MIKE GOLD: The Peacock Priorities
About a month ago, our Glenn Hauman turned me on to this story and I’ve got to tell you, I’m still pissed.
According to published reports, which all carry the following verbatim: “NBC/Universal general counsel Rick Cotton suggests that society wastes entirely too much money policing crimes like burglary, fraud, and bank-robbing when it should be doing something about piracy instead.
“Our law enforcement resources are seriously misaligned," Cotton said. "If you add up all the various kinds of property crimes in this country, everything from theft, to fraud, to burglary, bank-robbing, all of it, it costs the country $16 billion a year. But intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions [of dollars] a year.”
Okay, let me first state the obvious: this man’s head is so far up his ass his eyeballs think they’re hemorrhoids. And I am in the intellectual property business: what ComicMix publishes is intellectual property, and we’d rather not see our various creators’ work, current and forthcoming, ripped off.
The whole thing about copyrights and the Internet is a little wacky and confusing. This country has lousy copyright laws and, to the extent they “protect” anybody, they tend to offer that protection more to the corporate oligarchs than they do to actual creators, let alone to any legitimate sense of history, art and culture. We’re muddling through as best we can, basically using the Grateful Dead’s policies as our starting point.
But Mr. Cotton acts as though he is an idiot. He is either woefully misinformed or he is an out-and-out liar. Intellectual property crime runs into hundreds of billions of dollars each year? Prove it. Smith Barney, hardly a communist organization, quotes the Motion Picture Association as saying such piracy cost them $6 billion in 2005. I realize there’s a lot of other stuff going on – music piracy, books, even comics – but movies and DVDs are the E ticket of the operation. If Mr. Cotton is even remotely correct, these other media have to come up with a minimum of $194,000,000,000.01 to justify his number.
Mind you, the majority of this loss comes from overseas: nations like China, where there is little or no adherence to international copyright agreements.
But for the purpose of argument, let’s accept Mr. Cotton’s number. What Mr. Cotton is saying, and there’s no mistaking it, is that somebody who might bootleg a copy of the last episode of Studio 60 is a worse human being than somebody who would rip off Mr. Cotton’s mother’s life savings and steal his kid’s toy train set on the way out.
I don’t think Mr. Cotton worked for Enron prior to taking the NBC gig, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he did an unpaid internship there. He is the type of lawyer Shakespeare warned us about.
Mr. Cotton, I was there in 1989 when Warner Bros’ private detectives raided the Batman merchandise bootleggers throughout Manhattan. They did a nice job. It’s been a while since I’ve seen multitudes of DVDs for sale spread out all over the floors of the Times Square subway stations. The police are doing a nice job. Let’s get us a reasonable solution to the IP theft problem; one that doesn’t act as though that bootleg of Universal’s Evan Almighty is more important than the fraud at Enron.
Mike Gold is editor-in-chief of ComicMix.
Though many things have been cleared from view in Times Square in the regimes of the last two mayors, this New Yorker sees pirate DVDs et cetera ad nauseum on sale every day. Our species is good at stealing; there will be plenty of living space in heaven.
I referred to the bootleggers at the Times Square subway stations — in fact, for you New Yorkers nostalgic for days of yore, on the passageway between the 7th Avenue IRT and 8th Avenue IND lines. I liked the idea that you had to give $2.00 to the Transit Authority before you could buy your bootlegs, and the bootleg dealer had his wares spread out on some very attractive, colorful blankets. All gone to my eyes, no doubt victim to the latest "Times Square Beautification" program. Which is logical, as Disney was given Times Square by America's greatest phony, Uberfuhrer Rudy Giuliani.
Yes, they should investigate the fraud done by these companies when they wanted everyone to switch to DVD promising they would be cheaper to the consumer to buy then video cassettes. I have never see that happen, and they should be held accountable for about a decade's worth of over profit based on lies. Also everytime they purposefully hold back a director/extended cut of a movie for six months from the original DVD release trying to get consumers to buy almost the same product twice. Mr. Haney of Green Acres is alive and well.
Just an addendum from the movie This Film Is Not Yet Rated. One expert (I can't remember who it was) in the film stated, that the people who most pirate these movies are the same teenagers who usually still pay money to go see it at the theatre and buy the real thing on DVD later. So this Universal guy would be cutting his own throat if they cracked down on the "pirates" (they wouldn't have to pay to see the movies in prison).