Intellectual Property and Piracy and Congress Oh My!

So the hot topic for right now is of course SOPA and PIPA.  I have a lot of beef with these, and I think most everyone who reads my blog already knows a lot of the reasons why.  The legislation is to fighting piracy what using a flamethrower is to lighting a candle.  It will do the job, and hurt a lot of other people in the process.

But what I really want to talk about is the effect of piracy.  Lots of the Anti-SOPA/PIPAers have started to become pro-pirates.  Lets be clear here, being Anti-Bad Legislation is being Pro-Intellectual Property Theft are not the same thing.  Intellectual property is a hugely important topic in our world.  We exist in a time when information is more valuable than physical objects in many cases.  This is true of books, music, movies, software, websites all sorts of things.  When you buy an album the CD and package are a tiny fraction of the cost, you are paying for the content.

So why am I upset about piracy?  I don't sell my films, I provide them for free on the internet and anyone can watch them whenever they like.  So pirates are not stealing profits from me right?  What they are doing is taking away my audience.  I do hope to one day make films for profit, and have my ideas for short films or feature films become the predominant way I pay my bills.  This can never happen unless I am able to build up an audience of people who like and share my work.  Currently, everything I make, I make so that it can be shared.  You like one of my videos?  Pass it along to someone else.  I don't even mind if you download it off YouTube and burn it to a DVD and watch it or pass it around to people.  (I would like it if you watched on YouTube because then I can follow the analytics though)  Share it through bit-torrents, package it with your favorite other shorts and give it to your friends for their birthday.  By all means, if I provide you content for free, spread it around like a four year old fingerpainting when no one is watching.

When pirates give away movies for free, that cuts into the market of people I am trying to provide content for.  The people who don't want to pay.  If you have the option of paying nothing for one of my films, made on a budget of under a thousand dollars, with some rookie mistakes here and there, with actors you have never heard of, and special effects that don't really make your eyes bug out of your head.... or paying nothing for 'Hugo', with all the talent and amazing images that a multimillion dollar budget can buy.  Why on earth would you pick my work over that?  I understand the consumer who downloads the illegal copy, someone is offering you something of value for free.  But every time you decide to spend two hours watching a pirated movie instead of watching content provided for free (like mine or that of other young production companies) you are hurting the independent film makers and independent artists.

We depend on our low price point of free to help us compete with productions that have staggering budgets.  It is the one thing that we have up our sleeve to tip the balance towards independent production.  Pirates rob us of that.  I know that they think they are robbing people with huge fistfuls of money, so no big deal.  But they are robbing us, and they are robbing the artistic community as a whole.  I may not become the next great American director, but who is to say that they are not lurking on YouTube or Vimeo in obscurity because the people who would be their fans, are too busy watching stolen copies of Transformers 3?



After re-reading this post I realized my own hypocrisy.  Originally I had a really cute picture of a kid finger painting all over the floor and making a huge mess.  But then I realized, that is piracy too.  It is hard to avoid stealing other people's work sometimes in the attempt to create good quality content, especially for free.  But using that picture would be just as wrong as someone downloading Kanye West from Megaupload.  So instead, you get this picture that is in the public domain, which is close to right, but not quite.