The Jolly Roger and the Curse of the Black Pearl

Pirates. Ain't they cool? Well, it depends on who you ask about it, doesn't it. If you ask the Movie Industry, pirates are cool if they want you to go and see them at the theatre. But... they aren't cool if they are downloading movies off the internet. No, we aren't talking about the mass-produced foreign DVD copies of movies distributed for profit. We are talking about them going after Joe Average who decides he'd like to invest the patience in trying to get a movie from the 'net that he is not sure he wants to spend the money on.
 
Fact is, I have downloaded a movie or two in my day. I've borrowed them from the library and made copies. I've also paid for a lot of really really shitty movies in theatres that were not worthy of being released. Some stuff I have done is perfectly legal, some may not be although sometimes I can't be sure. For example, you can legally watch Night of the Living Dead online for free... are you allowed to save it? Watch it again? Transfer it to a videotape so you can see it on your TV? Hard to tell, in spite of "Fair Use" laws. What I do know is that I am not putting movies online for others to download, nor am I gaining anything financially by exhibiting them to people for an admission charge or copying them en masse and selling the copies.
 
So... if someone downloads a movie, does it really make your ticket price rise? Not likely. If some third-world country rips-off a movie, makes a DVD of it and sell 10000 copies of it in the supermarket parking lot? Probably.
 
If you really like a movie, you are likely going to pay to go see it. If you download a movie that you aren't sure about and you really like it and want to see it as it was meant to be, you are also likely to pay to go see it or buy a DVD of it.
 
If people are expected to pay $12 a head or more to go and gamble whether or not a movie is a piece of crap or not and not know if they are flushing money down the toilet... well, all I can say is that the movie companies have largely made themselves victims of their own hype and false advertising and poor production values by artificially inflating the value of what they do to the point where people don't feel they are getting their money's worth any more.
 
You can liken it to a situation that occurred a few years back here. The government thought they could reduce smoking. So, they increased cigarette taxes. Smoking went down marginally. So they thought, "Hey, paydirt!" and increased the taxes again, this time by a substantial amount. Smoking went down marginally again. So they tried it one more time. Then they hit the sticker. Sales of cigarettes fell. Substantially. They almost dislocated their shoulders patting themselves on the back. Prematurely. Because where did all those cigarette sales go? Well, people didn't quit. It just reached the point where even the most law-abiding smoker was not willing to pay $8 a pack when they could get illegally imported or grey-market "native" smokes for less, even if the less was only a buck less a pack. Law enforcement officials were swamped by the massive overload of smuggling. People were getting hurt. The government wasn't getting ANY money on the sales of the smuggled cigarettes. They had just taken aim, a deep breath, and shot themselves squarely in the foot. They broke down, lowered the taxes... sales went "back up" - legal sales that is. The smuggling market fell apart because it lost its cost-effectiveness. Of course, you can still get illegally imported smokes if you want to - but the fact is: why bother, when they don't cost enough less to be worth the risk?
 
The movie industry has priced themselves out of their own market. Even at a discount movie theatre I have to pay $7 for my 3 year old to go to a movie. She sleeps through the thing half the time! Do I get my money back for that? No. Do I get my money back if I feel a movie was rated less than a 5/10? No. Can I afford, like I once did, to go to the movies a half dozen times a month? No. Did anyone download movies when bandwidth was limited to 33.6K, in spite of the movie industry using downloading to justify these price increases in recent years back to before that speed being the benchmark? Are you KIDDING - of course not.
 
The movie industry's logic is flawed. They assume that every movie downloaded is a lost ticket - not true. They assume that there is no other way for people to see a movie for free or cheap - also not true (ever borrowed one from a friend or the library? Ever got a freebee at Blockbuster because the guaranteed one is not there?). They also fail to recognize that in spite of all this piracy, movies still set records in attendance - and I mean in people numbers not in inflated dollar-price ticket sales. They also obviously have not ever looked closely at a downloaded movie that is currently in the theatre shot with a camcorder or some other way - I had a friend who used to do this, and they were horrible to watch, especially if it was something you wanted to see. It is not worth the time it takes to download or the hard drive space or the cost of a CD, I assure you.
 
Rest assured, any movie I want to see, we take money from our extremely limited budget and go see. Anything that is just not worth paying for, I don't go rushing out to pay for, I borrow it or get it from a library or find some other way to watch it. An example? I wanted to see Farenheit 911 out of curiosity. Not enough to pay the $25 or so it would cost to go to a theatre. A friend turned up one day with it on DVD. So I borrowed it from him. It appeared legit enough, until we played it. Sound was OK but the video was... odd. It was like it was full screen but with the top and bottom cut off in letterbox. I turned on captioning and we almost died laughing - they made no sense at all. One memorable line was something in the dialogue saying "went to bed in clean linen sheets", and the caption said something like "Wet the bed with creamy lemon treats". I went online and looked at the release date on the IMDB. I noticed my calendar and it was NOT October 5th yet, if you know what I mean. But, seeing it satisfied my curiosity. Might I buy it someday in a legit, discount pile? Maybe, as a nostalgic memory of this time. Would I have paid full price to see it or own it? Not in a million years. DOes this make me a nasty, evil thief? According to the MPAA, it should.
 
When they figure out some better system... I know I will likely spend more on movies. If I can buy a ticket for a reasonable price, I will. If it costs $12 to see a movie but I can come back and see it again as many times as I want if I like it and see another movie for free later it sucks, maybe I'd be more likely to go more knowing it was a sort of investment more than a crap shoot. If I can pay to own a movie on my computer for $10-15 and watch it as much as I want in the privacy of my own home, I'd also go along with that - and I say that price is maximum because I'm not taking up any of their real estate space, heat, oxygen, labour costs or anything else in a theatre and they have to do nothing but make a digitally available download so it costs them nothing in media but the server. If I know I am going to want to own the DVD of a movie, if they even let me apply half of my ticket prices to the purchase of that DVD I'd also be less reluctant to go and pay several times for the same thing.
 
Get with the times - sell me a personal LICENSE to a movie for a reasonable cost, so I can make fair use of it. I promise, I won't pass it around the internet - why would I? Of course, this kind of enlightened and forward-thinking philosophy is not likely to come from the same dumbass industry who tried to have VCRs outlawed because they would "infringe on their rights"... they didn't complain too much when people started buying movies on tape, did they? Idiots.
 
Try and continue live in the glory days of the silver screen, when there was nothing else for people to get entertainment from (no TV, no Internet, no video stores) and sooner or later, your market WILL begin to fade even if it has not already. The day is coming.