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.
