Buying The DVD: Unhelpful And Unethical
Written by J.J. King on February 21, 2008These last few years P2Pers have got used to TV entertainment ‘our way’: unfucked, de-loused, delivered efficiently in economical, good-looking codecs. Because we rarely turn it on, it’s been easy to forget just how cynical, unsatisfying and downright venal television, as a distribution medium, has become.
Whether it’s the stupor-inducing gambling channels dedicated to parting fools from their money, the late-night pseudo-porn selling premium-rate phone sex, or the corrupt ‘competition’ call-ins plaguing the UK’s prime-time (even that Holy of Holies, the BBC), there’s the unavoidable sense that TV is on the rocks. Anyone who’d have you believe filesharers are the only scourge afflicting an industry that would otherwise be healthy is smoking crack, in the business, or both.
This is why Tape It Off The Internet seemed like such a good idea until you actually started trying to use it. There are just not enough good shows being made to justify something as complicated and involved as TIOTI. Enter all your favorites and share them with strangers ‘just like you’ and discover… what? That there are only seven good shows in the world at any one time, you were already watching six of them, and they’re all in the Pirate Bay’s Top 100 anyway. When you strip away the hours of dross and advertising, the truth is that the world’s mighty entertainment infrastructure is only capable of producing half a dozen hours of passable content a week. Maybe it’s because they spend the rest of their time on lawsuits.
One of these rare hours is The Wire. If by some small chance you’re not mainlining it already, think yourself lucky. You have four back seasons to enjoy, of what is quite possibly the last great show television will produce before it’s entirely superseded by — well, by whatever is coming around the way.
I’m not sure anyone has ever attempted to make a show of this scope: The Wire’s by-all-accounts-not-very-nice creator David Simon (Homicide, The Corner) has said his theme over the series’ five years has been ‘the decline of the American empire’ — which means decay of its cities through poverty, of traditional jobs, of the education system, of the police force and of the media. For those getting restless at the back, the show’s also got the slickest, nastiest drug slingers you’ll see on screen and is so realistic that the Baltimore Police have apparently complained it reveals too much about how crimes are — or are not — solved; apparently real thugs love it as well.
Find it and download it — though probably David Simon doesn’t want you to and neither does HBO, which has been actively poisoning Torrents of its other shows. Tell everyone you know about it. Maybe those of them still rocking TVs will raise the show’s increasingly dismal viewing figures.
Or maybe that’s no longer the point. While I sympathise with the plight of the David Simons, David Milchs (Deadwood, John from Cincinnati) and Joss Whedons (Firefly) of this world, and would like to help them in future endeavors, I specifically do not sympathise with the plights of the craven, dim-witted, played-out producers that surround them on all sides. And by ‘playing fair’ and buying the DVD or the cable package, besides the fact that most of our money is not going to the creators and their families, aren’t we really saying we accept the meshwork of shit in order to get the two or three gems that occasionally sift through it? Aren’t we signalling the industry that there’s something we still find acceptable about their way of doing business?
Now I suppose this could seem a bit extreme to some. But again and again in blogs and comments about shows like The Wire you hear ‘I’d pay for this if…’ — if it wasn’t DRM’ed all to hell like HBO’s own online offering, if it was freely shareable, good to be watched whenever, wherever, on whatever, without constant interruption by adverts. The kicker is that we’re not only unable legally to liberate and re-distribute shows from the broken, corrupt mechanisms of television and DVD distribution: we also have no way of supporting creators like David Simon and crew outside of it.
This means that right now, people still stupid or unfortunate enough to sit in front of TVs watching months-old shows or paying massive cash-or-attention premiums for the new ones are heavily subsidising us P2Pers. This is genuinely immoral, because we’re really exploiting people less fortunate than ourselves. Instead, we should be helping them out of the wasteland, and thinking of new ways to get the creators we like creating outside the prison of mass distribution. It cannot be that we are able to figure out how to make GNU-Linux - a world-class operating system — together, but not to make a dozen decent shows a year.
The irony is that TV series really feel like they’re coming into their own, just as the media that spawned them is dying. From the ‘high art’ of Deadwood and John From Cincinnati to the epic modern-day myth of Lost to the (dare I call it) Beckettian dark comedy of Trailer Park Boys, the drawn out tales of our series (often consumed a ’season’ at a time: I know at least three people waiting for The Wire to finish before downloading it) are an undeniable core of our emerging P2P culture.
We are the most passionate viewers ever, talking and writing profusely about the media we love, analysing, promoting, hosting free screenings… And they need us as much as we need them — all of these shows, without exception, enjoy their primary life on the networks, through our blogs, comments, reviews, remixes and fan fiction. Lost in particular has learned that incorporating online feedback can make a great (if utterly Shaggy Dog) story.
Can we find a way to get the shows we want made without buying the goddamn DVD? I remember this guy talking really sensibly a couple years ago about how Joss Whedon could get to make another season of Firefly, and we got this project back up his musings. Why didn’t Whedon try it? Because someone else owned his ideas? Perhaps it could have worked otherwise, and maybe it could work for the future. If you’ve got ideas, throw them in the comments box below. And if you have time in between catching up on The Wire, read this by the venerable guru of Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly — I’m going to try to get him into the next installment of STEAL THIS FILM. See you around. I’ll be back in two weeks to pick up the pieces.
TorrentFreak welcomes Jamie King as our new bi-weekly columnist. Jamie is the Director of STEAL THIS FILM I & II and a member of the League of Noble Peers. He is currently working on a cinema release of STEAL THIS FILM and prototyping an experimental, post-P2P remuneration system for creators.
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99 Responses (Add yours or TrackBack)
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The really need to bring back Firefly
How about an unbiased article once in a while. We get it bit torrent is good for distribution of media. We also get that it isn’t illegal in some countries.
Lets hope you make a difference in these actions, as this would take money out of the hands of single large organizations and into the hands of millions of people.
I can only see major problems arising from this as the “green” in people will come out even faster then it was going at this point and time.
Their will be protests in all the “upper class” due to the fluctuation this would cause.
Things will only get worse before they get better.
Through it all, we will remain standing firm and strong.
…
I hope?
The BBC stopped making quality programing 20 years ago. More than ever you get less for your license fee, which itself is downright criminal. That said, none of them are any good. If you pay for cable or satalite, its just 400 more channels of shit to choose from. Its no real surprise that people would rather download films or next months eposide of Weeds, because there is bugger all else for them to watch. Well at least for the non-sheeple who dont really care about wether they are breaking some pie in the sky international copyright law simply to keep themselves ammused in the hours between finishing work/school and going to sleep. As long as ‘entertainment’ is available sooner via bittorrent than via whatever low brow network provides your viewing, and without the fat chicks advertising diet drinks or ‘real womens’ beauty products, the ammount of people looking downloading will only increase. If I ever see one of those late night, what number comes next (1,2,_,4) quiz shows on bittorrent, I swear I’ll shoot myself.
The only reason I have cable is for ESPN and other cable sports stuff.
i know you won’t get the absolute newest shows.. but my library has pretty much every tv season dvd ever in it. checking it out for free is so much easier than waiting for it to download on bit torrent and then worrying about uploading to 1.0…
but i’m not one of those people that cancels all their social plans to watch lost by themselves in the dark.
We need to break our TV shows out of prison! Great article
I agree that TV sux these days as far as the mainstream popular shit that most of the serfs tend to enjoy. This is nothing new. If I had my way, watching the crap on network TV (American Idol, 24, CSI SUV, or ANY team sports) would be fucking LETHAL to watch.
Quality always goes down when the goal is to keep the largest amount of eyeballs. However, IMO, most of the shows mentioned in the article look like crap too. But then again, my tastes are probably uncommon as I only really watch documentaries and such (eg PBS/Discovery/BBC stuff.)
The nice thing about the P2P scene these days is the availability of complete all-season downloads of various classic TV shows that you may have not watched (or been alive) during the original runs. Stuff like Threes Company, Married w Children, Cheers, Happy Days, Munsters, L&S, Magnum PI, Fantasy Island, and so on is all good shit if you’ve never seen it, especially if you toke up or drop sum acid first.
The other day I DLed some of those Mark Evans series’s “A Plane is Born” “A MG is Born” “A Chopper is Born” etc etc and watched that shit from morning to night, ordered pizza, burned through many bong hits, and drank a bunch of shitty scotch. Man that was a good day.
Thank you Jamie.
You literate a point that i try to make,but when i try i end up calling ppl sheep and cunts and such.
As for the ‘Steal This Film’legacy, I would like to shake your hand.
Brokep,Anakata and yourself really make me proud to be a p2per.
HEROES OF THE TECHNOLOGICAL AGE.
I have to comment though… I enjoy reading commentaries on TorrentFreak, it gives you something to really think about… and with a columnist like Mr. King, you know you’ll be thinking about something significant too.
The thing is, I’m not sure it’s a great idea to make columns a regular thing on TorrentFreak. We filesharers certainly have a lot to rant about at any given time, and we could each probably write a column daily, with all the nonsense that goes on with this business… but it’s nothing new. With a column as a regular feature, we’ll essentially be reading what we already know and believe again and again. Columns have their purpose, but I think TorrentFreak should remain primarily news, and not opinion. We all have the same opinion here, so maybe instead of posting these opinions in communities where they’re already universally held, we ought to focus on spreading this rhetoric to other venues, perhaps opening the eyes of the “stupid or unfortunate” sheep.
That’s my two cents on the subject. At any rate, I am glad to see some big names in the P2P world getting involved with TorrentFreak.
People who say “sheep” unironically scare me more than the people they’re insulting.
Hmmm, you could have done better than the wire. Talk abt crap. And I did watch the first three years, just sick of all the violence, i guess.
I’m just sick of most tv. seen it all. the few good shows, they kill right away. firefly was good, life, in justice, etc. mainly just lost, am. gladiator, that stupid talent show, game shows, all tripe. sick and tired of the same rehashed shit over and over.
NewZealand and AU have some good stuff, not really new, but different because it ain’t us.
Again I say that it is the masses that DON’T know about p2p that keep us in business. If everyone was doing it, then the whole entertainment business would go belly up. It is interesting that in the above article this is referred to as exploitation, and I must concede the point; essentially it is. But artists like everybody else need to eat, and no truly great work came out of anybody who had to hold a day job at Walmart to keep a roof over their heads.
It seems to me that if the p2p ‘movement’ is essentially anarchistic: it wants to bring down an institution, but in so doing it will destroy itself. So that means that eventually we will reset everything to zero, no?
And another thing, while I love the idea of the p2p movement fighting THE MAN, in all honesty I think that the majority of p2pers are people who have found a way to save a significant buck in their entertainment expense, and that most of this saved money is being spent on booze, drugs, vacations, cars, and whatever else humanity can find to make the drudge of daily life a little more comfortable. there are too many people riding the nobility of yet another anti-system movement in order to save a buck, WHILE FAKING THE INTEGRITY displayed by people like Jamie King…
1 1/2 cents worth….
I’ve never heard of this US series ‘the wire’. But thanks to JJ I have now. And I will d/l the first series just to check it out. (I highly recommend the new Aussie drama series ‘Underbelly’ for the crime fans btw)
What I don’t understand, is why the producers and distrubuters of these programmes fail to utilise modern technology such as bittorrent, and include region specific or targeted advertisements in each download. Imagine being Finnish for instance, d/ling a free episode of ‘the sopranos’ which includes Finnish adverts, and was fan-subbed by a Finn. The producers and distrubutors would reap the proceeds from the advertising and have minimal outlay costs. Think of the profits ya mugs.
To the poster who reckons the BBC stopped transmitting quality programming 20 years ago, I unequivocally call ‘nutter’.
I could quote a huge list of exceptional BBCTV shows, both past and present, but will simply respond with two words: ‘Top Gear’ - HUGELY popular around the whole globe.
P.S. Great article, Jamie King. I look forward to more of your musings in the future.
@15: i’d have to agree that the bbc still can produce some quality shows, and top gear WAS one, but has in recent years died a slow and ugly death.
looking forward to reading more articles from you, mr king :)
One of the best articles here…ever
[quote comment="295221"]@15: i’d have to agree that the bbc still can produce some quality shows, and top gear WAS one, but has in recent years died a slow and ugly death.
looking forward to reading more articles from you, mr king :)[/quote]
You gotta be kidding me- the BBC are the worst of the lot. Disregarding their unimaginative line-up, every year they take millions of pounds of licence payers money and give it to Richard Hammond! Man, I hate that guy.
[quote comment="295215"]To the poster who reckons the BBC stopped transmitting quality programming 20 years ago, I unequivocally call ‘nutter’.
I could quote a huge list of exceptional BBCTV shows, both past and present, but will simply respond with two words: ‘Top Gear’ - HUGELY popular around the whole globe.[/quote]
Top Gear is the exception to the rule. Apart from the ‘odd’ natural history documentary and Top Gear, both of which combined account for an insignificant part of their total broadcast time, the BBC is dross plain and simple. If its not the complete and utter shite that is Eastenders who’s main viewing audience consists of mindless idiots, its repeats of programs like Eastenders watched be the same mindless idiots. The BBC does nothing to justify their government sanctioned extortion of public money, and being as their programming is no better than ITV or Sky1, they should at least get some commercials in. Half the time they’d be better viewing than than the program itself.
I see in TV Guide that it’s likely that Scrubs will broadcast 4 or 5 more episodes AND THE OTHER 4 OR 5 WILL GO STRAIGHT TO DVD. As a loyal Scrubs watcher, this royally ticks me off.
I live in Baltimore and I have to say The Wire is by far the best show on TV write now. I should also confirm what he said in the article the Wire is dead on its portrayal of Baltimore.
On to the issue of how we view TV. I would pay a flat fee of 8 bucks a season (or what ever a movie cost for a full season pass to a show. If movies can survive on that then why can’t tv but only if they were drm free full quality and free of advertisement. I would feel better if all of the money went to the cast producers writers etc from the show. If it was distributed over the internet then you could cut tv channels corporate crap etc out of the equation hopefully lowering production cost etc and opening the gates for more great shows like freaks and geeks (RIP. Just an idea this concept would need a lot more thought to work out the kinks etc)
peace.
I don’t think BBC is any worse or better than the rest of ‘em. What about channel four?
Top gear, monkey dust, skins all are thoughtfully poignant to the UK population
I have always preferred british television over anyother, and it remains that way today…
ITV though, well I just don’t know
The BBC give us…
BBC news 24, Horizon, QI, The World Service, Radio 4, Question time, Dr Who, Torchwood,Film 2008, BBC3, BBC4,MotD, etc, etc. Thousands of hours of original programming. All without advertising or commercial breaks.
Oh and free downloads via the BBC iplayer.
So my question is, if someone built the right vehicle, would it really get used? I know there are tons of us out there torrenting and watching with our LCDs hooked to our media centers. But on the grand scheme, we’re not nearly as big as the saber rattlers would have the world believe. How long would it take to convert the ’sheep’? And how the hell does everyone get paid by such a small community to keep whatever it is alive?
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