On Pirates, Trolls something something and Really Bad Eggs

Have you ever wondered why we should be worried about pirates nowdays? People who breach copyright laws, steal movies and music, for some reason, are called pirates. If you think about it, it’s a strange term to give them. Why not video vampires; music moles or sega snitches?

Our collective subconsciousness is filled with images of scary types that would grant an evil personality to someone accessing a movie, song or game without paying for that right. But why a Pirate? Surely there are many other labels that would instil the impersonal fear of these fiscal outcasts in the general population more adequately and aptly than a pirate? How about a vampire; troll; goblin; leprechaun or werewolf? What is it about pirates that made intellectual property rights peeps change the arrrrrrrrgument?

Ba-da – cha... thanks, I’m here all week...

If we can learn anything from history, apart from the fact that we don’t learn anything from history, it is that pirates have been part of our collective subconscious for many centuries, and have been given greater credence and villainy than their acts deserve. The word goes back to at least the thirteenth century and can be linked to the Latin pirata (sea robber), the Greek peirates (one who attacks).  From about 1620, the Spanish word Picaroon was used to mean a sea-robber. However, in 1701, there was recorded the term from the Latin peritus to mean a person who takes another’s labour without permission, forward through to 1913 where it was coined to mean an unlicensed radio broadcaster probably similar to this one. Of course, this is to completely ignore the Vikings and many other groups that were essentially pirates.

Like most GenXers, I grew up with pirates being bad and Robin Hood being good. Then, somewhere along the way, pirates became good (thanks to Johnny Depp) and Robin Hood got really bad (thanks to Kevin Costner and Russell Crowe). Pirates were the bad guys in Treasure Island, the Swiss Family Robinson and Peter Pan. They were not only bad; they were ruthless, unreasoned and cold: they were not human. Then things changed a little.

The Goonies retold the pirate story from a different angle in searching for the treasure of One-Eyed Willie. Fighting through deadly booby traps and the Fratellis, in the Goonies, it is more dumb luck that saves the day, the concept of piracy is told to have been captured for so long, freed by a final booby trap, the film ends with the pirate ship Inferno, sailing away unmanned and free.     

The Princess Bride introduced the Dread Pirate Roberts as a more cultured and reasonable person. “Good night Wesley, get some sleep, I’ll most likely kill you in the morning” turned into a very reasonable want to retire and be replaced by our heroin, whom we already knew and liked.  All of a sudden, we are introduced to the back story of (one of the) Dread Pirate Roberts, and it makes perfect sense to us. 

But it’s not until the recent Pirates of the Caribbean and its sequels that the pirate story is told in the positive. Like all great action movies, these movies are in part a ‘Gospel according to Cool’ that made us buy the headbands and wristbands of Capt Jack and forgive Keira Knightly for the Phantom Menace and part a retelling analogy of freedom and justice. Piracy in these movies is regarded not as history records; ruthless and merciless monsters. Rather, the pirates of these movies are akin to nobility in many ways: from the bloodline that runs from to the son from an unknown father (Bootstrap Bill) to the concepts of freedom and justice, while in some ways a divine gifts, are given to the pirates, rather than the English, to be upheld.

So now pirates are the new black.

Walking along in any given marina nowdays, you would be unlucky to not see at least one ship with the Jolly Roger flying loud and proud. This is a very strange thing given that before July 2008, flying this flag would constitute an offence in Queensland liable to life imprisonment.

And there are other types of groovy pirates nowdays, a Facebook Pirate, we can learn, is an “...[i]ndividual that[sic]  proceeds to steal everything you post on your facebook wall and post it on their wall without giving any credit thus taking all the glory of your genius” used to complain about someone “stealing my Lady Gaga video again and he has 30 comments and I only have for [sic]”  There are Pit Pirates, who  “...focuses his entire life around his own ego. EVERYTHING is always about him. If you've cooked it, he's cooked 10 times as much and of course BETTER! If you've been there, he been there SEVERAL times! If one of your kids is cute.... well then he just doesn't care....because it's all about HIM!!!” There is also the Digital Buccaneer who “...obtains large amounts of video or music over the internet, usually by pirating or other questionable means”.

So it seems our pirates have gone from bad to misunderstood to good to just plain annoying.

Vampires have a similar stroll through history. From a weird poem by Lord Byron that inspired the sickness of Bram Stocker; to a Dracula whose story was unknown, he was just bad. Then he was, like others, misunderstood into a life against God due to bad fortune and trickery. Through the wonderful stories of Anne Rice, vampires became understandable and human, and through stories like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Lost Boys, they were even more human, if still bad. But then there’s Twilight, isn’t there?   Vampires became pooncey and annoying...just like pirates.

We’ve talked about Darth Vader in this light before have we not? Yet there is a lot more to his story that fits the same mould. The first movie that came out, he was barely human; he was a cold and ruthless killer. In the second movie (The Empire Strikes Back) this is even worse in his dealings with his henchmen, using the force to strangle them over the intercom; he couldn’t even be bothered to travel to their ship to weird force-strangle his 2IC in person. Yet in the third movie, he becomes human. He turns into a good guy and dies, but we don’t really understand that. But insert the new Star Wars trilogy, especially the third movie; Revenge of the Sith, where we not only learn how Vader becomes that person, we understand it. Anakin gets tricked into hooking his wagon onto the bad guys horse to save the love of his life....awwwww...isn’t that sweet?

No, seriously, it’s not only sweet, it’s understandable. It all makes perfect sense, down to the retelling of the story of Sir Galahad, stealing the metaphysical conundrum that free will and divine determinism can so easily confuse our heroin. Anakin is ‘fulfilling his destiny’ in the eyes of Emperor Palpatine, but at the same time chooses his actions, lest he not be responsible for them... he wants more, when he knows a Jedi  shouldn’t. A notion that is exaggerated at the end of the movie by Obe Wan not killing him because he is unarmed, juxtaposed against Anakin’s fight with Dooku at the beginning.

So what has all this got to say about bad, do we know what’s good for bad? Do we know what’s bad for bad? We got to grow up with a version of the devil, Vader, that was then warped by reasoned explanation. We get to understand what the devil did, more than that, we get to forgive him for it. What the previous generation had seen in communists, the one before that in Catholics and the one before that in Chinese and Germans, we got to understand ours. Maybe this next generation will be the first to finally transcend notions of good and evil in morality. 

And I know you’re now shaking you fists in frustration at me, screaming, ‘what about the Terrorists’? Are they just our generation’s communists or Catholics? Maybe, maybe not. But they are terrorists, rather than a particular identifying feature. It is their actions that condemn them rather than their beliefs or nationality.

I know, a pretty weak distinction. 

There is another thought troubling me about this: in all these types of stories, bad is not just beaten, it is eradicated; it is completely removed from the world. Vader destroyed the Sith completely. Dracula, who originally was just bad, was given a back story in our lifetime. His service to the lord was mocked by the trickery that destroyed his wife. This was never in the original stories, but the idea of killing him was. He was the one and only to be removed; once dead, bad was gone. But my concern is, can bad ever be removed from anything? As Uncle Fred said, "But what if pleasure and pain should be so closely connected that he who wants the greatest possible amount of the one must also have the greatest possible amount of the other, that he who wants to experience the "heavenly high jubilation," must also be ready to be "sorrowful unto death?"

You could use this point to argue that Jesus was wrong to refuse the Devil’s third logic in his forty days of wandering, but that’s another post in itself.

Back to pirates...

Interestingly, one of the anti-movie piracy ads here is Aus, which portrays a ‘pirate’, who seems to look more like a blacksmith than a pirate or a computer geek, states that one of the reasons we should turn away from video piracy is that it ‘funds terrorism’. This claim has been made by many, but interesting has been made by John G. Malcolm, a deputy assistant attorney general in the criminal division at the United States of America’s Department of Justice before a formal House Judiciary Committee proceedings, or in short, someone who ought to know better. The link is a clear one too. "Organised crime syndicates are frequently engaged in many types of criminal enterprises, including supporting terrorist activities", Mr Malcolm explained. Unsurprisingly, he could not, when pushed on the matter, name any case where this actually happened, but "it would surprise [him] greatly if the number were not large".

So if I drive a car, and some people use cars to go through drive-thrus, I think it follows that I am a hamburger.  But really...If a person breaks the law, they are part of a sub-class of people who can be labelled law breakers, some of whom fund terrorism. Therefore, breaking the law funds terrorism. Did someone say McCarthyism ?

SuPERB

There’s another ad that asks “would you steal a handbag?” ...then ... “Would you steal a car?” while presenting the types of situational crimes that Routine Activity Theory would explain all too well.

But are they actually stealing something? And if so, are they doing it for the types of reasons that the traditional pirate did? It may well be a too simplistic statement to say that the reasons for traditional piracy is simple scarcity caused by the greediness of the upper classes. Is that not the case still today?

As a part-time author, I have very little concern about people reading my stuff without paying for it, as long as this doesn’t happen too much and as long as they are not actually Stealing it (capital S for claiming ownership/authorship of it). But this may well be because I am, through most of my work, not being paid at six percent of the jacket price of my work by the people that are really pushing the anti-piracy bandwagon. I get to keep somewhere between forty percent and two thirds of the price, depending on where my work is sold. I also get to keep complete control over my work. But what is the opposite? Think about that for a minute; an author who has written an entire work of whatever, laboured through thick and thin, if s/he chooses a book-deal over self controlled publishing, s/he gets only six percent of the revenue from that work. Artists and musicians appear to be in similar situations; the are making more for the endless stream of accountants and marketing gurus out there than they are for themselves. But at least they are actually making something, creating something that this world may ponder and smile upon for a second or more. Kudos for that.

So I guess the term pirate is quite apt. Historically, it is not that pirates stole from the creators of products that made them bad, it was that they were better at it and had considerably less overheads to contend with than the government and the quazi-creative industries that leech off talent from the creators. This is still true of video pirates today I guess.

This post’s groovy, identity-seeking quote:

“Nobody can build the bridge for you to walk across the river of life, no one but you yourself alone. There are, to be sure, countless paths and bridges and demi-gods which would carry you across this river; but only at the cost of yourself; you would pawn yourself and lose. There is in the world only one way, on which nobody can go, except you: where does it lead? Do not ask, go along with it.”

This post’s lame jokes:

Q. Why don’t pirates sail to the moon?

A. Because it’s too faaaaaaaaarrrrrrr

Q. What kind of socks do pirates wear?

A. Aaaaaargiles.

Q. What do pirates do when they injure their knees?

A. Get Arrrrrrrthroscopic surgery

Q. Why do pirates read Playboy?

A1. For the Arrrrrrticles

A2. For the booty