I went to the cinema the other evening, paid my £7.50, and sat in my uncomfortable seat through the compulsory hour or so of adverts as they struggled, vainly, to convince me that what I really want, deep down, is to pay too much for things that I don’t need. You know, the usual ‘big screen experience’.
Imagine my delight, then, when something new appeared in the vein of anti-piracy platitudes and beseeched me not to be a ‘Knock-off Nigel’. Now, Anti-piracy adverts don’t usually generate much thought beyond ‘oh do fuck off’, as a rule, but Nigel did. Nigel prompted quite a lot of thought in fact; he made me reassess everything.
I came to the following conclusions.
- The people behind these adverts are facile morons.
- … No, that’s it.
Seriously, is there no understanding of piracy whatsoever within ‘the industry’? How can they fail to realise that people who buy ‘knock-off’ DVDs know what they’re doing, know that what they’re buying isn’t legitimate and, shock-horror, really don’t care. Any childish attempt to guilt-trip or embarrass these people is jakin to pissing in the wind.
The industry habitually makes a big fuss about ‘quality’ and ‘the experience’, and they have a point, quality is important. Presumably, that’s why any pirate worth their salt will only upload/download high quality rips and why, unsurprisingly, most knock-off DVDs are a direct copy of a legitimate one. Quality, while important, isn’t as important as saving yourself five quid down the market to spend on something else later.
The question they really need to answer, the problem the vast army of greedy middle-men need to address, is not how to stop people buying on the cheap, or setting sail in the good ship Yarr, me harties!, it’s how are you going to get people to pay more for something they can easily get their hands on for less. The fact that piracy is illegal is quite beside the point, if you could solve every problem with laws and litigation, we’d be living in utopia by now. People simply don’t care.
I feel if more time and money was spent solving the riddle as to why, instead of making stupid fucking adverts, then maybe they wouldn’t be up to their necks in shit.
As for funding terrorism, *yawn*
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