We bought Amy a Nintendo DS for her birthday. It’s all part of our grand strategy to stop all conflict within our family. The theory is that if we all focused on individual hand held gadgets rather than each other and reduce all interaction to unintelligible grunts then there will be no opportunities for falling out. We’re doing well so far, only Evan refuses to comply with the new regime, choosing instead to wander round the house hugging family members and saying he loves them. The turncoat! We’ll beat it out of him yet by jove!
When I mentioned Amy’s impending DS ownership at work someone asked me if I was going to get an R4 card so I can pirate games for it.
Copyright is a difficult issue and I have a muddled and slightly hypocritical stance on it (now isn’t that a surprise). I’m not a particularly big pirate. If it’s been on TV then I consider it fair game and I’m not above downloading the odd MP3 for trial purposes. I also once read that piracy is integral to photoshop’s marketing strategy – people having illegal copies at home means that it’s brand leadership and loyalty and knowledge base is maintained. This in turn leads to companies and corporations buying legitimate licences to use it. I have no idea if that is actually true, but it is morally convenient for me to believe so.
These days I rarely feel the need to download illegal MP3s anyway what with the magnificent Spotify (which incidentally is still not available in the USA yet. How’s that feel eh? Not getting something first for a change. Burns doesn’t it?). And I don’t tend to bittorrent any video purely due to the immense amount of time and disk space it takes up.
But don’t get me wrong, I do pirate. Mainly by ripping TV DVD box sets I’ve borrowed from Lovefilm. This means I can watch them on my iPhone during quiet periods at at work, in bed before going to sleep, or while Kerry is trying to tell me something important. In fact the increasing trend of a simultaneous disparity in TV watching between huge HD 86 inch televisions and the tiny low res portable screens of iPods and laptops is a fascinating and probably worthy of a post in itself. But not today you’ll no doubt be relieved to hear.
I do try to practice what I preach. All of my photos on flickr are placed under the creative commons license, which basically means anyone is free to use and make derivative works from them as long as they inform and credit me. This has lead to my photos being used in some pretty cool stuff – including tourist brochures and German teaching magazine. I’d put my writings on this blog under the same licence too if I could work out how to change the little © in the footer.
However I recognise that me surrendering the copyright on my creative efforts is different from me breaching the copyright of someone else. Especially if the owner of that copyright is trying to make a living through their creations. Breaching copyright may be the most socially acceptable form of theft, but ultimately it’s still theft and knowing this I still engage in it. This, I suppose, makes me a theif.
But I’d rather not think of myself as a criminal, rather a loveable rogue like Danny Ocean, Raffles, or the greatest of all gentleman thieves Hudson Hawk. Because I’m a thief with principles – namely I refuse to pay pirates. I would never buy knock off DVD’s from the ubiquitous “man in the pub” for example. If anyone is to profit from me buying Smokey and the Bandit then it should be the geniuses that created it, not some halfwit who’s worked out how to open and shut the DVD drawer on his PC. In a similar vein I’d never have a games console “chipped”, even though the price of games these days is astronomical.
So I’ll not be getting a R4 card for Amy’s DS, even though it is very tempting. Because besides everything else I’m not sure what sort of message that would be sending out to her. It’s difficult enough for us adults to walk through that murky moral quagmire of copyright infringement without straying off the straight and narrow, but for children still calibrating their ethical compass this becomes even more difficult. What lessons would I be teaching Amy and Evan if I told them not to bother spending money on things they want because we’re able to steal it instead?
Yet even as I type this I’m aware that yesterday we borrowed the Mama Mia soundtrack from the library and now it’s sitting smugly on my hardrive. As I say, I’m a hypocrite and the lines I’ve drawn in the sand are nothing if not arbitrary.
The only thing that’s clear here is that I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, thinking, or saying on nearly every parenting issue you can think of. Oh, and that I’m probably going to get swooped on by F.A.C.T. as a result of disclosures made in this post.
Let’s just hope they don’t find my podcast archive.
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on Nov 22nd, 2009 at 11:50 am
Maggie´s last blog ..Normal service will shortly be resumed…
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Dan Reply:
November 22nd, 2009 at 9:58 pm
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on Nov 22nd, 2009 at 1:13 pm
Andrew´s last blog ..The Proposed Cookie Law
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Dan Reply:
November 22nd, 2009 at 9:57 pm
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on Nov 22nd, 2009 at 1:15 pm
I buy stuff I réally like and which is somewhat affordable but I still download tons of stuff incl music, tv-series, movies, games and software.
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Dan Reply:
November 22nd, 2009 at 9:56 pm
we do buy boxed sets quite a lot, but only if they are discounted.
Ultimately I think that the media companies are going to have to keep prices of their goods very low if they want to dissuade people for pirating.
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on Nov 22nd, 2009 at 3:25 pm
I have never downloaded a film, song or video knowingly illegally – that’s because I’m pretty sure the first time I did it I would be caught out. So best not to do it. I also hate bad pirate copies of films, and refuse to pay for or even watch them.
Having said that I’m sure there are other ways of copyright infringement that I have trespassed into, and I’m conscious of this when preparing teaching materials and lessons. I try to use copyright free material, but you know, sometimes you just can’t find what you need so you have to use what you can.
notSupermum´s last blog ..Things my daughters cannot do: part one
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Dan Reply:
November 22nd, 2009 at 9:54 pm
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on Nov 22nd, 2009 at 6:07 pm
The UK is in danger of passing the most draconian copyright protection measures in the world. Peter Mandelson is proposing legislation that would allow record companies to force schools to hand over previously confidential information about pupils. The record companies could then force schools to cut pupils off from the internet… it’s getting quite scary.
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Dan Reply:
November 22nd, 2009 at 9:51 pm
To be honest I’m not sure what the answer to this is. People need to make their money, but the business models need to change to reflect reality.
It’s a tricky one.
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on Nov 22nd, 2009 at 8:54 pm
Julian Baggini wrote a great book about the British observing that they are often characterised of fair play, yet almost everyone tries to avoid tax – even so called socialists – usually on the basis that they have ‘already done their bit’.
I have less respect for the big gaming and entertainment companies who use intellectual property as a means to make monopoly profits. My boys have an R4 – absolutely no quarms!
And interestingly, we just posted 9 Ds games on ebay – new they must have cost us near to £300 – and yet now I’ll be happy if they make forty quid.
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Dan Reply:
November 22nd, 2009 at 9:50 pm
Or as I prefer to put it, a deep and complex man.
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on Nov 22nd, 2009 at 8:59 pm
It was a friend who suggested having the PS’s “chipped” so that we could buy those dodgy pirate copies of games from him, he in turn got them from his place of work along with loads of knock-off videos and music CD’s.
I declined, if only for the fact that I knew, I just knew, that if I “chipped” my PS’s then they would go faulty within hours and I’d have some explaining to do down at Toys R Us.
My friends profession ?
He is a police officer of course (true story).
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Dan Reply:
November 22nd, 2009 at 9:48 pm
Are you still using napster these days, I imagine spotify has taken over from them for a great many of their users.
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Gary Reply:
November 23rd, 2009 at 9:12 am
I also use Media Monkey to play my own “cough” borrowed “cough” collection of MP3’s but also for its damn good collection of internet radio stations, my music listening hours now outnumber my TV viewing hours by a factor of dozens now.
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on Nov 22nd, 2009 at 10:08 pm
We tend not to pirate, but that is mostly down to time!!! infact since having children I am so behind the times musically is is frightening.
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Dan Reply:
November 25th, 2009 at 8:01 pm
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on Nov 22nd, 2009 at 10:49 pm
Me, I am content with ripping a few music cd’s from friends and the Library on occasion, to my hard drive.
If I like the music, then I go out and buy the new release, which I would never have done before said ripping.
Seattledad´s last blog ..My 1st Kiss & A Bowl of Hot Random to Go.
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Dan Reply:
November 25th, 2009 at 8:02 pm
I do buy some stuff i’ve “sampled”. But i must admit i just as often keep the sampes but not buy the album.
I’m not sure what the answer will be for the music industry. Lower wages and more touring i suspect.
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on Nov 23rd, 2009 at 1:05 am
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Dan Reply:
November 25th, 2009 at 8:00 pm
And it’s my belief that UK TV lisence fee players should be allowed to download any BBC TV or radio programs without no qualms whatsoever.
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on Nov 23rd, 2009 at 3:08 pm
I’m rambling – main cause of problems in music industry isn’t piracy but lack of anything worth pirating on the major labels.
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Dan Reply:
November 25th, 2009 at 7:58 pm
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on Nov 23rd, 2009 at 6:16 pm
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Dan Reply:
November 25th, 2009 at 7:57 pm
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on Nov 24th, 2009 at 10:23 pm
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Dan Reply:
November 25th, 2009 at 7:57 pm
Thanks for that copy of microsoft offce btw.
Dan´s last blog ..Qtag and the art of scribbling on T-Shirts
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