloading films off the Internet, you, dear viewer, are depriving this Average Joe of his livelihood. Oh, sure, it won’t affect the movie stars and producers who receive million-dollar paycheques, he says, but it will affect an Average Joe just trying to make a living. Fade to black. Visit www.respectcopyrights.org for details.
Well, to you, Average Joe, the General says, “Fuck you, and the shitty movies you make, and the completely extraneous industry to which you belong.”
RespectCopyrights.org was created by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) to combat digital piracy (or, as powerful organizations like to say when they want to bully the general public into respecting outdated copyright laws that protect corporate infrastructures and the bankrupt creative personnel they house, the MPAA wants to “educate” you). The MPAA wants to avoid the same fate as the Recording Industry Association of America (you know, the group of multinationals that’s into suing old ladies and little kids), which blames piracy for declining sales of their mostly shitty “recordings”. Record sales in the top ten markets worldwide declined 6.8% in 2002, and research suggests that piracy was responsible for about 40% of this decline. About 1.7 billion blank CDs were sold in 2002, a 40% increase over 2001.
The problem with focusing the debate over digital piracy on how it affects the artists and their continuing ability to make “art,” as the MPAA and RIAA have done, is twofold: first, they belong to the “entertainment” industry – nothing to do with food, water, or shelter – so they are non-essential (or should be, except most people don’t see them that way); and second, most of the “art” they produce is shit. Don’t believe me? Take a look at the top ten albums on Billboard (as of this writing):
|
This
Week |
Last
week |
Weeks
on chart |
|
Artist, "Title"
Imprint | Catalog No. | Distributing Label |
|
|
Peak
Position |
|
1 |
1 |
2 |
Clay Aiken, Measure Of A Man
RCA | 54638 | RMG | (18.98 CD)
|
1 |
|
2 |
- |
1 |
Rod Stewart, As Time Goes By ... The Great American Songbook Vol. II
J | 55710* | RMG | (18.98 CD)
|
2 |
|
3 |
- |
1 |
Eagles, The Very Best Of
Warner Strategic Marketing | 73971 | (25.98 CD)
|
3 |
|
4 |
4 |
5 |
OutKast, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below 3
Arista | 50133* | (22.98 CD)
|
1 |
|
5 |
2 |
3 |
Ludacris, Chicken*N*Beer
Disturbing Tha Peace/Def Jam South | 000930* | IDJMG | (18.98 CD)
|
1 |
|
6 |
- |
1 |
Loon, Loon
Bad Boy | 000892* | UMRG | (14.98 CD)
|
6 |
|
7 |
6 |
4 |
Dido, Life For Rent
Arista | 50137 | (18.98 CD)
|
4 |
|
8 |
3 |
2 |
Jagged Edge, Hard
Columbia | 87017 | Sony Music | (12.98 EQ/18.98)
|
3 |
|
9 |
5 |
2 |
Barbra Streisand, The Movie Album
Columbia | 89018 | Sony Music | (18.98 EQ CD)
|
5 |
|
10 |
- |
1 |
Barenaked Ladies, Everything To Everyone
Reprise | 48209 | Warner Bros. | (18.98 CD)
|
10 |
Clay Fucking Aiken? This is the rallying point for the RIAA? If I don’t download music, then Clay Fucking Aiken will be more capable of making another album? If I don’t download music, then talentless old fucks like Rod Stewart and The Eagles can afford more hookers and coke? OutKast is the only talented group on the list, and the only thing affected by their potentially declining record sales – like, maybe they’ll sell a million copies instead of 1.5 million – is the size of the rims on their new Bentleys.
Now that I think about it, there are actually three facets to the problem with the MPAA and RIAA, because the third issue is: These artists (and the industry that pimps them) already make too much money for what they do. The only reason they’re crying foul is because they’ve had it so good for so long. And the independent artists at the bottom of the charts won’t suffer, because their fans will buy their CDs anyway. It’s the “impulse artists” sitting atop the charts – the real cash cows for media conglomerates, the artists whose albums sell like the National Enquirer at the grocery store checkout, who are loosing sales because everyone knows their shit ain’t worth paying for in the first place.
But back to the main point here. The entertainment industry is not an essential industry. Digital piracy will not destroy the entertainment industry; it will simply provide the type of “correction” that it had coming anyway. It’s funny that no one ran commercials pleading with the public to support real, essential Average Joes when, for example, Reagan smashed the unions during the 1980s, or when automation decimated the manufacturing sector. The suits feeling threatened by digital piracy always dismiss working class devastation due to economic transformations as necessary casualties of some kind of progressive revolution; but when entertainment lawyers and accountants and nameless middle men are going to lose their jobs, suddenly the public is expected to stand up and fight for Average Joe.
When the North American economy transformed from an agrarian economy into an industrial one, and later from an industrial economy to a post-industrial one, the party line on farmers and labour-intensive jobs was: Well, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette. To those same financial analysts, accountants, and other white collar types in the record and movie industries who quickly dismiss working class people as casualties of “progress,” the General would like to say, quoting a favourite movie, “Welcome to the party, pal.”
Testifying before the Senate Commerce Committee on September 17, 2003, MPAA President and CEO Jack Valenti called piracy a “national problem that must be a high priority for officials who comprise the federal government.” Valenti argued that intellectual property is America’s largest trade export, creating new jobs at three times the rate of the rest of the economy. The film industry, he argued, is losing $3.5 billion per year due to piracy.
What gets lost in Valenti’s entertainment industry boosterism is the cultural cost of what that industry produces, and the aesthetic, not monetary, value of that industry’s product.
America is the illiterate drunk who, depressed and alone, hopes for nothing more than the presence of moving pictures and the white noise of stadium crowds in televised sporting events, the audiovisual clutter of a desperate and aimless society that just wants to be left alone but won’t turn its TV down for the sake of the neighbours. America reminds me of a dog I used to own: If you left too much food in his dish, he would eat until he puked. No self-restraint here. No taste either.
The problem is, Mr. Valenti, your industry produces shit, and your country’s increasing dependency on that shit is running up a bill that it can’t cover. Maybe less entertainment would be a good thing.
In his 1999 book The Entertainment Economy: How Mega-Media Forces Are Transforming Our Lives, entertainment lawyer Michael J. Wolf argues that entertainment has become the key factor in the consumer economy:
“Entertainment – not autos, not steel, not financial services – is fast becoming the driving wheel of the new world economy. In the United States, which has the most developed entertainment and media industry, entertainment ranks ahead of clothing and health care as a percentage of household spending (clothes 5.2 percent, health care 5.2 percent, entertainment 5.4 percent). Even if you don’t count consumer electronics (which means leaving out TV sets and VCRs, which I would argue are bought primarily for entertainment), we are looking at a $480 billion industry” (4).
Neil Postman’s observation many years ago, that Americans were “amusing themselves to death,” is happening. But first, they are amusing themselves broke: “while the rate of personal savings in the United States has declined to a sixty-three-year low of 2.1 percent, entertainment spending is at a high of 8.4 percent of total consumer expenditures,” wrote Wolf in 1999 (31). If you just help Joe Average make the next Charlie’s Angels sequel by not downloading his shitty movies, you won’t have to acknowledge the retard for a president and the record $374 billion national budget deficit. America is trying to anaesthetize itself into prosperity, while its personal debt load exceeds $600 trillion.
Digital piracy, by taking a piece of the profits from these overfed media conglomerates, may save America from its mentally obese self. Consider the excessive output of the current media regime: “there were more than 500 films released last year [1998] in the United States, almost one hundred times the 5.2 films the average American sees every year,” writes Wolf (101-102). The General bets at least 490 of those films sucked major ass. Who will miss 40 or 50 of them if I download a film or two off the Internet? The unemployed grip? Maybe he should do something else – you know, as a casualty of a progressive revolution in the way we live.
Looking at digital piracy from a legalistic or economic perspective misses the broader cultural implications, which I believe are positive. By focusing on only issues of supply and demand (if people don’t buy our shit, our people will lose their jobs and the country will go bankrupt), one overlooks the possibility that fewer shitty movies might shift consumer expenditures into other, more important areas.
Finally, consider how Michael J. Wolf ends his book: “In the high-tech entertainment economy, the old-fashioned, low-tech motivator of change and innovation still reigns supreme: The most valued commodity is the human imagination” (296). This commodity – imagination – is in very short supply, and that is America’s real “national problem.”
8:55:43 PM 
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