Tina Fey wants video pirates to walk the plank
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- May
- 6
Jerry Seinfeld didn’t want to be a pirate. Apparently Tina Fey doesn’t want anyone else to be one, either.
OK, fine, they’re talking about different kinds of piracy. In fact, there wasn’t a puffy shirt in sight at a press conference yesterday, to which New York’s attorney general, Andrew Cuomo, invited Fey along to rail against the evils of film piracy.
No mention was made of high seas piracy, though presumably its evils are not in question.
Lotsa laughs: Fey listens to Cuomo during a news conference Monday in New York. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)
Here’s the AG’s case against piracy: half of all illegal movied are pirated in New York, costing the Empire State millions of dollars and thousands of jobs. Cuomo thinks the penalties are too light to be much deterrent.He wants first-time pirates to face a $1,000 fine and a year in the clink. Do it again and, under the proposed Piracy Protection Act, you’re a felon. The legislation has stalled before in the state legislature.
No doubt buying a $5 copy of “Iron Man” or “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” on the street corner, no doubt filmed with the shoulder-mounted handicam of a movie theater patron, is stealing as sure as going to any one of probably hundreds of bit torrent sites and downloading the same.
Still, at $10 a movie ticket, the motivation to be entertained without being ripped off is understandable, even if it’s not justifiable. (At least with the knock-off DVD you can fast forward through the commercials.)
Similarly, price-gouging music companies fueled illegal song downloads in the late 1990s and early 2000s as surely as Napster did. And it was just as disappointing to see the members of Metallica rail against the practice before Congress in 2000 as it was to see Fey at that podium yesterday.
The comparison between movie theater films and pirated DVDs is apt since the latter are often of movies still in theaters. The $9.99 specials at Wal-Mart left the cineplex long before they hit retail shelves.
(For a great alternative take on piracy, check out this Slate Magazine piece on how some companies see the wisdom in giving content away. )
At the same time, piracy robs hardworking people, and not just people with last names like Rowling and Hetfield. So I can agree with heart of the matter even if I have little sympathy for the big-wigs leading the legislative and charge.
With her boss, NBC Universal President Jeff Zucker, and Dan Glickman, top dog at the Motion Picture Association of America, looking on, Fey offered this consumer tip to avoid lifted video content.
“As an actor, a writer and a New Yorker, it’s discouraging to see the widespread effects piracy has had on our industry,” Fey said, adding piracy is often overlooked but has an enormous negative impact on every person who works in entertainment.
“Remember, when you buy a DVD, you should not be able to see the heads of people watching it in a movie theater at the bottom of the screen,” she said.
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 at 3:30 pm by Brian Howard.
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Yarr, genius!