Flour Power

Regular readers (are there any?) might be wondering what made me come back to the blog from a more than 6 months period of silence. Well, it turns out that a simple post can be of use in protesting against one of the many anti-piracy laws that the powers-that-be are trying to put in place.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t condone piracy when used to profit from someone else’s work, but the way most copyright cases are currently handled is just outright ridiculous, and the recent draconic crackdown on file sharing sites is a serious threat to the Internet as we know it.

OK, enough ranting, what’s this all about then? As reported by TorrentFreak, a Spanish artist and an hacktivist group devised a very clever way to protest against an anti-piracy law that when into effect today.

The Sinde law allows for the blocking of allegedly infringing sites based on reports from copyright holders, something very similar to the US SOPA bill. So Eme Navarro, who usually publishes his work under a Creative Commons license, released an “all rights reserved” track specifically for the protest. Then, with the help of the group Hackivistas, hundreds of sites are linking to this copyrighted song without permission, and Navarro is going to report all of them to the Ministry of Culture. In turn, they have to review all the requests individually and on order of arrival, so the protest should slow down the review process significantly.

What a clever DOS attack!

Why am I talking about this if I’m not Spanish or living in Spain? I should probably be more worried about SOPA Ireland at the moment…

They will also censor foreign websites, so anyone in the world can join us. We want to check what happens in every case.

And that’s where I come in. As of now, this blog is infringing on Spanish copyright law, because I’m linking to Eme Navarro’s Nobody’s Death.

Let’s see how that goes.

If it wasn’t clear enough in my post about the conviction of the Pirate Bay founders, I’ll say it again:

I don’t believe piracy is hurting the movie/music/game industry.

On the contrary, I believe piracy is helping these industries, by giving even more visibility to their products, with no cost for the publishers. They’re basically getting free publicity and benefiting from the fact that people who wouldn’t even think about buying their album or watching their movie might just feel inclined to do it or to buy some other kind of related product.

You might argue that there’s no proof of this. Well, of couse this theory is very hard to prove, but a blog post over at The Inquisitr presents some interesting facts on the recent X-Men Origins and Star Trek movies.

A month before X-Men Origins hit the movie theaters, a workprint copy of the movie was leaked to teh Internets. The copy was far from being finished, and most of the special effects were not yet included. 20th Century Fox screamed in pain and begged the authorities to find the culprits. The FBI was called in to investigate and one movie reviewer from Fox News was fired.

Star Trek had a flawless release, with no leaks or any other kind of fuss surrounding it. Pretty boring, uh?

Now let’s look at some numbers, more speficically to opening weekend box office dollar figures:

• Wolverine - $85 million
• Star Trek - $75 million

Interesting… So the movie that was leaked 1 month before the premiere and presumably was downloaded 4 million times actually had a  better opening weekend than the one that managed to remain safe from those horrible pirates and had everyone dying to watch it. I know what you’re going to say. Maybe the Wolverine movie was just so much better than Star Trek, and that’s why so many more people went to watch it. Right?

Wrong!

It turns out that, according to Rotten Tomatoes, X-Men Origins is pretty crappy, while Star Trek is one of the best movies of the year so far.

So there you have it folks. The movie that caused the most uproar over piracy in recent time actually earned more money than the other hot movie that garnered critic praise and not a peep about piracy. In the process an ISP data host lost millions of dollars and had their reputation severely impacted. As well a long time FOX freelance movie reviewer has lost his livelihood. All because of the pirating of an incomplete film that ended up earning more money on opening weekend box office that the golden boy movie.

Still think piracy is hurting the movie industry?