Digital Piracy Is Evil: Difference between revisions

''And the shame would leave a permanent scar''

''Cause you start out stealing songs and [[Slippery Slope Fallacy|then you're robbing liquor stores''

 

If you're watching television, it doesn't matter if the characters are drug-smuggling, whore-mongering, granny-beating, world-destroying murderers: the illegal downloading of movies and music [[Even Evil Has Standards|is guaranteed to morally offend them]]. Any good character who doesn't fall in with this philosophy will [[An Aesop|learn his lesson]] by the end of the episode. Expect physical theft to be used as a comparison and/or a plot point. That said, both sides of the debate are rife with [[The War On Straw|inaccuracies and strawman statements]]. There are much more nuances to the matter and to the sides than often given credit for.

For the polar opposite, see [[Digital Piracy Is Okay]].

 

 

{{examples}}

* "''[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmZm8vNHBSU Piracy: It's A Crime]''" commercials. Typically these are fairly easy to swallow, as far as a moral lesson.

*** To be fair, knowingly purchasing stolen goods ''is'' a crime in most conventional Western legal systems. The key word, of course, is 'knowingly'.

{{quote|"I am illegally distributing this anti-piracy commercial. Normally, you would have to buy a DVD or pay admission to a movie theater in order to see this (you rotten thief, you), but here you can watch it for FREE. You're welcome."}}

** Even more ironically, this very commercial was sued for using unpermitted music from Dutch composer Melchior Rietveldt.

** [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmLPvMlKNBU Used in the beginning of this video, The DVD Pirate.]

* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6xj4jS8cho They brought it. He's gonna steal it!]

 

== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==

* In the last episode of ''[[Battle Programmer Shirase]]'', the narrator thanks the viewers of Japan and the viewers overseas who were illegally downloading the show.

* In episode four of ''[[Kaitou Tenshi Twin Angel]]'', a group of small time thugs that got away from the titular magical girls team up. They include a costume fetishist, a burglar, a marriage swindler, and an uploader of illegal videos, presented as a fat [[Otaku]]. The Angels consider him as bad as the other three.

 

== [[Comic Books]] ==

{{quote|'''Spider-Man''': There's got to be ''someone'' illegally downloading music around here.}}

* In the [[Darkwing Duck]] comic, Honker is arrested for downloading music, though the event is treated as a part of St. Canard's slide into an over-litigious laws-enforced-by-robots dystopia.

 

== [[Film]] ==

** Porn producers have an advantage in that some of their material can embarrass even the most brazen pirate. Some companies concentrate their copyright-infringement efforts on their kinkiest products in order to maximize the potential embarrassment of fighting them in court.

* Pre-internet example: In ''[[Night of the Comet]]'', the biggest [[Jerkass]] is a movie-theater manager who covertly loans movie reels to an accomplice overnight so they can be copied, then sells the bootlegs. He becomes an [[Asshole Victim]] pretty quickly.

 

== [[Literature]] ==

* Played all the way to its most horrible conclusion, in [[wikipedia:Noir (novel)|"Noir"]] by K.W. Jeter - which tells of a world in which (besides other implications of a society where free market capitalism holds absolute sway) there are police forces that hunt down copyright pirates, one memorable punishment for said pirates is having their spine & brain extracted from their bodies, then transformed into high-fidelity audio cables, in which the pirate/victim '''still lives''', being tortured by every note/sound that passes through, essentially, their nerve system.

* In [[Robert A. Heinlein]]'s ''[[Job: A Comedy of Justice]]'', Gerald (Jerry) Farnsworth makes it a point to ask his daughter if she legally paid for a pornographic hologram. After finding out that, yes, of course she did (because she is a "good girl"), he mentions that he happens to already own a copy which could have borrowed from him.

* ''[[Hyperion]]'' by Dan Simmons has the poet Martin Silenus thrust into massive debt when his second book bombs horribly. It's actually quite popular amongst the AI, but only one of them actually bought a copy; that AI then transmitted the contents to every other AI in existence. "Interstellar copyright doesn't mean shit when you're dealing with silicon."

* One story from the collection All Hell Breaking Loose featured a [[Corrupt Corporate Executive|recording executive]] making a deal with the devil that allowed Satan to steal the souls of anyone who illegally downloaded music.

 

== [[Live Action TV]] ==

* An episode of ''[[Seinfeld]]'' had Kramer convince Jerry to get an illegal cable hookup. Jerry subsequently has a dream where he's busted, and is shot hundreds of times while trying to make a run for it, dying in Kramer's arms.

{{quote|"[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v{{=}}FZMr6-yM-Ls What have you done to my little cable boy?!]"}}

 

== [[Music]] ==

* [[Current 93]] played this trope totally straight when they sent out promos of their latest album to reviewers, with an added notice at the beginning spoken by a [[Creepy Child|little girl]]: "[http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/oct/15/illegal-file-sharing-promo-copies This is a promotional CD. Anyone illegally selling, copying, uploading or downloading this material is condemned to eternal hellfire. Happy listening, God is love.]" It was creepy enough to make some people think twice about ripping the promos and putting them up for download before the album came out. From that same article:

{{quote|"Illegal downloads are making it unfeasible for bands like Current 93, who put out their own material, to continue. One loses a little of your soul when you exploit someone in that way. Once your soul has gone, you are in hell."}}

* Princess F - "Internet Kills The Eurobeat Stars", on ''Super Eurobeat vol 202''.

* The original warning on [[My Chemical Romance]]'s "I Brought You My Bullets..." threatened to have Gerard come to your house and suck your blood for making illegal copies of the album. Which is [[Fetish Fuel|not exactly a deterrent for some]]...

== [[Newspaper Comics]] ==

* In a ''[[Yenny]]'' story arc, the title character goes to see the first ''[[Transformers (film)|Transformers]]'' movie at a theater, but her lizard, Zacha, takes a camera with her to record the movie off the screen and sell pirated DVDs of it, much to Yenny's annoyance.

 

== [[Tabletop Games]] ==

 

== [[Video Games]] ==

* Oddly subverted in the Scholastic ''Microzine'' video game ''Pirates of the Soft Seas.'' The player is welcomed into a software pirate crew and seeks to help them steal video games. What's really strange is that this involves ''physically stealing computer discs,'' which would typically be considered a much worse crime.

* ''[[Spyro the Dragon|Spyro: Year of the Dragon]]'', if you are playing a cracked copy, has Zoe the Fairy appearing at the latter part of Sunrise Spring telling you that [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZnCcOe59CY your copy is hacked and may be an illegal copy, which will lead you to experience "problems" you would not experience on a legal copy].

* In the DOS days, id Software used to have some very creative anti-piracy messages on their exit screens. For ''[[Doom]]'', the message read like this:

{{quote|"If you haven't paid for DOOM, you are playing illegally. That means you owe us money. Of course, a guy like you probably owes a lot of people money -- your friends, maybe even your parents. Stop being a freeloader and register DOOM. Call us now at 1-800-IDGAMES. We can help!"}}

* Jagged Alliance: Deadly Games features a mission where you raid a shack of armed software pirates, recovering the master CD of the game you are playing.

 

** The information in that strip regarding iTunes having DRM protection on its songs is outdated, as acknowledged by a [http://xkcd.com/546/ later strip].

*** Only because DRM-free music is the norm. The original strip still applies to music that does have DRM, and perhaps more importantly, to most computer games and other software on the market today.

* Justified in ''[[Mac Hall]]''. [http://machall.com/view.php?date=2002-08-15 A] [http://www.machall.com/view.php?date=2002-08-21 three] [http://www.machall.com/view.php?date=2002-08-30 strip] arc, which points out that while anti-piracy measures may be inconvenient, all the blather pirates throw around doesn't change the fact that they'll pirate from ''anyone'', bad DRM or not. The strip was done in 2002, and still remains relevant.

{{quote|'''Shadehawk''': You returned that movie we rented, right?

'''Shadehawk''': Well, it's not MPAA: ''they can't fly''. }}

* ''[[Penny Arcade]]'' seems to hold this view, evidenced [http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/2/19/ here] and [http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/9/29/ here]. Unusually, they lampoon the makers of DRM as well as the pirates, something the usual designers of stealth [[Public Service Announcement|PSAs]] rarely do.

* Parodied in [http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/042406/ this] ''[[Toothpaste For Dinner]]'' comic.

 

== Web Media ==

* Remember those ''D&D'' scare comics? [http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/08/nonprofit-distr.html They're trying to do it again.]

** Oddly enough, the comic has a B-plot about the main character's grandmother trying to fight the city's using eminent domain to evict her from her house, albeit with (in her view, inadequate) compensation- the city technically wins but can't pay the revised total. It's apparently supposed to be analogous to the downloading story, possibly in applying moral equivalence between what the sympathetically portrayed homeowners are doing and the record companies, but it ends up not making much sense in context because of the [[Dissimile|dissimilar situations]].

{{quote|Downloading fake movies may infect your computer with viruses that can be transmitted while you're downloading. Not only do you risk crashing your computer, but you also risk acquiring malicious spyware which will steal your personal information.}}

* Lazlow of ''[[GTA Radio]]'' fame hosts an satellite radio show periodically, of which he gives away the most recent episode, but sells the back catalog as a box set online. Upon learning that the entire box set was being passed around on torrents, he wrote an angry article and ranted about it during the following show.

* Inverted in episode 50 of ''[[Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Abridged Series|Yu-Gi-Oh the Abridged Series]]'', where Joey defends the series in court against charges of copyright infringement brought by the [[4Kids! Entertainment]] legal department.

* [[YouTube]]'s video about Copyright Infringement, starring none other than [[Happy Tree Friends|Russell]]!: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InzDjH1-9Ns&feature=relmfu\]

 

== [[Western Animation]] ==

** In a bit of a more ''old-fashioned'' version of this trope, in "Hell is Other Robots", one of the sins Bender is being punished for in Robot Hell is selling bootlegs. Note that cheating others and forging IOUs (both forms of stealing) is level two of Hell whereas piracy (another form of stealing) is level five. And, to add salt to the wound, he's punished by the artists he bootlegged in the first place: the Beastie Boys.

** [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWPfcEOr2Yg Spoofed] with the [[Fun with Acronyms|Downloading Often Is Terrible]] extra on the ''Bender's Game'' DVD, which parodies that "You wouldn't do crime X" ad by having [[Jerkass|Bender]] reply that he ''would'' do those things.

'''Bender''': A beating human heart! That's where I draw the line.

** Also, "A Clone of My Own" features the opening subtitle, ''"Coming Soon To An Illegal DVD"''.

* After Granddad forced Jasmine to accompany him and the boys while they sneak into the movies on ''[[The Boondocks]]'', an ad that played before the movie compared digital piracy (and "stealing movies") to murder and featured a movie stuntman who said that it hurts when someone "steals all that work". Jasmine started crying, said "I'm sorry, Mr. Stuntman," and wanted to turn herself in to her father, the assistant district attorney. The actual episode ends with Huey saying they should have just downloaded the movie off the internet instead of sneaking into the theater.

* That really weird [[Anvilicious]] episode of ''[[The Proud Family]]''. Penny meets a mysterious, [[The Matrix]]-like stranger who turns her ridiculously old computer that can only play Pong into some kind of super computer by... moving some stuff around. Yeah. Then he shows her THE INTERNET and the magical stash of ''evil'' illegal music it contains. Soon, the whole world knows about it and the music companies don't make any money anymore. It also compared downloading music to ''using drugs''. Then, the police ''surround her house'' and they show a musician who has actually gone broke because of piracy. Penny tells the Matrix-kid to bugger off and then this makes everything all right. The episode ends with no conclusion other than Penny putting on a pair of sunglasses and flying out the window. This episode can perhaps be described like the ''[[South Park]]'' example listed above, except played ''completely straight''.

** You get the feeling the writers were forced to make the episode since A.) Disney makes a crap ton of money on tween singers and B.) fans of tween music probably watch 'hip' shows like The Proud Family.

* The [[Couch Gag]] from ''[[The Simpsons]] Movie'', where Bart was writing on the blackboard ''"I will not illegally download this movie"''. Though it's less of a condemnation and more of an utterly hilarious in-joke if you just illegally downloaded the movie.

** Not exactly digital piracy in the sense of downloading movies/music, but when Homer got stolen cable (cable, now, being digital for many North Americans, though arguably not at the time), this trope is played remarkably straight. Even the guy who hooks up the cable is later shown to be stealing car stereos and breaking into houses. Homer, who's shown to have stolen from Moe's and work and is an unabashed alcoholic and [[Jerkass]], comes to view this as a kind of [[Even Evil Has Standards|evil even]] ''[[Even Evil Has Standards|he]]'' [[Even Evil Has Standards|can't support]].

*** Because Dethklok sales are so vital to the world economy, the UN allows them to carry this on.

* An episode of ''[[Transformers Animated]]'' dealt with it in an almost-[[Broken Aesop]]. The episode was mostly about illegal street-racing, that Sari and Bumblebee would watch on bootleg cable, a subplot that felt like an afterthought compared to the rest of the episode. Once the street racing was dealt with, Bumblebee decided to cut their cable to "Set an example" for Sari. Okay, not only did the whole piracy issue feel tacked onto the otherwise perfectly-fine street racing plot, but how did the Transformers have such a full grasp of the concept of piracy at a time when they were still getting a feel for Earth customs?

{{quote|'''Gumball:''' We need a copy of "Alligators on a Train". I know, I'm gonna download it!

* Played with in the "Downloaded Music Awards" in one ''[[Kim Possible]]'' episode:

{{quote|'''Musician #1:''' Downloading is about the fans, yeah.

== Caricature ==

* "[http://caricatura.ru/parad/grinchenko/3695/ That's patented!]"; "[http://caricatura.ru/parad/grinchenko/3718/ With copyright in head]"; "[http://caricatura.ru/parad/grinchenko/3786/ The Patent]"; "[http://caricatura.ru/parad/korsun/3921/ Attack]" (text:"How do you think -- are our disks licensed?"); "[http://caricatura.ru/parad/dubinin/3823/ Creative labour]" (text:"Let's use protection ?.."); "[http://caricatura.ru/black/korsun/457/ Civilized approach]" (text:"...we chose deliberate and civilized approach to the protection of copyrights"; the author's comment: made for a journal article about "anti-pirate campaign" which turned out to be part of war between traders in infringing copies).

 

== Other ==

** Needless to say, that slogan has been parodied enough to be approaching [[Dead Horse Trope]] status.

* Eric P. Sherman, President of [[Bang Zoom]] Entertainment, stated that if fans don't stop viewing fansubs and purchase their DVDs, the studio will stop dubbing anime, stated that "anime is going to die", and he even chastised the very audience for downloading illegal files.

 

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[[Category:Index of Exact Trope Titles]]

[[Category:Evil Tropes]]

[[Category:Stock Aesops]]

[[Category:Discredited Trope]]

[[Category:Undead Horse Trope]]

[[Category:Plots]]

[[Category:The Newest Ones in the Book]]