Some Film Rants

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WARNING: May contain traces of typos, run-on sentences, and unnecessary profanities.
Proceed but with CAUTION!

You can also slog through my essay on Kieslowski done for the wonderful film history class by Prof. Charles Ramírez Berg in Spring 2015.

Some irrelevant views on piracy (esp. of popular entertainment)

I think it is clear that any infringement on IP is clearly a kind of stealing, should you believe that only creators of a work has the ultimate power on its distribution. So no whining about that. However, there are several other effects to be considered. First I believe the $ lost claimed by the industry is mostly bogus. This is because if we really have to put a price tag on the value being stolen, it has to be based on what the pirates think. For example, if the cheapest option is to buy a dvd/book for 50 bucks online, should I choose to pirate it somewhere else (be it the sea of torrents, file sharing services, or even the library), what the producer lose is most definitely not $50. Simply because that I would totally prefer to have the dvd/book in hand if I could buy it for 10 dollars. All the effort I went through to steal is caused by a mismatch in valuing the products. Perhaps it is important to point out that in the world of individuals, the value system is never fair nor can it be fixed by any single party. This is in fact the foundation of capitalistic organizations.

Then there's the idea, which pirates frequently champion, "the exposure." Surly it seems wrong, but in this day and age revolving around information flow, any reduction in the barrier of "entry" does indeed creates a deeper market penetration, which is something that business people should always value.

Finally the most silly one of my points: I think the pirates can play the victim. It is almost a basic human desire to not be left out and collect as much as possible. The amount of their time and energy wasted on consuming pirated media, while can't possibly be compensated, should still be recognized.

Of course this whole discussion ignored a very significant population of pirates, the ones who are doing it to make bank. These people are probably paying for the content just to share it freely online so that they can profit from some sort of ad revenue. They exist just to exploit how (certain) consumers value IP drastically differently comparing to the makers. And it seems only honesty and a pay whatever you want system can fix this problem. (or we can approximate that solution with a minimum price, which is being done but requires a lot of effort in judgment to come up with that proper price. on the other hand, services like patreon are helping awesome youtubers like Brady and Dustin etc. to fill the revenue gap. And I am sorry to say that I block ads and have yet to donate to them.)