PIRATES! (The new masters of quality control.)

Avast ye! This torrent of The Green Lantern was an .mov and thar be no Quicktime in these parts!

A new study has been making the rounds across the interwebs which states that the advent of copyright piracy dens the Pirate Bay and torrent clients like BitTorrent have had no effect on Hollywood's box office receipts. Unfortunately, this study has been falsely hailed as the definitive assuagement of the internet's collective guilt over illegal downloads.


Perhaps still in a furor over SOPA, the unbelievably Orwellian attempt to curb piracy that inadvertently proved Hollywood is essentially a branch of the U.S. government, the internet is heralding the study by Wellesley College and the University of Minnesota as vindication that their innumerable illegal downloads were not malicious.

The abstract of the study goes something like this:

Through examination of Box Office receipts before and after the nascence of torrent clients, namely the ubiquitous BitTorrent, researchers found no deviation from the trends of ticket sales in the United States, and were able to deduce that those who were illegally downloading movies would not have paid to see the movies anyway.

The study reinforces one of the main stances taken by advocates of freely torrenting copyrighted material. If the option to download a movie gratis wasn't available, the film would go unseen, rendering cries over lost ticket sales obsolete. Something that would not have existed can't be lost.

The problem with this rationale is that before pirating, those who chose not to pay for a movie didn't get to see a movie. Excluding the tactics of those smelly mall-kids who buy one ticket then sneak into different movies all day, there was no way to reliably see a movie without paying before torrenting.

There is no denying that if everyone who downloaded movies had paid for them, there would be a massive Box Office boom. Hollywood can smell all that money staying in people's wallets, and made a desperate snatch at it with SOPA, but failed because they misunderstood the power of the force they were up against.

Ultimately, studies like this are a nice reassurance to Hollywood of how painfully greedy and unnecessary acts like SOPA are. It's irksome to think that the study will be championed as infallible proof that "piracy" - a term I find incongruous to it's repurposing - is completely excusable in every case.

It's just a matter of respect. If you like a movie, or respect the work of those who made it, think of a ticket sale as a token of appreciation, and a vote of approval for their careers to continue. After all, this is capitalism. We vote with our dollars, not our ballots. If you want to continuously see good movies released in the multiplexes, you have to let the Hollywood machine know that quality filmmaking can be profitable.

So torrent all the shitty movies you want. I know I do. But have some respect for truly talented people. It breaks my heart (metaphorically) to see fantastic movies like Take Shelter and masterful comics like Y: The Last Man up on torrent sites. If everyone who went to see crap like The Vow (as of the time of this writing, the #1 movie in the country) just downloaded it instead, Hollywood might realize that producing shit movies is no longer a viable business model.

Before piracy, people based their monetary support of movies and other media on the potential displayed in advertising or generated by the discussions by others. By giving people access to everything for free, you allow them to save their money from being spent on potential quality and put it toward actual quality, thus more effectively supporting genuinely good content. Copyright piracy has the ability to serve as quality control for the entire Hollywood system, and that might scare Hollywood more than anything.