27th April 2009

Arrrrr, Jim Lad! I expect everyone was thrilled to bits when the Pirate Bay boys got themselves found guilty, right? Me too. In fact I probably still haven't stopped laughing about it.

Thing is, though, outside the small circles of what we might describe as "right-thinking people", people who respect the films and the filmmakers by actually paying a fair price for them and supporting them, there are a vast number of those who are, by definition, "wrong-thinking people", and they've been filling a few forums (fora?) with their alleged thoughts and badly spelled opinions.

Much is made of the notion that the Pirate Bay is basically a search engine, and if they're going to be prosecuted then so should Google. But that's nonsense. No-one goes to the Pirate Bay looking for information about where to find top hats or pictures of Alistair Darling. Pirate Bay only lists, well, pirated material.

By their kind of logic, I could set up a site detailing information on home security, and announce that Mrs X at number 17 leaves her bedroom window open, Mr Y's laptop password is "Kaplinsky", and Mr Z keeps £500 cash in a biscuit tin on top of the fridge. My defence, that I didn't actually do the burgling and wasn't responsible for what other people did with the information I provided, would not be accepted by the court. And quite rightly.

There's also much screaming and whining about how piracy serves the music companies right: how a CD isn't worth £15 so, in effect, it's perfectly okay to get it for nothing. Yeah! Vive la revolution! Down with the corporations! Smash the system! Liberate that new Hannah Montana album from the evil forces of capitalism! You try that with a tin of beans at Asda, chum, and we'll see how far you get. My guess is about fifty yards short of the car park.

Also getting an airing is the old saw about second-hand shops. The original rights holder don't get paid then, do they? Well, no - but they did get their share when it was bought new from HMV in the first place. (Actually I've always been a little bemused by repeat fees and royalties - a builder doesn't get a share of your house price when you sell it, a car worker doesn't get a payout when you trade your car in. My brain surgeon wouldn't get a couple of quid in the post every time I had an idea or finished a crossword or something.)

There's also much railing against DRM. Well, there's a kind of a point there - having bought the CD I expect to be able to play it in the car or on the computer, or to copy it onto my MP3 player. I also make the occasional compilation for myself, friends and family - as defined as "fair use". That doesn't apply to making it freely available to countless unidentified strangers on a website. They aren't friends or family.

What I really don't get is the appeal of downloaded movies in the first place. Purely on the basis that I should know whereof I speak, I've actually looked at a few films that aren't on DVD yet. The copies I found of Push, Knowing and The Haunting In Connecticut are all shot from the cinema auditorium: the camera is too close to the screen to get the whole image in (and he's too far to one side so it's automatically got a perspective problem). Meanwhile the focus doesn't hold and stuff keeps going off the edge of the frame. He's also got no control of the audio; the small camera microphone is basically picking up the sound from the cinema speakers. For crying out loud, stump up the dollars and watch it properly! How is a wobbly, inaudible, badly-framed blur better than an actual cinema viewing? A copy of Paul Blart Mall Cop (no, I don't particularly want to see it) actually starts with a Sony/Columbia copyright notice across the first two minutes of the film and has a timecode counter running along the top of the screen! Even the ones that appear to have been taken from official sources (such as Crank: High Voltage or Fast & Furious) look appalling when blown up to even a moderate PC monitor screen size. Though maybe that's just the effect of watching them streamed live rather than actually downloading the.

Lousy picture quality is nothing new, of course. Back in the 80s, VHS-to-VHS duplications of video nasties and uncertificated movies were the only way a lot of people could see them. That's how I first saw Dawn of the Dead and Zombie Flesh Eaters in their uncut, BBFC-unfriendly versions: through a permanent audio hum and a colour scheme of streaked sludge. But at least I managed to see the legendary splinter-in-the-eyeball scene! We even had a video recorder with two decks so we could copy one tape onto another (Macrovision copy-protection excepted). Couldn't have set up any kind of business doing that, though: for one thing the picture quality wasn't great and for another I would have been scared of being arrested! Plus, of course, I wouldn't have done it because deep down I knew it was wrong.

Maybe that's it. There's a generation out there that don't think it's wrong. I think we can start by not calling them pirates: it's a term that conjures up images of Burt Lancaster, Johnny Depp and Errol Flynn, all glamour and fun and excitement and killing Spaniards. Similarly, "bootlegging" suggests Prohibition-era gangsters in sharp suits and spats, zinging one-liners about like George Raft or Jimmy Cagney. If we actually call them leeches (which, I gather from my fifteen minutes of research on the Pirate Bay, is a technical term on torrent sites) or lowlife thieving bastards, we might dent their deluded self-image. Plus I'd wouldn't mind seeing films called The Crimson Lowlife Thieving Bastard and Lowlife Thieving Bastards Of The Caribbean.

I can kind of understand a bootlegging industry providing music and films that aren't currently commercially available and isn't likely to be available for a long time. I don't really like it, but it is supplying to a demand. The long absence of a proper DVD of Four Flies On Grey Velvet is a case in point. Now there is one, my substandard illegitimate version can go to landfill and I'll happily upgrade it. But Wolverine? It's out next week, for crying out loud! Properly, with the right music and in the right shape. Go see it then! (Even though it's probably rubbish.)

(PS: Oh yes, and I nicked their logo. Sue me.)

Until the next time.

Richard.