The Pirate Bay Press Release On SOPA: We Are The New Hollywood

from the history-repeating-itself dept

Given its general contempt for the repeated attempts to close it down, you wouldn't expect The Pirate Bay to be particularly worried by SOPA. But in its very own press release on the subject, it goes much further: it flings the ultimate insult at Hollywood by claiming that not only are the two of them spiritual kin, but that The Pirate Bay is the New Hollywood.

Here's why The Pirate Bay thinks Hollywood is exactly like itself: Because of Edisons patents for the motion pictures it was close to financially impossible to create motion pictures in the North american east coast. The movie studios therefor relocated to California, and founded what we today call Hollywood. The reason was mostly because there was no patent.



There was also no copyright to speak of, so the studios could copy old stories and make movies out of them – like Fantasia, one of Disneys biggest hits ever.



So, the whole basis of this industry, that today is screaming about losing control over immaterial rights, is that they circumvented immaterial rights. They copied (or put in their terminology: "stole") other peoples creative works, without paying for it. And here's why Pirate Bay thinks it's the New Hollywood: The reason they are always complainting about "pirates" today is simple. We've done what they did. We circumvented the rules they created and created our own. We crushed their monopoly by giving people something more efficient. At the end of its release, The Pirate Bay admits rather drolly: Some facts (years, dates) are probably wrong in this press release. The reason is that we can't access this information when Wikipedia is blacked out. Because of pressure from our failing competitors. We're sorry for that. In fact its potted history of Hollywood is not so far off the mark. Here's a rather more rigorously-researched description of the battle between Thomas Edison, along with his Motion Picture Patents Company (MPCC) – basically a group of suppliers that tried to enforce a monopoly over cinema equipment – and Carl Laemmle's Universal Pictures that refused to knuckle under: what ultimately did the Edison monopoly in was the assumption that its legal/technological dominance over the trade, and its moral stance, would trump the public’s demand for ever more creative motion pictures. Unlike the independents, the MPCC system did not invest in its network. Consumers would simply have to watch Edison Trust fare, the monopoly’s principals figured.



They didn’t. Instead, they flocked to Laemmle and his fellow independents' "illegal" movies, which were longer and of better quality. Even the Trust's inner circle knew this. "We… pass on pictures we know will get us nothing but unfavorable comments and cancellations," one confided. "We haven’t the power to throw out the distinctly bad pictures, nor the courage, because as poor as they are, they represent a certain sum of money invested in negative production."



Edison and his cohorts never understood that they were involved "in much more than an economic battle to determine who would control the profits of the nascent film industry," Neal Gabler writes. This was a conflict between an older generation of Anglo-Saxon Protestant inventors and a new generation of immigrants. The parallels with today's battle between the MPAA (complete with its "moral stance") and Net-based "independents" like The Pirate Bay (with its DRM-free content), are clear. Once again, this is not just about who gets the money, it's a conflict between the "older generation" of movie companies with their "legal dominance", and the "new generation" of digital immigrants like The Pirate Bay that give the public what they want.

Call it Hollywood 2: The Sequel.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community. Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis. While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: disruption, history, hollywood, innovation, monopolies

Companies: mpaa, the pirate bay