The Grind

A Piracy Rant…

Piracy is wrong.  There’s no way around that.  While the prices for things that don’t actually have a limited supply may be higher than I personally believe they should be, intellectual property is property and if you want it, you need to pay for it.  I don’t disagree with that, but we’ll get back to that in a minute.

There has been a rumor swirling around that Microsoft is experimenting with ways to prevent the next XBOX console from playing used games.  For anyone not well versed in video game publishers’ crusade against used games and GameStop in particular, here’s a quick summary: they hate it.  They believe that GameStop is costing them sales.  In a lot of ways it’s similar (though not identical) to the belief by film and music publishers that the number of times a film is viewed or a song is played illegally translates 1:1 to dollars lost based on the price of a ticket/DVD or legal song download. 

Here is a the HUGE logical flaw with this way of thinking, and please note that I’m definitely not the first person to point this out: game, film and music producers are under the mistaken impression that someone illegally downloading or buying a used version of a game, movie or song would have paid full price for the product had they not acquired it through other means.  This is just patently false.  I know from my younger days that if a friend said hey I’ve got this movie on my computer let’s watch it, I watched it ONLY because of it’s availability to me without having to go pay for it.  If that person hadn’t offered me the opportunity to watch that movie and I wasn’t already going to go pay to see it, no one was going to get my money for that.

When I was younger, there were dozens of video games I would never have played or ever even seen if a friend hadn’t come over and brought their copy of the game with them.  I wouldn’t have heard many songs or been exposed to many artists if not for Napster in the early 2000s.  Here’s the kicker - if I heard music from an artist I liked I would later go on and buy the CD or, with the rise of iTunes, buy the album to download.

This is an important distinction to be made.  I’m not capable of offering a solution and I’m certainly not saying that the solution is to allow or endorse the widespread illegal distribution of copyrighted material.  But I think it would help to look at the problem and try to understand it more clearly.  Identify whether a cruise missile can solve the problem instead of a nuke.  Why are people downloading things illegally?  Why are they buying used instead of new?  For argument’s sake, I’m going to ignore the internet denizens who think they’re entitled to free shit all the time and that capitalists are swine.

For a lot of people the issue is simply price. $60 for a new video game is a lot of money.  Especially as publishers try to push us towards downloadable games the storage capacity for consoles grows.  Look, if you’re charging me $60 for a new game in-store, I don’t like it, but I can accept that part of that price involves the cost of producing the disk, packaging, labeling, cover art, etc.  You can’t tell me the same thing when I’m transferring data.  And this is the crux of the matter.  As more and more of our media takes on a digital format and exists solely as data, it becomes harder to justify the insane price points for things.  It simply defies logic and economics for an ebook to priced only two or three dollars less than a hard copy of the same book.  It’s artificial scarcity and it’s transparent.  By charging the same $60 for a download as a disk, you’re making it abundantly clear that cost of production is lower, but you intend to reap the same profits for the product.

Again, there’s intellectual property involved here.  People need to be compensated for that.  But supply and demand works differently when there’s an unlimited supply.  And a step to restrict a gamer’s ability to play a used game is a dangerous step toward something much more frightening.  What that’s essentially saying is we don’t own anything, we’re only paying for a limited right to temporarily access the content under a certain set of restrictions.  How long then before a reproduction of a work of art includes technology that senses when visitors are in your home and goes to a black out because those people haven’t paid for the right to access and view that art?

I’ve sold a few prints of my photographs for probably more than I thought they were worth because I simply priced them at what similar looking art work was going for.  But I would be absolutely horrified at the idea that the new owners were legally required to put a piece of black poster board over the images when they had company.  I know all of that sounds awfully Orwellian, like I’m terrified about some vision of a dystopian future I saw in a movie once (and paid to see!), but it’s really a very taught analogy. 

I write.  I am a photographer.  I produce very valuable products that are the fruit of my brain-labor for a large company.  I understand what intellectual property means, but I also realize that sending someone a PPT slide deck ahead of time doesn’t translate directly to that person skipping my entire seminar.  Change scares people.  If you start saying that we’re moving to an all-digital means of distribution for something, you’re losing jobs for people that press discs or craft boxes or make cover art. 

I get it.  It’s scary and will temporarily lead to an awkward state of existence for people depending on the physical medium for their livelihood.  But this isn’t the first time we’ve faced technological innovation as a civilization.  Let us not pretend that the world crumbled around us when the printing press took away the need for people who were previously paid to copy books by hand.  Or when automated means of assembly took away the need for human laborers.  I’m sympathetic to that plight but stomping out innovation as a whole for fear that people will be unemployed is simply backward.

It’s especially discomforting to see this way of thinking from companies that were previously on the forefront of innovation.  It seems that innovation is only good until it puts you on top and then you need to preserve the status quo.  But I suppose that’s just the way it goes. 

Drive - A Non Review

I finally got to see this on the plane today after wanting to see it for months and the only thing I could think of was “that wasn’t bad, but what is all the hype about?” 

Ryan Gosling stares at people uncomfortable for minutes at a time.  The camera lingers on his face for entire scenes in which Gosling’s character says NOTHING.  This isn’t as strong and artistic as one might think from only hearing the description - in practice it’s very unsettling and feels like I’m watching an art film made by a sixteen year old girl obsessed with Gosling.

There’s no explanation given for why Gosling and Mulligan fall so hard for each other so fast with such minimal interaction besides “I want to touch you and you want to touch me too.” 

Gosling’s character doesn’t say anything for the first twenty minutes of the film besides “Yea” or “OK.”  And it isn’t cool the way it is to not have any dialogue in WALL-E for the first 30 minutes.  It all just came off as very weird.  The premise of the film felt like it could have made for a much better story if they’d spent less time on lingering shots of Baby Goose’s beautiful face and instead allowed for some kind of character development so we can see him transform from the cool driver that doesn’t carry a gun to the hell-bent man on a rampage.  Instead we’re supposed to buy that the guy has this psychotic inner demon.

Albert Brooks, Bryan Cranston and Ron Perlman give good turns, though Cranston is clearly better because his character isn’t pulled from “Organized-Crime Tropes for the Aspiring Screenwriter Kindle Edition.” 

Lastly, I’m tired of Hollywood putting two women in a film and expecting me to agree with the characters on which one is pretty.  Someone in this film calls Christina Hendricks ugly.  Christina Hendricks…ugly.  Granted, they’ve appropriately fugged her up in this film (ewwww no woman can be attractive without a shitload of makeup while wearing flannel!) but still.  Anyway, the main takeaway from this movie is that Christina Hendricks > Carey Mulligan regardless of what Hollywood wants you to believe.  More leading roles for Hendricks please.

WTF GOP?

Does the Republican party realize that each time Gingrich speaks he sets race relations in this country back by five years?  Is that the intended effect or….