First of all, I'd like to share a recently learnt fact about the original pirates. The word "buccaneer" actually comes from the French word "boucanier" meaning "user of a boucan" which was a kind of barbeque used for smoking meat for storage on long voyages. Pirates were common users of the boucan, and eventually the word became associated with their trade. So really most people could call themselves a buccaneer without breaking the law.
But what I really want to put my two cents in on is video piracy. Things have been hotting up for pirates these days. Pirate Bay was raided, Kickass Torrents had its domain seized (again), and even Demonoid is still having trouble. Pressure is on in Australia for anti-piracy laws to be passed. Pretty soon ISPs will be the privateers of today; limiting the internet access of suspected pirates in an effort to force piracy rates down.
Honestly this idea is laughable. If there's one thing the government should know about pirates it's that they're incredibly resourceful fiends. The odds of such a scheme making any significant impact on piracy are very low; although the threat of capture may put off some (a bit like a gibbet swinging in the ocean breeze).
Limiting internet access though? In AUSTRALIA? This is a country that can't even co-ordinate a national broadband network without constant stuff-ups. A country with pitiful internet as it is (I myself get by on a mere 20gb per month and an average download rate of around 1mb per second). There's not much left to limit really.
Surely there's a better solution.
I am a pirate. I get up at 6am to use my off-peak data to download tv shows and movies I can't get anywhere else. I'm hurting hundreds, probably thousands, of people who worked their guts out to make the stuff I'm stealing. But this should be a signal for a change in the marketing and sale of these products, not for the punishment of people who would otherwise have to wait weeks, months even, for the content a million other people are enjoying right now.
Sure, Netflix is on its way to Aus right now, along with a couple of competitors; but for a lot of Australians this means nothing. For those of us still stuck on mobile broadband, or fickle ADSL, or just a really crappy data allowance, bufferless YouTube videos can seem like a distant dream, and Netflix is little more than a myth or fairytale.
For us, like the desperate sailors of the 1700s, there is little choice. We could wait months for television to catch up, or the dvd to come out (whichever comes first), and shun the internet for a similar amount of time to avoid the dreaded spoiler. Or, we could sign up to the world-wide pirate crew and claim our share of the entertainment gold which is rightfully ours. For many, the choice is easy, but I know a lot of us feel press-ganged into service.
Take, for example, the recent Australian-made zombie flick Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead. It looks like a fun movie, home grown and bloody good (pun intended). But unfortunately only showing in select cinemas. I respect the 4 years of hard work these people put into making their own movie, and I want to show that respect through a little bit of money. I want to see this movie in a cinema. But it seems like in Australia we can't even be bothered to give our own movies a national release, and the only other place to see them is on the pirate ship.
TV shows are worse. It's less than 2 months until season 5 of GoT comes out. We've only just started screening How To Get Away With Murder. They're advertising it as "the mystery all Australia will be scrambling to solve!" Nope, they'll be scrambling to google it, because the internet already knows. You know our networks once tried to advertise an almost 2 year-old show as "fast-tracked from the US"? It's just ridiculous.
If the government wants to stop piracy, maybe they should take a good hard look at the reasons people turn pirate these days. It's certainly not for lack of respect for the industry, no more than the original pirates lacked respect for gold. Most of us just want a fair go, like many pirates just needed a way to survive, if we don't
need to pirate anymore then we
won't. Why is that so hard for people to understand?
