Piracy war just a Hollywood script

In case you did not know it, one of the mainstays of American
culture, Hollywood, is in peril.

Movie piracy is a growing threat to the livelihood of not only
the movie industry, but to productive creativity at large.

Fortunately, the recent re-arrest of “prince of
piracy” Johnny Ray Gasca marks a great victory for those who
are concerned with preserving our cultural heritage.

But if we look at this War on Piracy with a Hollywood lens
““ that is to say, as a narrative ““ we might notice the
similarity its formula has to other contemporary war narratives we
are familiar with. We might even conclude that, far from being a
primary threat to the cinema, Gasca, whose name rolls of the tongue
like so many generic characters, is much more of a puppet prince
than a scourge of the intellectual property seas.

Cinema has been dealt its death blow several times before in its
100-plus-year history. The emergence of television, and then later
home video technology, threatened to usher in a new age of visual
entertainment that would leave the movie house an obsolete relic of
a celluloid golden age.

Though this technologically fueled argument does not seem to
correspond to the recent increase in box office revenues, the
assumption that new visual technology threatens the established
technologies is reasonable.

The industry certainly takes the threat of new visual media
seriously. Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Association of
America, has made it his top priority to ensure first that video,
and now digital technology, do not end up in the wrong hands
““ that is, anyone who does not serve the needs of the media
conglomerates.

It is to the credit of the American film industry that
box-office numbers are on the rise in the face of increasingly
sophisticated in-home visual entertainment. The fact is that there
are just some movies that look and sound better on the big screen.
This difference has become a deciding factor for moviegoers who are
deciding between what to see in the theater and what to wait for on
DVD.

The MPAA is interested in maintaining the difference between the
theater and the home experiences. While the media conglomerates
make money off both, the opening ticket sales are particularly
important because the initial release audience is more affected by
the marketing of the film, and less by the critical opinions of
it.

Movie piracy threatens the marketing strategies and economic
interests of the movie industry by making films available before,
and also in place of, the purchase of a ticket.

So Valenti is following the trail blazed by the music industry
and is busy lobbying for increased regulation of copyright laws. In
the interest of this, he has been using newspapers and public
relations conferences to create a war narrative that has striking
similarities to other recent PR war narratives ““ namely,
morality versus a bad guy.

Valenti knows how much America loves melodrama. In his opinion
piece for the New York Times, he moralistically suggests,
“Copyright protects not just the financial interest of people
who create artistic or intellectual property, but the very
existence of creative work.”

And the more recent story of Gasca’s capture in a hotel
room in Florida plays well into the spiraling narrative that is the
War on Piracy. The dramatic flourishes of the story as it is told
by most publications ““ that Gasca was found in a room stacked
with recording devices and DVDs ““ brings to mind any number
of Hollywood films that portray drug busts or terrorist
standoffs.

The staginess of this drama is made all the more overt by
reports that Gasca has kept a diary of all his piracy exploits that
is ripe for screenwriting material.

As someone who considers himself invested in the continued
existence of the cinema, as well as the proliferation of creative
work, my own opinion is that movie piracy does not threaten the
cinema as much as it transforms it.

Under such high-pressure conditions as I imagine them to be,
pirating movies is a kind of interpretive act that not only
documents the film and the filmgoing experience, but also piracy
itself. Pirated copies seem to be of a different order than the
films themselves, or even the DVDs. The quality is different, the
expectations are different and the viewing experience is
different.

That is not to say that piracy might not get better in
reproductive quality, or that it does not threaten the movie
industry at some level. But the notion that creative culture is at
stake, and the conflation of Gasca to the degree of villainy of,
say, Osama bin Laden, reflect rhetorical strategies we have seen
before. We should take them with a grain of salt.

Bridge is a first-year master’s degree student at the
critical studies program.