Having been a long time complusive music, movie, and book consumer, my new job at a used book store continues to educate on the ways of the buying public. While some of my co-workers and I enjoy the hunt, most of our customers want their copy of Eat, Pray, Love, that moment and more shockingly most don’t understand the how to go about looking for a book themselves if left to it.
They’re use to search engines1.
We don’t even have an inventory of our stock, there’s too much volume. Knowing only that “the book’s by some guy, and has something to do with arsonists, and, like, New England writers’ houses…” only gets you a shrug unless one of us had heard of it. When none of our stores have one, or any idea of the title or author’s name, the customer’s left to their own devices.
We don’t order things. We don’t have to, and it helps business, because everybody always thinks they’ll be able to find a better deal somewhere. Who, though really wants to order from a store? It’s unnecessary. It’s a pain in the ass to order from a store. The internet allows for much more immediate gratification. Piracy is just the obvious byproduct of a generation with a short attention and enough technological knowhow to get what they want.
Hearing studios and record labels whine about losing money due to piracy only gets funnier when taken into consideration the number of critics who sell their promo swag to our store. We greet, with open arm the critics who come, loaded to the brim with advanced proofs, unopened cds, dvds, and boxed sets—some weeks before their street date.
There are no fools in these transactions.
The critics only have so much time and their periodicals or television or radio station gigs only give them so much space to discuss their views on this stuff. It’s not like they’re renting the products. We on the other hand are more than happy to buy the unopened Family Ties Third Season, that for whatever fucking reason Paramount thought this needed a critic’s attention2. Any attention it might receive is probably cheaper than creating an advertising campaign, but money is money and they’re they’re giving their product away. Should it make a difference if it’s Family Ties or an Arcade Fire album?Studios and labels exchange the chance at free publicity for the risk that their cherished product might get passed along to many people’s hands for free.
If someone was really that concerned about policing piracy and leakage why would screeners of There Will Be Blood be floating around and it would take nothing more than entering a few words into a Google to access it?
Also consider, as a critic, you’ve already sat through a press screening of say, Gone Baby Gone. You liked it enough. You wrote the review. Job done. Three months later it’s scheduled to be released on dvd. Padded envelope arrives, unsolicited, in your mail from the studio. Your media outlet doesn’t care to spare the space to revisit it or review the dvd. What do you do with it? Might as well make some money or gift it.
Mashable.com provides one of the most ration reason why piracy does work.
”The albums and videos and movies come quickly; they’re thoroughly checked by the community, they’re well organized, they have standards of quality, and they’re free. To beat that, you need to offer content that’s just as fast, just as good, just as organized, and then give something extra to compensate for the “free” part: higher quality bitrates, extra digital content, extra physical content (shirts, concert tickets, coupons). You can’t miss out any of these elements because your content will ultimately be worse than the stuff on Mininova or The Pirate Bay.
The industry stabs itself in the foot. They add those annoying “piracy is a crime” trailers to DVDs which you can’t skip and which just make you go and download the XviD version. They add DRM and rootkits to their media which makes pirated content, well, a 100 times better than theirs simply because it’s annoyance-free. They often have crappy online shops and support some weird media formats instead of using what most people use. Their content, simply put, sucks compared to pirated content.”
If studios and label wanted to put a dent into piracy they would be more accountable with their marketing and they’d take more attempts to secure their product.
If that was really what they wanted.
- This is more of an optimistic assertion than a gut feeling.[back]
- and, without any bonus features beyond a gag reel and episodic promos who among us, who isn’t a M.J.F Fan or a Family Ties completist doesn’t feel cheated?[back]
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