L.A. County makes piracy a public nuisance: 'It's just plain morally wrong,' Yaroslavsky says

At Tuesday's L.A. County Board of Supervisors meeting [PDF], the board added an ordinance to the county code's Title 13, which deals with public peace, morals and welfare, that makes piracy a legal nuisance.  That means it's now subject to being "restrained, enjoined, abated and prevented" by county authorities. People hawking bootleg DVDs or other merchandise on the street can now be swept away and/or penalized. 

If you read through the minutes of this meeting, you'll see  that when the ordinance was called up for discussion, the only two speakers in attendance were representatives of the Recording Industry Assn. of America and the Motion Picture Assn. of America. Each says a brief piece, invoking the usual statistics about how worldwide piracy costs the L.A. area billions of dollars a year. The reps thank the supervisors for their attention, and the supervisors thank the reps for coming. Thank you sir -- no, thank you sir.

Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky then preaches the gospel of anti-piracy: piracy is a "really outrageous problem" involving an activity that is "just plain morally wrong."  Yaroslavsky invokes the now ancient-school swashbuckle of comparing piracy to other types of theft in which copying is not involved: "It's no different than if you walk into a store and steal a bag of potato chips or rob a bank."  (I like how bank robbery takes second billing to chip-lifting). 

The logic of this, of course, is more than a little suspect.  When you rob a bank, you're not making copies of the money in the vault, and when you steal potato chips, the bag you stole isn't still sitting on the rack for someone else to buy. The major presupposition of almost all piracy impact studies is that people would actually buy all of the stuff that they copy -- i.e. if you hadn't paid the $2 on the street for the "Pearl Harbor" DVD, you would've bought it for full price from Amazon. 

It's all just a little too circa 1999. The business models they're trying to defend have been on the slab longer than the kids who are flouting them have been alive. There are hardly any trees left, fellas -- you should definitely be able to tell it was a forest now.

Photo of questionable DVD sales activity on Broadway in downtown Los Angeles is courtesy of flickr user jimw

Comments

[Marcelo de Santi]

What we see in this article is another instance of the argument according to which piracy is at the same time 1) unavoidable and 2) a result of mistakes and iniquities made by the big, bad entertainment businessmen themselves.

According to 2, the state should not prosecute pirates because theirs is a "justifiable" crime - it's not harmless, but since it's only harming "bad" people, we can let them get away with it. The problem here, of course, is that that argument relies on a dangerously impressionistic (not to mention unlawful) way of defining who is "good" or "bad", and it also means that people can rightfully apply whatever punishment they see fit to those considered "bad" with their own hands, as long as that punishment is "harmless" to the "good" people - in this case, the poor audience who has been forced for years to pay for bad quality, overpriced CDs and DVDs, as if NOT consuming such products had never been an option.

And 1) is even worse, because it implies that, if someone DID find a way to make perfect copies of dollar bills, without removing the original bills from their original place, then what the hell - just let it be. They're not technically stealing anyway.

No matter how the author tries to spin it, piracy IS morally wrong. If you have a problem with how much CDs and DVDs cost, or if you have a problem with people making a ****load of money out of these overpriced, generally low-quality-content products, then simply DON'T buy them.

Don't support the raping of property rights just because it's happening now to property you don't own. Just as you consider that big studios' and recording companies' CEOs have too much money to worry about one harmless unauthorized copy you're making/buying, there are lots of people around the world who would consider that the average American, with their mortgages and new cars, already have way more than they need to survive; so it should be ok if we forced said Americans to share some of their property with the poor of the world.

I live in a 3rd world country, I've seen such anti-Americanism in action and trust me, you guys don't want to support any loosening of the fundamental rights, such as property rights, that have made it possible for Americans to enjoy the standard of living they have today.

[Sarin C Mass comm 100 ben lohman]

I think piracy is ruining our music and movie industry. Its putting a huge halt on creative musicians getting their music out. Independent musicians can't seem to get their music out and distributed. Instead of pircay we should look toward the big companies to make music cheaper and more readily availabe. Lets get it don people. Whats up ben?