Saturday, April 22, 2006

Would You Steal A Car?
Among their guilt inducing efforts to reduce piracy, the movie industry now includes these short infoganda pieces on DVDs that start by asking you the question, Would you steal a car? Now I do not condone or support stealing or piracy. But, let's not mention the fact that both the movie and the music industries should be among the last to try to guilt someone with admonitions regarding stealing from artists. I mean the music industry was built on stealing from artists. How many artists died dirt poor and broke while the industry itself got filthy rich off their music? And even today how many million album selling artist are there who eventually end up broke after everyone in the industry takes their cut from them? The movie industry is just as guilty. And though you see the Tom Cruises and other superstars who make $20 million a picture, that's not the history of the business.

And also not to mention the fact that I have bought the same damn album in almost half a dozen different formats from vinyl to 8-track tape to cassette tape to CD to mp3. And the movies have had Beta, VHS, laser disk and now DVD. Still, it is bad karma to steal. Even if you're stealing from huge faceless evil corporations. So I thought about the question. And I had to be honest with myself. And I thought, well, if the car could be downloaded over the Internet in the privacy of my own home without anyone knowing, or if it could be illegally copied onto cheap media on my home computer, I would be very tempted. But it would an environmentally friendly Flex Fuel car or a gas/electric Hybrid car. I mean I wouldn't want the karma of driving a gas guzzling SUV on top of stealing.

Pirated available at the Revolutionary Store

2 comments:

www.vascts.com said...

Very well said, I agree!

Julio-Debate Popular said...

I think that artists earn less, but the real losers are the record companies. The industry is losing, the artist has a value and has a way of showing that large-scale billing value.