If you've been watching the news this past week, you'll no doubt have seen reports about the American ship's captain rescued from Somali pirates. Unfortunately, in the days after his rescue, the pirates successfully captured several other vessels. Meanwhile, in film news, famous file-sharing information site The Pirate Bay has been torpedoed by the courts, much to the relief of the big studios. But does this mean that the Jolly Roger will cease to fly in cyberspace? One suspects not.
As the promoters of films like Pirates Of The Caribbean ought to know, piracy has long had connotations of romance and revolution. In many people's eyes (including those of many poor Somalians) the pirate is a figure not unlike Robin Hood, taking from those who have plenty and distributing to those who have little. Studios battling internet file-sharers should have refused to engage with the pirate analogy at the outset. Their conflicting messages that pirates are cool but that file-sharing pirates - the sort many film fans directly benefit from - are bad, were never going to get them very far.
File-sharing, without regard to copyright, will always happen. It's ridiculous to talk about trying to stamp out the technology when many businesses and individuals depend on being able to use it in a legal way, and ISPs will never have the resources to monitor everything going through their systems. Besides, with many more pirates than anti-piracy agents out there, new technologies will develop as fast as old ones can be restricted. The only way to win this war is to stop people wanting pirated goods.
Does that sound impossible? Think again. Whilst cinema adverts telling people to hate pirates have been greeted with boos, hisses and jovial cries of "Arr!", those talking about the difficulties faced by the little people in the film industry, the cast and crew members whose living is threatened by this sort of file-sharing, tend to attract a lot of audience sympathy. As a rule, people downloading films illegally do so because they don't think it's hurting anybody. They don't give a damn about big companies and the likes of Rupert Murdoch. But they appreciate how difficult it can be for ordinary people to make a living, and they love movies - or they wouldn't be doing it - so they certainly want them to carry on being made.
Internet film fans notably came together to condemn the leak last week of an unfinished copy of the new Wolverine film. Still, this seems a natural enough development in a changing culture where it has become commonplace for fans to have read the script long before an eagerly anticipated production reaches the screen, rather diminishing its impact (and their pleasure). Also causing scandal was Roger Friedman's review of the leaked film. It seems unfair to review a film on this basis (though Friedman actually liked it a lot), but at the same time, it's the business of a journalist to hunt down stories, and the leak was a major story in itself. If he had watched the leaked film and then commented on the piracy, rather than actually reviewing it, would he still have lost his job? Should he?
Friedman commented that he had downloaded the film because it was easier than going out in the rain to a press screening. Whilst we may not approve of his actions, there can't be many journalists out there who don't feel a twinge of sympathy. The fact is that a lot of film never actually get press screenings, but are shown to journalists, prior to their release, via DVDs. Why not just provide them online? The main reason this doesn't happen is that distributors are afraid illegal copies will be made, but there's no reason why journalists couldn't be required to join a register first, enabling them to be struck off if they broke the rules. Online copies could be marked with codes to make them identifiable if they were leaked. The transfer process could be made as secure as it is for the many major businesses exchanging material like this.
What's needed is more trust between all the different players in the movie game - studios, journalists and audiences. Rather than being threatened with lawsuits, people need to be encouraged to take responsibility for their own actions. For a start, let's do away with the paranoia about people filming movies in cinemas via handheld devices. Nobody wants to watch that kind of thing - in fact, several famous pirates make it a point of pride never to touch such material, no matter how much of a scoop it represents. The truth is that most pirated films come from one of two sources - they're copied from DVDs and preview discs, or they're leaked directly from the studios by disgruntled workers. There are practical ways of dealing with these problems that don't require annoying members of the public by trying to take away their phones.
Wolverine will be on the big screen on the 29th, and for real fans of the X-Men franchise, that'll be the only way to see it. Not because they hate pirates, or because they think it's fair to lock people up for running specialist search engines, but simply because they love the cinema experience. A movie like this is about going out with friends, maybe having a few drinks first, getting in some popcorn, laughing along at the trailers and then settling back in one's seat for a rollicking good ride. It's a great card for the studios to hold, so they should play it, instead of working hard, as they currently are, to make themselves look like the bad guys.
