Piracy

I slide the DVD into the computer and wait for the robot to take my disc.  I'm psyched to see Guy Ritchie's latest installment of dumb fun: Sherlock Holmes 2.  I murmur a little apology to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose character is now a free-agent in the public domain, and wait for my passive diversion to kick in.  

The first thing I notice is that there is no DVD menu and no string of eight compulsory movie trailers; instead the DVD jumps in at the opening credits.  The picture is a little shaky, and the Spanish audio is too despite the fact that I was told, yes indeed, there is an English option.  Suddenly, the camera dips, and there the silhouette of a head in the lower left corner.  Actually, the head takes up the lower left quarter of the screen.  

Thus I learned never to buy pirated DVDs that come in plastic sandwich bags.  I'd also purchased Madagascar 4 for the kids this way, which also wasn't in English.  At some point, the pirates lost the audio and just re-looped the first half of the movie on the second half, which didn't make sense even in a language we could half understand.  And then the end was cut off.  The kids were pretty good sports, and after the wailing subsided, we went out and bought some fun-dip, or rather a fun-dip knockoff.

So I quickly moved up to the high-end shops, palatial in comparison to the baggie stalls, most of which are farther away from the markets in real store-fronts -- these joints hock their wares in plastic cases we're familiar with in North America.  And the luxury of a good pirated copy comes at a premium price: a buck twenty-five, or ten for ten dollars.  

How could I perpetrate such a crime?  How do I justify this copyright theft?  Well, thanks to my big brain (apologies, Mr. Vonnegut) I have lots of rationales, some of which may even be logical.  Chief among them is that there is no such thing as a legitimate movie store in Ecuador, at least so far as I've seen.  The market, I guess, has rendered them anachronistic.  If I told someone here that we pay 15 to 30 bucks for a DVD in the US, they'd look at me like I just told them I let my son play with Barbies (™).  (Of course I do -- he loves them.  We even paid the industry rate to download Barbie, Mermaid Princess -- a quality film if you ask me.)  

But nobody pays 100 bucks or more for the whole Sopranos series -- those are things you own only if you've received them as gifts (which I wouldn't mind receiving for Xmas by the way, mom or dad).  No, now we stream our stuff from Netflix at X dollars a month.  Or if you're under 30, you scoff at the idea of oldsters like us paying anything for music or movies with several bit-torrent sites at your fingertips.  

I have to admit that I loathe those Hollywood lackeys, the MPAA, the main proponent of those ridiculous ads, "you wouldn't steal a car would you?  Buying a pirated a DVD is the same thing" or some such hyperbolic nonsense.  And so if purchasing a bootleg version of Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter makes me feel like I'm sticking a finger in the eye of the MPAA, I'll take it.  We used to lend each other Ghostbusters VHS tapes, and no one minded.  We used to record Star Trek: The Next Generation, maybe even on beta, and no one was trying to crack down, even when we converted the whole series to VHS.  

One of the industry's main arguments against piracy is that every dollar spent on a pirated movie is a dollar "robbed" from the filmmakers.  Many have already disputed this bogus notion: no one is going to actually purchase Fast and Furious 5… but they will watch it for a freebie.  Which is essentially marketing for that franchise, so goes the argument.  

Author Neil Gaiman did a 180 on the issue when he noticed that sales of his books were the greatest in the places where piracy was the highest (namely, Russia).  So he convinced his publisher to release his novel American Gods on the internet for free, for one month.  Sales of American Gods subsequently went up 300 percent.  When he gives lectures, Gaiman routinely asks how people came to find their favorite authors; almost invariably, someone lent them the book… for free.

Back here in Ecuador, there seems to be no such thing as copyright.  You see the guy from Ratatouille and Foghorn Leghorn and any number of characters advertising restaurants.  You see a bazillion decals on a bazillion cars -- pioneer, adidas, nike, apple -- they love their logos here, no matter how far from context they wander.  Even fishing boats will sport an Umbro or Reebok tag.  

Then there are the products, clothes being among the most prevalent.  If you find Hollister, American Eagle, and Gap stuff in the same store, you can be pretty sure that they are ersatz products.  I myself purchased a sweet "Adidas" track suit for under twenty bucks.  The tag from the original clothing maker was actually still on the garment.  Do I occasionally feel a pang of shame to know that my duds are not the real deal?  You bet I do, but I'm getting over it, "it" being decades of conditioning by advertisers that I need to own a certain product to be cool/hip/in or whatever.   

On the flip side, my students at the university have no notion, it seems, of academic integrity when it comes to "borrowing" or using other sources.  For the first assignment, I even received three versions of the same thing -- in a class of nine students!  When I addressed this concern with my boss, her response was a vacant look, as if to say, "this is a problem?"  So instead of trying to take on a systemic, possibly cultural issue, I threw away all of the bogus work and now only give creative assignments that can't be plagiarized.  

Perhaps the best example of copyright infringement is with the works of Ecuador's most famous painter, Oswaldo Guayasamín.  You can find dozens of faithful copies of his works at any given market.  These faithful reproductions, however, pale against the originals (though they are much closer to the source than when I do "It's Tricky" in my Adidas (not) tracksuit.)

I wonder what Guayasamín (who died in '99) thought of all of the copies of his work -- he must have seen them.  I'd wager it was closer to the sincerest form of flattery than ham-fisted legal attacks on Joey in his dorm-room downloading Shania Twain and Metallica from the bastard stepchildren of Napster.  Whether you like the music or not, there was always something endearing about the direct "file" sharing of Grateful Dead shows in the form of cassette tapes, now streamed on the internet for free.

I like Woody Jackson's stuff, but I thought it was sad he went after copies of his Ben and Jerry's cows -- I doubt B and J minded much.  Better to laugh it off and make something new if you ask me.  I don't think Jackson lost anything by people reprinting cows.  Bo Muller-Moore (AKA the Eat More Kale guy), on the other hand, is being harangued by a gigantic corporation, Chick-fil-A, and teams of lawyers for copyright infringement because "Eat More Kale" they say, is too close to "Eat Mor Chick'n," which is, of course, ludicrous and why corporate lawyers need restraining bolts (Star Wars, Episode IV (c)).  For his part, Muller-Moore has turned this into an advertising bonanza, more popular than he ever was before the suit.  Given the choice, I'll take Ecuador's lax approach to copyright over this shenanigans.

So Sherlock Holmes has Kung Fu moves now -- at least Ritchie explains this by showing Downey Jr.'s Holmes thinking through his moves.  While I love the original Holmes, I have to allow that I enjoy this, too.