Anarchogeek

I don’t like TV. It sucks me in and eats away at my day. I can easily sit down and turn my mind off. Then the tv is full of ads, and the shows i want to watch aren’t even on when i want to watch them. I could get tivo, but that’s for watching more tv, not less. For the last year or two i’ve been downloading some stuff from thepiratebay’s bittorrent tracker. Mostly show’s i’ve discovered from friends as i don’t have a tv to show me ads for other shows. We’ve also got a netflix account in which we apparently only watch foreign films, documentaries, and dramas based on our rental history. I’ve tried getting a few TV series from netflix but it’s not a compelling experience because you don’t want to watch a whole year of tv programs the same way you watch a full length film. Lately i’ve been better about making backups of my movies for personal use later, it seems like fair use to me.

So i’ve been thinking, what is the best way to get media. To get a season of a tv show on netflix takes about a week. There are usually 5 disc’s in the process, i’m lucky to get through the netflix cycle twice. There is a cost of about $5 because that’s 1/4 of my netflix movies for the month. I could download them from the itunes store. If i do that i’d have to deal with their DRM, but i’d officially get to keep around a copy. It would download pretty quickly, but cost me $35 for one tv show for one season. Easy, legit, not many freedoms, and pricey. The other way i can get a tv show is off of the piratebay’s bittorrent trackers. Searching and finding what i want is pretty easy, downloading may fail and it will be slow. But not any slower than the week it takes me to get the season from netflix. It’s slow, but cheaper than the other options. I get the media drm free, compressed so it’ll fit on a single dual layer dvd, and cheaper. I only pay for my broadband net connection.

For now i’m getting my TV shows from bittorrent, it’s the most convenient. What i’m wondering is, who am i cheating. If i were to get the show from netflix, then i’m paying netflix and they bought the dvd’s. They bought them once. Apparently there is some license deal where netflix does kick back some money to the rights holders, not much i’m sure.

One thing i think is really interesting when it comes to getting media is what i can get where. The local video rental store and the p2p networks have the same general type of selection. Stuff which is commercially popular and promoted by some sort of ad and marketing budget. I can get Battlestar Galactica but there’s nothing from Los Olimarenos. The movie theaters don’t show films like Sir No Sir, nor are they on the p2p networks, but netflix does carry them.

It’s interesting that the value of selling media to me comes from the people who sell the obscure items, not the most popular. I was at the Play Conference a couple of weeks ago and i got to ask a question of one of the executives of Universal Records about what they think they provide, why should they be given laws to protect them from ‘theft’. His answer was mostly that they provide production and promotion assistance to the artists. That’s why they provide which is distinct from artists who are only promoted via social networks (online and off). What an interesting contradiction. The only things i can get easily via p2p are the things which are popular in large part because the media companies have marketed them. The media companies justify their existence because they can provide marketing. The sales of media which have marketing budgets are undercut by p2p networks, but various independent artists use things like netflix and cdbaby to sell and for the most part aren’t hurt by p2p networks. Perhaps the existence and popularity of p2p networks are a consequence of the the way the large media companies work.

The copyright and intellectual property laws were written to promote and foster a community of creativity and innovation. Today their existence and effect threaten communities of creativity and innovation. It’s about time we started questioning copyright’s existence as a useful tool in society.

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