Arrrrrgh…beware…there be pirates in these waters, matey!

Today’s thoughts are about piracy, and not the good old-fashioned, walk-the-plank, pillaging kind of piracy. I was thinking more about digital piracy based on these two articles on CNN.com today (note these are my own headlines, not CNN’s):

RIAA Going after college kids

Study says video download business to boom

The first article is about illegal music downloads, and the fact that it’s a major problem on college campuses. This should surprise no one. Bandwidth is plentiful on college campuses, and today’s college kids are big adopters of digital music technology. I shan’t admit whether or not I have ever been guilty of downloading music I have not paid for, but I do have one thing to say, and it’s directed at the RIAA. Want to stop illegal music sharing? Stop charging $14 for a friggin’ plastic disc. $14 bucks! It’s no wonder kids don’t want to pay that - that’s absurd. And don’t tell me it’s the “market price”. It’s only the market price because you set it so that you can afford your institutional payola. I’m calling bullshit. (In keeping with a recurring theme on this blog, the RIAA is FULL OF CRAP.)

The second article is about a study that predicts a huge boom in the paid video download market. I think that’s cool. But my thoughts aren’t exactly about this. It prompted me to think about illegal downloading of pirated movies.

We all know those people who have seen Spiderman a month before it comes out. How do they do it? Here’s how it works, generally. Someone sits in a movie theater, in a premiere or some early screening, and they use a video camera to film the movie as they watch it. Then they upload this video, and the masses of obsessed fans download it and watch it.

But here’s what I don’t get - why would you do this? Speaking as a movie fan, I really must ask why you would want to watch a bad pirated copy of a major film without the benefit of a darkened theater with good digital sound. At least for me, a big part of the movie experience, especially with the major hollywood blockbusters that are usually illegally downloaded, is the excellent sound quality and that huge screen in a darkened theater. I get it that going to the theater ain’t cheap, but I would bet that a lot of people who download bad pirated copies of movies are also seeing it later in the theater. For me that would ruin it.

Here’s an example. Silence of the Lambs. Remember the scene in which Clarice finds the head in the jar? That scared the crap out of me the first time I saw it. Can you imagine having downloaded Silence of the Lambs and then seeing it in the theater? That would totally ruin the suspense, and that scene wouldn’t have been nearly as good if I’d already seen a grainy downloaded copy.

I’m not going to make a morals/ethics argument here about this. I just don’t get how one, as a movie fan, can watch bad pirated copies in which you lose part of the experience of what makes movies, well, movies.