I love copyright and I hate piracy, but SOPA and PIPA are stupid!

I love copyright and I hate piracy, but SOPA and PIPA are stupid!

I want to be able to buy artistic material and support the artists who create it. However, living in France, often the content I want to buy, particularly films and TV shows, is not available because of discriminatory, territorial, legacy distribution deals. The people who put those deals together complain when their potential customers get content from a “free” online pirate site. The important word is NOT “free”, but “available”.

I want to give my money to artists. But friends of mine in the music and movie industry receive less than 5% of revenue after “marketing”, “distribution”, “retail” … so who is ripping off whom?

Pirated content is horrible. I would much rather rent a film from iTunes for a few euros than wait 20 hours for a film to download and find that the quality is awful, the sound out of sync and the film incomplete!
Assuming I can find the film on iTunes.
And assuming that the price is reasonable.

Would people really pirate audio-visual content so much if it was available at a reasonable price and in all territories?

The entertainment and publishing industries claim to lose $135 billion annually. This is absolute rubbish. Just because millions of films were downloaded by students in China last year does not mean that those students would have bought the content if piracy was not an option.

Another misinterpretation of the data is the fact that the global music and movie industry has shrunk by x% over the last twenty years, so that must be due to piracy. Hello! Anyone with teenage kids knows that there is so much more entertainment content to spend money on today. When I was a teenager, all my pocket money was spent on music. My children have the choice of online and console games, apps, films, tv … Seems like good old competition is the “problem” not piracy.

Back in the eighties my friends and I would record each others vinyl records onto audio cassette tape. The albums I liked I went out and bought (I happen to own Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” on vinyl, CD and legal digital download, fool that I am). One of my favourite bands is Thievery Corporation. I only discovered them because a friend of mine “illegally” copied one of their albums onto my iPod. I have since bought all of their albums.

And you know what, if I find my film is being downloaded illegally on the web … Hallelujah! For every pirate download at least two legal copies have been sold. So if my film has been illegally downloaded a million times, I am in for some serious royalties on the at least two million legal copies sold!

Spending time creating laws that prosecute web sites that accidentally reference pirate sites is, in the words of a Wikipedia spokesperson, “like making cars illegal because some people use them to rob banks”. Instead of wasting resources creating such silly laws as SOPA/PIPA, use those resources to persuade the people controlling content distribution to make it available legally at a reasonable price in all territories. That is surely a win-win for everyone.