Ok so I’m still thinking about piracy – though I still think we need to phrase the whole debate better. After all, Pirates are cool. This, I presume, is why the Industry (or The Man, an even cooler name if you ask me) is desperate to rebrand internet Pirates as Thieves. However like so much else in the virtual world this is still giving far too much kudos to the activity. “Surfing for pirate p2p networks” is a very glamourous term for sitting in your bedroom watching a download bar creep across the screen…

Anyway, despite some impassioned debate on all Shooting People bulletins this morning I still feel that “piracy” is just an easy scapegoat for the problems of our free-to-view culture. As an Englishman I grew up with the firm idea that there were two sorts of TV and Radio programme, those that were paid for by advertising and those that were paid for by the BBC License Payer. Programmes with adverts were generally not as good, but you didn’t mind so much because you hadn’t had to pay for them. It still remains every British Citizen’s natural right to complain about the BBC because that’s my money you’re giving to Jonathan Ross.

With the launch of the superb BBC iPlayer though all that has changed. At the moment the only television I watch is “Stuart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle”, “Newswipe” and French police drama “Spiral”. All of these I watch at random points of sleeplessness throughout the week using the BBC iPlayer. I do still have a television and so somewhere along the line a license fee has gone into the pot to pay for all these three rare delights but I could quite happily – and legally – live without one.

If you’re reading this in America the case is clearer. If you follow my link to David Hepworth’s brilliant programme about the history of music bootlegging you will be listening to a radio programme that I helped pay for – but for you – it’s free. OK you’re paying for the broadband (or is that free as the air now as well?) but you’re not paying for the content and if I sold (or just broke) my TV I wouldn’t have to either.

How different is watching “Stuart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle” on iPlayer to watching a pirated copy of “In The Loop”? The BBC have paid Armando Iannucci for his creative role in both and both the pirate and legitimate platforms hinge on the idea that this stuff is out there – it exists – it has been made and, as such, is mine if I can get hold of it. (I have not done this, I’m only too desperate to go to the cinema and pay to see this film – and by the sound of things, so should you be.)

Again, I’m not trying to say that therefore pirating is ok, just that we need to think carefully about how stuff gets paid for. I am a fan of the licence fee, I’m a fan of public service broadcasting and a production ethos of something other than a simple ratings chase. However increasingly it’s just looking like a tax on technophobes…

So piracy is wrong but it isn’t stealing (see below for details). In film making there is, however, another confusion and our own beloved Shooting People website is a very good example of it.

Filmmakers, especially those who make short films, are constantly encouraged to give their work away for free. So much so that it can often be seen as quite an affront if you refuse to do so. Shooting People offers a superb online streaming service where members can watch each other’s films for free. Youtube offers the same freedom to anyone with a broadband connection. There are plenty others doing the same thing.

For some, like Shooting People and the BBC Film Network the benefit to the company is a mixture of kudos and what we were set up to do. For many though, the benefit is to monetise the dead-air (or advertising space) on either side of the film. Not all platforms and producers share the revenue generated in this way with the filmmakers. If you challenge this then usually the response boils down to the idea that if you’re making a short film you should be grateful for the chance to get it shown and stop whinging.

As I said before, with other creative industries, giving away your work can make economic sense if you can use it to create an audience for a live show or other thing that can generate you money. For filmmakers this hope generally lies in getting either a feature film or television project commissioned.

However I think the logic of this jump is skewed because we’re not dealing like with like. A performer who is funny in a two-minute clip on the internet is probably going to be funny again in a two-minute sketch on BBC 3. A director who makes a funny two-minute clip on the internet probably isn’t ready yet.

Perhaps I’m being overly cynical but I don’t actually know of any writers, directors or producers who have built true commercial success on the basis of internet clips. I do though know a great many execs who would need a great deal more than a short film on youtube to convince them that a director was ready to take on a bigger project.

I’m not saying that having your work online will hurt, or that it will not help at all. But remember the core of the piracy argument is not about stealing, it is about lowering the value of your creative work. As filmmakers we have no one to blame for this but ourselves.

So how’s about this for an argument – for the majority of Shooters reading this the fuss about piracy is like the fuss over changing the rate of inheritance tax so that you can keep the first million. You may feel like you want to be able to keep that first million as something to aspire to, but in truth it’s not going to impact on your life.

Why are we getting hung up about piracy when we’re mostly all willingly giving our work away for nothing anyway?

Come on you Vikings – pirate this:

Free Speech

Or alternatively – don’t pirate it – click here and vote for it instead.

Ok so I still don’t know what I think about piracy. One thing that does annoy me is the “you wouldn’t steal a handbag” line of reasoning that hopes to make people question the morality of creative piracy.

At first glance this is a compelling point. I certainly wouldn’t dream of stealing someone’s handbag, I wouldn’t smash a car window and take a stereo and when a man hit me in the face and ran off with my laptop I found the whole experience to be “very unsatisfactory” (as I put it in the hour long IPSO/Mori phone poll that seems to come as a sort of special but pointless extra feature of the contemporary legal process.)

However, the point is that in downloading a pirated song or film you are not stealing someone else’s handbag. When self-styled “musical expeditionary” Bob Dylan felt that he needed to have Paul Nelson’s rare folk records more than Paul Nelson, he had no option open to him but to deprive Nelson of them. If the same need struck the great man today he could simply go online and download the same music without having to disturb Nelson at all.

Pirating in the internet sense is not stealing a handbag, it is the magical creation of an identical handbag. The important ethical implication of this is that it pushes the crime out of the window.

Pirating involves neither violence nor depriving someone of their property. Rather the crime is that of stopping a creator earning the full market value of their work – a role more traditionally fulfilled by record labels, film studios, distributors and broadcasters all of whom exist by piggybacking off someone else’s talent and skill.

Now obviously that’s a sweeping statement and one I don’t intend to stand by. I fully accept that the great majority of distributors, agents, labels and studios act with their artist’s best interests at heart and it is only through their hard work that the artist is really able to bring their creativity to a commercial audience. This is especially the case of my agent.

However the history of film is littered with notable examples to the contrary. If you are looking for the traditional and historical role of user than I give you Colonel Tom Parker who almost single-handedly hamstrung the King of Rock and Roll, limited his creative scope, controlled his every waking act and got very rich whilst his meal-ticket was kept in the relative poverty of extreme luxury.

If you are looking for an ethical model to shame people with then don’t say that pirates are stealing handbags. Pirating makes you into a Colonel Tom.

OK so this is me working out my thoughts on piracy as I go. The previous post, (VIKING ATTACKS) which is well worth reading, talks about music and the way that pirate recordings on the internet can encourage you to seek out and buy new things that you would not have otherwise fallen in love with. It also talks about how Spotify (who aren’t sponsoring me but should be) can act as a brilliant replacement to a radio industry which has been crippled by mediocrity.

However music is very different to film and so piracy has a very different effect. I’m probably going to sum this up at the start of the next post but for those of you interested, I’m going to explore the idea because it means a lot to me.

When we started out on Shooting People’s first ever Mobile Cinema we were regularly told that we were proving that film was the new rock music. We were a band on tour, we had the battered bus and the nightly routine of set-up, gig, dismantle, piss-up that goes with it.

But, whilst this was a great line to drink to, it never felt especially true to the bunch of us in the van. I still feel that what we learnt on the Mobile Cinema was a unique lesson in why so many films (short, feature, fiction, documentary, the lot) are so bad at really reaching an audience.

The film industry is not set up to reach out to people. As a band it’s expected of you to play gigs, to find an audience, to bring your work to them. As a filmmaker the norm is to make your work and then throw it out into the world and wait with growing fury and frustration for the money and applause to come back to you. Screening films night after night up and down the country taught my brother and me some important lessons about making films people actually want to see, not just those we want to make.

[caption id="attachment_305" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Mobile Cinema, ready for action."][/caption]

However, we were lucky because though we did show one of our films (OK and occasionally more than one when things got very drunken) we were able to draw on a catalogue of work made by the entire Shooting People community. We were lucky to be at the helm and learn the lessons at first hand, but this is not something that it’s easy for every filmmaker to do.

In the five years since the first Mobile Cinema most of the filmmakers whose work we screened have only made, at most, two more films. It just takes… time. As a result the gig circuit is never something that individual filmmakers are going to be able to get stuck into.

Free music on the internet can draw audiences to buy albums – more importantly it can shift gig tickets. Increasingly this is the way the music industry works. Which is why we’ve seen the shift in importance from “new” music to the, one time utterly unthinkable rise of “nostalgia” bands. Today real money in music is not in selling records by the latest thing, it’s selling tickets to see a band you thought you’d never get a chance to see again.

Similarly the internet is full of comedy. For instance, here’s a clip of my mates Tom and Gemma…

Stand-ups, sketch shows, new talent all quite happy to give their best lines away for free because they know that this is a sure fire way of encouraging audiences to pay to see them live, they know that a couple of million hits on youtube can open the door to a TV commission.

In both cases the “free to view” material, which is often also either “pirate” or at least sees no direct revenue returning to the creator, has a knock on benefit. An album is a loss leader on gig sales in the same way that a £5 Harry Potter book helps Tesco sell potatoes.

The problem for filmmakers is that we don’t have anything else to sell.

I find myself in an unusual position regarding the Pirate Bay ruling which has seen a bunch of Swedish Pirates (or Vikings as we used to call them) sent to prison. Normally I am boringly full of opinion about events but the surrounding buzz about the rights and wrongs of piracy and the entire future of creative capitalism leaves me confused.

First of all I, naturally enough, agree with Lee’s sentiments about getting paid for making stuff up. However I think Cath was closer to the mark when she kicked the whole debate off saying that “…Creativity needs supporting. We are all invested in that [but] the ‘to steal or not to steal’ just surely isn’t the right question?”

One of the big problems I have with damning piracy was, oddly enough, summed up in David Hepworth’s eulogy to pirated music sessions on Radio 4’s “Archive on 4: For One Night Illegally”, which is worth listening to again either at 3pm this Monday afternoon, or on iPlayer.

Hepworth points out that many of the great moments of music history, (including the sublime moment in which Dylan answers the hysterical shout of “Judas” by playing one of the best songs ever written) only come down to us because of pirated live recordings.

More importantly he references a law suit Bruce Springsteen brought against a pirate trader which he won, despite the fact that recording clearly starts with Bruce himself shouting “BOOTLEGGERS! BOOTLEGGERS! ROLL YOUR TAPES! THIS ONE IS GONNA BE HOT!”

Now obviously there is a difference between a live event badly recorded, or a studio out-take saved from the dustbin (the programme is also more than worth listening to for the sounds of the Troggs arguing about drum beats) and the pirating of an otherwise available piece of work like a finished film or album. However the Springsteen case highlights for me the complicated relationship between Piracy, Sales and Fans.

In the world before the mass and near instantaneous dissemination of creative content via the internet, piracy and bootlegging played a vital role in opening up new markets and bringing an audience to work that they might otherwise ignore. For instance, as a child I fell in love with the Specials through a bootleg cassette of a live gig they’d played ten years previously in Boston. It’s still one of the best live shows I’ve ever heard and it kicks seven shades of shit out of any of their studio recordings. Listening to it explains why they were so important and had I not heard it I wouldn’t have obsessively bought all their albums on cassette, vinyl and CD.

Things are different now but the same principle applies. I have recently become obsessed with Spotify, another Swedish file sharing site which, unlike Pirate Bay, claims to be legal. I say “claims” because the offer is so astoundingly good I can’t believe it’s not a crime. For the price of nine quid a month or having to listen to an advert every quarter of an hour, you get live streaming access to pretty much every song in the world ever. It’s like iTunes but… well… free.

Now I don’t know where the advertising and subscription money goes. I find it hard to believe that it all trundles back to the MCPS but perhaps it does. I’d like to think it does because that means I’ve recently given the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s and the Black Lips a lot of someone else’s money. My fingers are crossed.

Anyway, the point is that being able to hear the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s latest album has made me want to buy it and own it and have it as mine. Moreover Spotify has massively reawakened my interest in contemporary music – finally there’s a music station I can listen to that doesn’t force me to hear the Xfm playlist of songs I’ve definitely decided I don’t like, intermingled with the banal chat of idiots who are desperate to convince me that it’s all the best thing ever.

People recommend me stuff, I listen to it, if I like it, I buy it…