In Tristan Mattelart's article "Audio-Visual Piracy: Towards a Study of the Underground Networks of Cultural Globalization" the author writes about the teeth-gnashing and wailing of the motion picture industry as it lashes out like a trapped animal at the global pirate movie industry.
His article got me thinking about the communications strategies that groups like the MPAA are using to convince the world that the unauthorized copying of movies is, in fact, a serious crime.
They put out this kind of commercial:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pS_Z2kSFadU&feature=related
And, almost instantly, a thousand parodies of it pop up on Youtube. This is one of my favorites:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtDZ37WFJdk&feature=related
The seriousness of the MPAA is just begging to be ridiculed. And the overblown rhetoric, with the idea that 'stealing a purse is the same as pirating a movie' seemed too familiar to me Anyone my age will remember being forced to attend the D.A.R.E. program in fifth and sixth grade. The programs were riddled with the same kind of rhetoric, basically "if you smoke marijuana you might as well shoot heroin into your eyeball." I almost wonder if the same ad agencies are behind these two campaigns.
The D.A.R.E. campaign, according to most social science studies of it, was as much of a failure as the anti-piracy ad campaign. Mattelart points out the fact that we should question the statistics that the MPAA puts out showing the hundreds of thousands of pirated movies that are broken down by country, because you can't accurately measure the flow of a black market good. Similarly, D.A.R.E. used questionable statistics and fuzzy logic to try and prove that marijuana was a gateway drug.
The MPAA scare ads, with their techno music and quick cuts, make pirating movies seem sexy. If I was a teenager that had no idea what it meant to pirate videos, watching the ad would have made me feel like piracy is definitely something I should check out.
The same is true with D.A.R.E. ads. I remember having conversations with other sixth graders about how amazing drugs must be, since adults were obviously going to a lot of trouble to keep them away from us. Without DARE, I don't think many of us would have been interested in drugs at such a young age.
So, thanks MPAA. Your anti-piracy ads are more entertaining than most of the the movies churned out by the studios you represent. I have to go check my BitTorrent now.
Yeah, these sectors of the movie industry have been shameless in their self-victimization. I can understand how piracy might affect smaller film makers who put everything they have into making a movie. And yet they're not the ones putting up a fight, they can't even afford to do it. The ones fighting are these greedy bastards, and they're certainly not fighting for the smaller fish.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, here's another pathetic attempt at making us feel guilty about piracy. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOniKJlyPxY&feature=related) .
I'll translate the message at the end: "Pirated movies look bad, but you as a parent look worse. What are you teaching your children?"