Wednesday, January 25, 2006

Copy This

If you would have asked me a year or two ago which was more evil and stupid--the RIAA or the MPAA--I probably would have told you, without a second's hesitation the RIAA. Since then, however, the MPAA has been doing its fair share of stupid crap, seemingly in a race to catch up to the level of idiocy that the RIAA has set the bar for.

Adding to their many dumb manouvers (such as their lame ass "don't pirate stuff" ads before movies and on DVDs), is their unauthorized copying of Kirby Dick's This Film is Not Yet Rated, a documentary on the double standards of the industry.

Since it's been confirmed, it has been interesting to see the reasons the MPAA gives for copying the movie, namely their excuse that they copied it without permission "because it had implications for [their] employees." That's a very interesting justification, as well as one that is very open ended.

I can imagine many scenarios where I would need to copy a movie because it had implications for a person or group of persons that was related to me. Let's say I rented Pulp Fiction, saw all of the drug use in it, and felt it had implications on some of my co-workers who were recovering addicts. Seeing this movie may cause unintended behavior in them if they saw it so I needed to make a copy of the movie in case any of my co-workers were thinking of watching it so I could properly enumerate the potentially offensive things they'd see.

That's not too much of a stretch, is it? The copies of This Film is Not Yet Rated were made to show people that they thought might be affected by the content of the film. I'm sure that with even more careful analysis of whatever cock & bull stories that the MPAA come up with to justify their actions combined with a little more in depth situational analysis (as opposed to the 37 seconds I used to come up with the above paragraph) you could justify almost any movie copying.

Sucks to be caught doing what you're telling everyone else not to. It's like seeing your teachers shooting spit balls in study hall. Once they do it, why the hell shouldn't you be able to? Because they said so, my ass... I don't give credit to anything a blatantly open hypocrite has to say. Sorry, it just doesn't make any logical sense.

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