Video piracy is among the most irritating aspects of modern life for those who work in the film business. Adverts telling you not to commit video piracy are among the most irritating aspects of modern life for those who don’t.
The other day, my husband and I found ourselves unable to watch our exciting new box set of Modern Family without sitting through a tedious supporting feature: a mini-film about why we shouldn’t buy illegal DVDs.
We don’t buy illegal DVDs! I paid £19.99 for that box set! I feel like a bit of a mug already; it would have been much cheaper to rent, and this was a TV show we could have watched for the bargain price of the licence fee, if we weren’t so slow to catch up with things.
In the slight muggery I feel about spending £19.99 (£19.99!) on a few sitcom episodes, I do not then want to be addressed as a thief by the people who receive that money.
Stop narrowing your eyes at me, film-makers! Putting your suspicious message on to sold DVDs is not just failing to reach your intended target, it is exclusively reaching the opposite of your target. The ones you want are elsewhere, online, streaming the stuff to their computers. (Or, at the very least, watching a recorded copy on which I doubt the illegal recorder has been kind enough to include your advert.)
Put anti-piracy messages on to billboards or egg cartons and you might accidentally catch the eye of a footage-snatcher. Put them on shrinkwrapped, £19.99 DVDs from Amazon and you can’t possibly. In one deft move, you have sliced out everybody you ought to be talking to and left yourselves hectoring the last few exhausted fools who pay your wages.
Some people say that traffic cameras only punish the essentially decent folk who are traceable through legal documentation, letting uninsured “true” criminals whizz off scot free. In those cases, you do at least have to drive in the bus lane or break the speed limit to catch the robots’ evil eye.
To endure a long, bored wait through an anti-piracy advert on a (did I mention the price? £19.99) DVD, you have to have specifically done nothing wrong at all. If anything, it might drive the obedient purchaser to reflect wistfully on the fact that, if she chose instead to buy black-market films and TV series, she could get them without this deeply annoying advert.
The story concerns two men: Bob, who “invited his friends to watch a DVD he bought in a store”, and Jim, “who invited his friends to watch a DVD he bought on the street”. It’s like Hilaire Belloc on a bad day.
Law-abiding Bob and his attractive, laughing friends enjoy a wonderful evening of film. Street-shopping Jim’s DVD has bad picture quality, which “makes his friends disappear”.
So: legal DVDs make you cool and popular, while pirate ones are the business of friendless dweebs. Nowhere is there any suggestion of right and wrong. Nothing about stealing; nothing about supporting artistic endeavour; it’s all about cool and not cool.
I understand it’s difficult to make people feel guilty in relation to media giants. A tear doesn’t spring to one’s eye when a company loses its £19 profit on a DVD manufactured for tuppence in a Chinese factory – especially if a lot of that money is going to Amazon. In the music industry, you can’t pluck heartstrings with the idea that souped-up BMWs and wraps of cocaine won’t buy themselves.
The same unsentimentality applies to fare dodging, now that private railway companies have created punitive and baffling pricing systems. It applies to keeping accidental extra tenners from “evil” banks, or stealing a little something from chain hotels: a soap, a flannel, the innocence of a bus boy…
When I’m tempted to nab something for free from a corporate giant that can easily afford it, I think of the late, great John Diamond and his computer.
John was crazy about technology, very much the type who would have queued overnight for the iPhone 6 and, when it bent in his pocket, been proud to have got in at the “glitchy” stage.
One time, keen to acquire the latest Apple Mac but feeling guilty about spending £800, he decided to “drop” his existing laptop on the floor, so that his insurance company could fund the new one.
As he held his 18-month-old computer above his head, he suddenly thought: “Is this how I pay the bills?”
He felt no obligation, he knew, to the insurance company, which was comfortably able to pay due to its extortionate inflated premiums. They’d still be in fat profit on his custom. But this was about the sort of man he wanted to be. The way he wanted to make money. The pride he took in the mechanisms by which he supported his household. The difference between creation and destruction. The small scale of the con, if anything, made it worse: it rendered him not just a fraudster but a petty fraudster. And he put the laptop down again.
That’s the kind of logic I admire. It is not without selfishness, but the self-image is bound up with the ethical, inextricable from it. That is how a decent society runs. The Bob-and-Jim story, where “the kind of man you want to be” is entirely about image, coolness and popularity, strikes me as revolting and soulless.
Of course, when 20th Century Fox was making its advert, it wasn’t trying to appeal to me. I’m not a pirate.
Maybe the “cool” argument is just the ticket for those who would steal films and music.
But if those are the people it wants to address, then DON’T PUT THE MESSAGE ON A £19.99 BLOODY DVD.
