Piracy is Theft - FACT or FICTion
Have you ever been to the cinema and watched the whole FACT type warnings before the film starts? I’ve often laughed derisively at the warning that “anyone caught with recording equipment will be ejected from the premises and prosecuted” and the request “to be vigilant at all times, reporting those who bring such equipment into this movie theatre”. Images of some toothless video pirate sat at the back row hoping the whirring noise emanating from his Super-8 recorder doesn’t attract attention, desperate to be able to sell the latest movies months before they are commercially available in shops. It just never seemed a plausible scenario to me.
Not like the bootleg recorders you would bump into, as you would drunkenly stumble around a mosh pit at a gig. That makes a little more sense. With even lo grade equipment you will be able to capture a recording that is decent enough; you can also go so far to say that these recordings give people who have never had the opportunity to hear their band of choice in a live setting without the studio covering up their deficiencies… I remember the disgust that throttled my intestines when I heard Soundgarden live for the first time. Cornell’s voice way off, the guitars leads way too complicated and polished on the album to translate live, and long pauses peppered with twittering, drunken speeches between songs… It made me appreciate the albums a whole lot more.
A bootleg also means you get to hear those all too rare cover versions that are only for ticket carrying fans. Green Day belting out “Eye of the Tiger” for example, or Rage Against the Machine blasting out NWA’s “Fuck Da Police”. The whole notion of “cover-songs” is something that all musicians can relate to, whether it’s your first lick on a guitar from Led Zeppelin, a cover of a classic blues track played by a local pub band, or the rare glimpse of the influences of platinum selling artists.
With images it can never be so simple. If you point a camcorder at a screen in a cinema, it will capture all around it, dark murky picture, bright light reflecting, poor sound quality… So surely this has never happened. I was convinced. Then the other day I was reading about these teenagers that had remade “Raiders of the Lost Ark” shot for shot, line for line, with themselves in all the roles. All the stunts were replicated; a garage was accidentally burnt down when re-enacting the bar scene with the Sherpas. It took six long years to complete, and all they had for reference was this badly made home video from an old video recorder they had smuggled into their local backwater theatre. There is talk of this version being included as an extra on a new Criterion edition of the Raiders… DVD.
So, I had to concede, that it had least been done. But it was in America, and it was in some small redneck community. The audience will have been allowed to take alcohol and guns into the theatre with them, shoot big wholes in the screen at the Arabs digging for the ark of the covenant, while they whoop and holler at the nazis exploits… So, fuck it. “This isolated incident is the exception that proves the rule,” I thought. I then put this idle jibber-jabber to the back of mind.
I’m going into work one day and my local cabbie picks me up – A bug bear for me at the moment is if I’m on an early shift, public transport is so shabby here I have to use a taxi service – at the usual time. He’s a young Asian lad called Ricky. Moved up north from London because he had some family and friends up here (don’t they always?) and set himself up driving cabs. He’s a good guy, always on time, always talkative… On this morning we got talking movies. Not film or cinema, just movies. Our views on films, not surprisingly, differed greatly. He thought “Euro Trip” was “hilarious”. I let that one pass me by, the waft of puerile filth coupled with the stench of feeble Americanised European stereotyping kept me away from it. I asked if he liked any other movies. He said he was a big fan of gangster movies. I approached him for his opinions on “The Godfather”… He said he’d never sat through it all the way through on the grounds that it was “too slow and too long”. “Plus” he added “What the fuck is that geezer who can’t talk properly all about”. I can only presume he was referring to the late Marlon Brando. A fitting tribute to his legacy…
We got talking about what was going down well in the box office at this moment in time, and we found a mutual respect for “Spider Man 2” if for nothing more than it was pure popcorn. He leans over and pulls something from down the side of his seat while we wait at traffic lights:
“You’ll like that then” he says, and drops a CD into my lap in a flimsy, transparent casing.
Aliens Vs Predator was scrawled across it.
Yeah, for all my above talk trying to make out I’m some kind of high art cinema critic this is a film that had been wetting my appetite. A fan of both sets of films it was a crossover I knew was doomed to failure, but one I had to watch anyway. I had been praying that it would at least constitute a “so bad it’s good” viewing experience. Better that than mediocrity on all fronts.
We concluded the transaction and I did a day at work wondering just how good a copy I’d purchased and whether the film would be much cop if I could indeed sit through the copy… I thought of all my pirate video experiences… The first dingy viewing of Robocop at an incredibly young age trying to figure what was going on and what the fuss was about, but still revelling in the amount of times I could hear the word “fuck” buzzing out of the speaker… More recently a version of Troy so badly put together that all the fight scenes on sand were so bright and lacking contrast and definition you couldn’t see the participants at all.
I then got thinking about the poor jokes old stand up comics made about pirate videos during the 80s in an attempt to prove they were cutting edge:
“Got a pirate video of E.T. the other day… Wasn’t bad either… Mind you, the little alien looked fucking stupid with a wooden leg and eye patch on it….”
You get the picture. I shuddered and went about the rest of my business.
Get in, decide to whack it straight in to see it the goods are “kosher” and yeah, the picture quality is good. A little fuzzy but certainly watchable. The sound is decent enough and the dubbing is right on the money. So I settle into the chair I am sitting in now as I type this and start to watch. The film is trundling along, painfully bothering to flesh out characters that we know are fodder for the real stars of the show, then I see a flicker of movement in the corner of the screen. Something black and smooth… The first glimpse of a xenomorph? A new kind of predator cloaking technology?
If only. It was the round, smooth shadow of the back of someone’s head. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Then, to completely shatter everything I had ever believed, someone else gets up and walks across the screen, easily as large as the actors up there on celluloid. This pirate DVD, of a quality higher than your average one, was indeed created by the same toothless, Super-8 carrying pirate that I had scoffed at for so many years. I’m sure I’m not alone in this mockery, but I have finally seen evidence of this and will hold up my hands – I was wrong to scoff…
I shall never renounce piracy as a bad thing, never. Nor shall I buy into the urban myth-esque tales of pirate video funding terrorist organisations: In the 80s the dreaded IRA, now the even more dreaded and omni-present Al Qaeda. The same business template of distribution that pirates are condemned for is used at the top where the entrepreneurs live. Purchase the “rights” to the original, replicate en mass through technology and distribute at a cost that covers overheads to make a profit. It seems insane to demonise one set of people to the level we do, while we applaud the multi-millionaires in their ivory towers and thank them for giving us the gift of entertainment.
All I am saying is that maybe those FACT pigfuckers and all the other anti-piracy groups know something after all. Which is more than I’ve ever conceded before.
Not like the bootleg recorders you would bump into, as you would drunkenly stumble around a mosh pit at a gig. That makes a little more sense. With even lo grade equipment you will be able to capture a recording that is decent enough; you can also go so far to say that these recordings give people who have never had the opportunity to hear their band of choice in a live setting without the studio covering up their deficiencies… I remember the disgust that throttled my intestines when I heard Soundgarden live for the first time. Cornell’s voice way off, the guitars leads way too complicated and polished on the album to translate live, and long pauses peppered with twittering, drunken speeches between songs… It made me appreciate the albums a whole lot more.
A bootleg also means you get to hear those all too rare cover versions that are only for ticket carrying fans. Green Day belting out “Eye of the Tiger” for example, or Rage Against the Machine blasting out NWA’s “Fuck Da Police”. The whole notion of “cover-songs” is something that all musicians can relate to, whether it’s your first lick on a guitar from Led Zeppelin, a cover of a classic blues track played by a local pub band, or the rare glimpse of the influences of platinum selling artists.
With images it can never be so simple. If you point a camcorder at a screen in a cinema, it will capture all around it, dark murky picture, bright light reflecting, poor sound quality… So surely this has never happened. I was convinced. Then the other day I was reading about these teenagers that had remade “Raiders of the Lost Ark” shot for shot, line for line, with themselves in all the roles. All the stunts were replicated; a garage was accidentally burnt down when re-enacting the bar scene with the Sherpas. It took six long years to complete, and all they had for reference was this badly made home video from an old video recorder they had smuggled into their local backwater theatre. There is talk of this version being included as an extra on a new Criterion edition of the Raiders… DVD.
So, I had to concede, that it had least been done. But it was in America, and it was in some small redneck community. The audience will have been allowed to take alcohol and guns into the theatre with them, shoot big wholes in the screen at the Arabs digging for the ark of the covenant, while they whoop and holler at the nazis exploits… So, fuck it. “This isolated incident is the exception that proves the rule,” I thought. I then put this idle jibber-jabber to the back of mind.
I’m going into work one day and my local cabbie picks me up – A bug bear for me at the moment is if I’m on an early shift, public transport is so shabby here I have to use a taxi service – at the usual time. He’s a young Asian lad called Ricky. Moved up north from London because he had some family and friends up here (don’t they always?) and set himself up driving cabs. He’s a good guy, always on time, always talkative… On this morning we got talking movies. Not film or cinema, just movies. Our views on films, not surprisingly, differed greatly. He thought “Euro Trip” was “hilarious”. I let that one pass me by, the waft of puerile filth coupled with the stench of feeble Americanised European stereotyping kept me away from it. I asked if he liked any other movies. He said he was a big fan of gangster movies. I approached him for his opinions on “The Godfather”… He said he’d never sat through it all the way through on the grounds that it was “too slow and too long”. “Plus” he added “What the fuck is that geezer who can’t talk properly all about”. I can only presume he was referring to the late Marlon Brando. A fitting tribute to his legacy…
We got talking about what was going down well in the box office at this moment in time, and we found a mutual respect for “Spider Man 2” if for nothing more than it was pure popcorn. He leans over and pulls something from down the side of his seat while we wait at traffic lights:
“You’ll like that then” he says, and drops a CD into my lap in a flimsy, transparent casing.
Aliens Vs Predator was scrawled across it.
Yeah, for all my above talk trying to make out I’m some kind of high art cinema critic this is a film that had been wetting my appetite. A fan of both sets of films it was a crossover I knew was doomed to failure, but one I had to watch anyway. I had been praying that it would at least constitute a “so bad it’s good” viewing experience. Better that than mediocrity on all fronts.
We concluded the transaction and I did a day at work wondering just how good a copy I’d purchased and whether the film would be much cop if I could indeed sit through the copy… I thought of all my pirate video experiences… The first dingy viewing of Robocop at an incredibly young age trying to figure what was going on and what the fuss was about, but still revelling in the amount of times I could hear the word “fuck” buzzing out of the speaker… More recently a version of Troy so badly put together that all the fight scenes on sand were so bright and lacking contrast and definition you couldn’t see the participants at all.
I then got thinking about the poor jokes old stand up comics made about pirate videos during the 80s in an attempt to prove they were cutting edge:
“Got a pirate video of E.T. the other day… Wasn’t bad either… Mind you, the little alien looked fucking stupid with a wooden leg and eye patch on it….”
You get the picture. I shuddered and went about the rest of my business.
Get in, decide to whack it straight in to see it the goods are “kosher” and yeah, the picture quality is good. A little fuzzy but certainly watchable. The sound is decent enough and the dubbing is right on the money. So I settle into the chair I am sitting in now as I type this and start to watch. The film is trundling along, painfully bothering to flesh out characters that we know are fodder for the real stars of the show, then I see a flicker of movement in the corner of the screen. Something black and smooth… The first glimpse of a xenomorph? A new kind of predator cloaking technology?
If only. It was the round, smooth shadow of the back of someone’s head. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Then, to completely shatter everything I had ever believed, someone else gets up and walks across the screen, easily as large as the actors up there on celluloid. This pirate DVD, of a quality higher than your average one, was indeed created by the same toothless, Super-8 carrying pirate that I had scoffed at for so many years. I’m sure I’m not alone in this mockery, but I have finally seen evidence of this and will hold up my hands – I was wrong to scoff…
I shall never renounce piracy as a bad thing, never. Nor shall I buy into the urban myth-esque tales of pirate video funding terrorist organisations: In the 80s the dreaded IRA, now the even more dreaded and omni-present Al Qaeda. The same business template of distribution that pirates are condemned for is used at the top where the entrepreneurs live. Purchase the “rights” to the original, replicate en mass through technology and distribute at a cost that covers overheads to make a profit. It seems insane to demonise one set of people to the level we do, while we applaud the multi-millionaires in their ivory towers and thank them for giving us the gift of entertainment.
All I am saying is that maybe those FACT pigfuckers and all the other anti-piracy groups know something after all. Which is more than I’ve ever conceded before.
posted by Richard Lewis at 4:35 AM
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