NB: written back in December 2012, only published Feb 22, 2013

While I can't find anything official on the 2 Player Productions, there's a buzz about the movie Minecraft: The Story of Mojang being put up on The Pirate Bay by its producers. (Google search)

My kids backed this as a Kickstarter project. Getting access to goodies was a nice part of the deal, the real goal was to see that movie fully realised - i.e. on our TV. We got the link to the digital copy, downloaded an SD version (shitty, edge of the exchange net access) and waited. Like a slowly warming room on a cold winter's night. "37 minutes to go! No.. 33. No.. 42"

We watched the movie as a family. I won't spoil anything in saying you probably won't learn anything you didn't already know - but you'll have a smile on your face nonetheless. It's quite inspiring in many ways - particularly the advice about not accepting advice and the need to make stuff happen (not just dream it). The choice comment from the night, having seen the boys' names in the credits, was from my oldest: "I feel like everything has changed." He's now part of gaming history.

It was a wonderful film. And now it's released you have the option of either buying it - or just downloading it from The Pirate Bay. Assuming the comments on TPB's page is true, it sounds like the folks from 2PP are accepting a blatant reality - one that traditional media seems to be fighting tooth and claw to deny. People will copy your stuff. And sometimes they won't pay for it.

I'm intrigued by this. It appeals to my thinking, about how the machinations of intellectual property pundits are being disrupted by smaller groups intent on creating some kind of meaningful dialog with the consumers of their product. It's a new kind of capitalism - writ small and with a human face. Yes, I'm sure there will be people who try and rort things. But they have less chance of doing large scale damage (relative to, say, a large financial institution) and more chance of being caught out.

But how do I feel about it? When I heard about Minecraft: The Story of Mojang being released on TPB I have to say I felt a little twinge. Here was something that we'd spent money on, had waited and waited until we could finally watch it, now available for anyone to just download for free at a whim.

Maybe more of a cringe than a twinge: a horrible feeling that things just aren't right, like bogans turning at your dinner party. That feeling lasted oh, a good hour or two, with minor flashbacks throughout the night. When I woke up on Christmas Day however, it had vanished. Maybe due to severe sleep withdrawals, having written a web app that displayed the number of hours until the kids could wake Mum and Dad ("No earlier than 6am!"). What worked on my box of course failed once I pushed it up to the server. Time difference. Different version of Ruby. Grrr.. By the time I got everything working the page read "4 hours and 22 mins 50 secs until you can wake Mum and Dad".

But now, a day and a sleep-in later, I'm still feeling fine. People were always going to pirate this movie. By getting in ahead 2PP are creating an opportunity to engage with a new potential market. It makes sense - both from a business perspective and from a human one. It's taking me back, to when I first read the Cluetrain Manifesto and thought "Yep, this is the world I want to live in."

There are two kinds of people 2PP will engage with via The Pirate Bay: those who will buy the product, and those who won't. In either case there will be a range of reasons people either decide to give back or not. I suspect that choosing not to contribute will boil down to one of three reasons: too poor, too miserly or being a brain-dead zombie.

I've met plenty of brain-dead zombies: people who just download out of some compulsive habit, without any conscious realisation that the sheer volume of content they have siting on their multi-terabyte drives cannot be watched within a single lifetime. Yet still they download. I'm sure in the future we'll come up with medical term for this, but for now "brain-dead zombie" will do as a placeholder.

Of those too poor, well.. having once been a university student / worker of crappy jobs I understand the feeling of going without. It's hard to judge, when there's so much on offer, so much available and being consumed by the rest of society. How can anyone be expected to resist? And why resist? Who really is the victim? The only difference is that when I was younger we didn't rip CDs. We made mixtapes. Of course, we were intentionally violating IP laws in the pursuit of turning our friends on to new music. We knew every crackle and pop, the scratches where the needle would jump the vinyl. But maybe none of this happened. We were under the radar and no statistics were gathered. We bought the posters, went to the gigs. Our relationship with our pop culture heroes was writ across bedrooms, on the old fridges we bought for the first flat we rented. It's all different now, of course. But I remember what it was like to be young.

As to the miserly, again it's hard to judge. I used to get irritated by well-off dudes limewiring (or whatever old dudes do) music, but then you get to talk about their collection of hard-to-get blues that you just can't find on iTunes. And I get it. But then you have a whole crowd of casual downloaders who just do it because they can. There's not even a "Fuck it to the Man!". Popular culture is just a noisy post-modern backwash to their lives that they feel as entitled to as air or thought.

Taking a purely freeloader approach to online content creates very little value. Maybe a link in a tweet is good advertising. But that's more check out my cool that check out this cool thing. Again, no judgment. But here's the sticker. Someone who just downloads an infinite stream of candied culture into their brains will never know the joy, the expectation, of watching and waiting for something you care about come into fruition. They'll never have that giddy delight come over them when a package arrives in the mail.. from overseas! (more joy for little people). They'll not be engaging in the creation of something new, something good. Or they may just get their joy from somewhere else. We're all different. But fundamentally they won't have the opportunity to access some of the value of this film. Not everything can be downloaded.

So if you didn't contribute to the Kickstarter project, and you didn't buy a copy from 2 Player Productions, but you downloaded and watched the movie anyway.. good on you. It's a wonderful film, isn't it? I hope you didn't mind missing out on the extras, and I really hope you enjoyed the film.

Credits

Minecraft image derived from an original image by Paul Schulerr.

Pirate Bay logo by The Pirate Bay.