Making excuses for Somali pirates

Johann Hari of the Huffington Post claims we are being lied to about pirates. Far from being despicable scallywags, they are to be admired for their democratic and egalitarian ways:

Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied against their tyrannical captains - and created a different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively. They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls "one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the eighteenth century." They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed "quite clearly - and subversively - that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal navy." This is why they were popular, despite being unproductive thieves.

Similarly, the Somali pirates are but poor, honorable folk fighting against injustice:

Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our nuclear waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We didn't act on those crimes - but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 percent of the world's oil supply, we begin to shriek about "evil." If we really want to deal with piracy, we need to stop its root cause - our crimes - before we send in the gun-boats to root out Somalia's criminals.

One commenter even suggests:

The pirates are totally justified in their actions, no questions asked. I don't care who they pillage or plunder, it's only for their own benefit provided that we don't start killing them like the Israeli's did with the Palestinians.

The more crewmen they hold hostage, the more ransom they collect, the happier I feel seeing that the common peasant still wields a weapon over even the most powerful of governments and corporations.

With pirates as their model, it is little wonder that Barack Obama is their hero. Kind of puts the recent tea parties in a new light.

"Piracy is just another business model"

There are better ways of beating the pirates than suing your customers:

Media piracy will always be with us. But the pirates, Mr. Bylund writes, “can be beaten — it happens all the time — but not primarily by means of legal threats and lawsuits.” Rather, he says: “You subjugate these rebels with the tools of free enterprise. Piracy is just another business model, and the pirates will lose and go away when you come up with a better model.”

Consumers make buying decisions based on three factors, according to Mr. Bylund: “price, convenience and quality.” Pirates will always win on price (free), but media companies can and do beat them on the other factors. Among the examples he cites is the cable channel Comedy Central, owned by Viacom (comedycentral.com). The Web site offers the complete archives of “The Daily Show” and makes them searchable. Hulu, owned by NBC and Fox, offers many television shows and some movies with limited (and short) advertisements (hulu.com). All are offered in high-quality video.

But it should not stop there, Mr. Bylund says. “Figure out an ad-supported model if you can, or charge less than a dollar per episode. Let people burn it to DVD or play the file on iPhones for a buck.” Eventually, “piracy will force all the big-time content producers to move in this kind of direction,” Mr. Bylund says. “Capitalism, properly applied, will beat the rebels every time.”

Marching with the Hollywood jackboots

Hollywood is on a mission to change Canadian copyright law to its benefit. It continually misrepresents statistics, calling Canada a haven for piracy, and has engaged the U.S. government at the highest levels to do its bidding. Regrettably, Stephen Harper has fallen in line.

After Prime Minister Stephen Harper met with Mr. Schwarzenegger in Ottawa Wednesday, the Conservative government gave official notice to the House of Commons Wednesday night that it plans to table a bill to combat video piracy. A new federal law will target the growing ranks of video pirates with camcorders who copy first-run films at movie theatres. Officials said the law will go beyond existing copyright protections to make camcording a crime.

[...]

Canada's copyright laws prohibit selling unauthorized copies of films. But theatre owners say police will not arrest individuals caught copying films because it is almost impossible to prove they intend to sell illicit copies.

For two years, Doug Frith, president of the Canadian Motion Picture Distributors Association, has railed that the theft of intellectual property is treated as a “soft crime.”

Yesterday, Mr. Frith said this “is really the first step – not only for the movie industry – where the government has shown it will seriously address the whole area of intellectual-property theft.”

The piracy issue heated up in January after The Globe and Mail reported that Fox's Hollywood-based president of domestic distribution had sent a blistering letter to Ellis Jacob, the Toronto-based chief executive of Cineplex Entertainment, Canada's biggest cinema chain. Spitting mad after pinpointing Canadian theatres as the source of illegal camcording, Fox threatened to stop sending copies of all its films to Cineplex's 130 movie houses, or push back Canadian release dates.

“All of us in the Canadian film industry have been working together to get the laws changed,” Mr. Jacob said yesterday. “We are obviously delighted to hear the news that the government is acting to put a stop to film piracy and make it a criminal offence.”

Canadian copyright law already provides the tools for Hollywood to assert its intellectual property rights. If the movie studios think camcording is such a threat to their revenues, why not take a few of the vendors of these shoddy, camcorded DVDs, available at flea markets and other questionable venues, to court? The legal remedies are already at hand. This is nothing but special treatment for Hollywood.