Zombie Room

I’m working for the film industry here in Finland. My salary comes from a company called Energia Productions, a company which gets money through government subsidies (like Finnish Film Foundation) and from the distribution of it’s films, either through distribution companies (they pay a certain % of each unit sold) or through our own resale. Anyway, I get my tummy full every day because people pay me to see or buy my films.

And still, I think the only good guy in the distribution industry is the ”pirate”. I’m talking about the forest fire that sweeps through the vast, old woodland, leaving only ashes behind. Ashes, from where even more healthier industry can be born from. A 15-year old nerd living in his/her’s mom’s apartment and renewing the 100-year old business in between wanking, IRCing and Facebookng. The only asshole not after my money in the industry.

I’m a pirate myself. I started out with music – downloading hudreds of gigs of music from all over the world, getting to know thousands of new bands along my active piracy years. But then, one day, I decided to trash all the illegal music from my harddrive and start buying the music I was in to. The reason wasn’t definitively the sudden strike of conscience, but the fact that I felt uninterested on the music because of the sheer mass of it now flowing slowly to my harddrive. I felt I needed to focus a bit, so I focused on music that I had paid for, and trashed everything else.

All went well, until I found myself in a situation that I didn’t have either enough money or time to worry about my music – I felt that if I wanted to listen to something, I should be able to do it without hesitation. And then, along came Spotify. A service where I just have to pay a yearly 100€ to keep me listening to all the music I could ever want to, and much, much more. So now I’m satisfied, a perfect balance has been found: I have all the music I want to, and somebody else is worrying about getting the stuff to me. I just open the tap, get what I want and as much as I want, and my money goes to the artist. Well, there’s of course the middlemen… But that’s, in the end, the industry’s problem, not mine.

How about movies? I’ve started downloading films via BitTorrent, through such places like Pirate Bay or Mininova actually quite recently. The reason was actually Essi: she re-ignited my interest towards film, flooding me with all the news on interesting productions popping out everywhere around the world and hyping about classics that I should’ve watched a long time ago. Nowadays, I rate my films in three categories:

These are the must-see-as-soon-as-possible-with-the-best-quality-available -films, with either a subject so important to me, or with special effects so special they rock the theater big time. Or films that are very strongly time-related, like the Oscar-nominated ones.

Usually these films are something everyone is hyping about all over the Internet, and waiting for them to land here in Finland is quite frustrating. So, in most cases, I don’t want to wait for them, and just end up downloading a screener, and never go to the theater, just because somebody wants to regulate the territorial rights.

So, because everyone is avoiding the day-and-date releases unless it’s the big-ass film of the year, as well as almost banning the multi-platform releases, film studios lose 80% of my money for not offering what I want, when I want in the format I’d prefer.

The second category of films are the ones that I don’t need or won’t have the time to go and see in theaters. There are two reasons I’d like to buy them on DVD – the quality and the box. In most cases, I want to watch the film in the best possible quality at home, and very often the BitTorrent version is of a little bit lower quality (and my TV set is so crappy that I can plug into it only through SCART, so at least there the quality is killed). In some cases, I also want to have the copy to my collections, so that I can watch it again at second’s notice. I’m not a big fan of the boxes itself, and more than that, I hate most of the extra material on a DVD, since they are, in most cases, just total, utter, viewer’s-intelligence-despising crap, but having the DVD in my collections – well, there’s some value to it.

But my dilemma is: why to pay 20e of the film, if I just want to watch it once and then forget it? It’s more than in theater, and I’m not fond of the less-than-respectable quality extras anyway. And as I’ve learned personally, the only films that deliver any kind of income to the filmmakers themselves are the full-priced ones, so buying a DVD with 5,99e just get my money to the store-owner, the one person having nothing to do with the film itself.

I don’t even want to go to the flaws of renting a film, but let me just say this: the most preferred way for me would be watch films online. I wouldn’t have to worry about anything – the availability, the heaps of boxes of films I’ll never watch again, the fact I’m paying money for the crappy extras I don’t even want to watch…

I did a little test the other day with Essi. We had a Male Superiority Sunday, when we watched films by Steven Seagal, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Clint Eastwood – and suddenly, we ran out of films to watch. We wanted to see Commando, but didn’t have the copy. Renting was completely out of question – having to walk 3 miles to the nearest rental store wasn’t the thing I wanted to do. So we finally decided to try online rentals.

We are not complete idiots with computers, I’m a bit short-tempered with them, but I get along with different net services quite well, even if they are a bit lame. But we just couldn’t rent a film from any of the five services availble here in Finland we tried. It just was completely impossible.

So, again, money lost. We got frustrated, downloaded what we wanted and watched the film.

The films that I get via BitTorrent are, in addition to the expections from above, the films that will never travel to Finland, or are classics too hard to find from stores or rental stores… Just some strange, great films from all over the world that I want to see, but would never be able to get from anywhere. I could try Amazon or Play.com, but I’ve decided to boycott those – I just hate browsing for stuff, finding exactly what I want, and then finding out that ”this product can’t be delivered to your country”. Makes me feel like Finland is in some sort of a third-world commercial blockage…

So again, a lot of money lost, and now the so-called ”long tail” gets the hit. The smaller, international filmmakers, the ones that I’d loved to support if possible. And it’s not.

Given these facts, am I a criminal? I would’ve wanted to pay for the films I watch, but it just was completely impossible for me at the level of effort I was willing to put into it.

So it’s like I’m driving a car on a long and lonesome highway, about run out of fuel. I stop by at a gas station, fill the tank, and when going inside to pay, there’s completely nobody, doors are locked and the station is dead because the gas station owner just didn’t feel like coming to work today. I’m not going to just sit around and wait for the owner to show up. If my money is not good for the owner, then I’m off, fuck him.

I don’t believe that digital sharing and distribution of films is piracy, and criminal action as such. It’s just a byproduct of the corporate-controlled industry that’s too slow to adapt, and consumers – the people who LOVE the stuff the corporates are producing – shouldn’t be the ones that take the hit.

EDIT: I just received a funny email, which says:

helpcinema.eu invites you to participate in an online petition against illegal file sharing.

Helpcinema is an initiative taken by European film professionals to collect your reactions regarding the effects of illegal file sharing on the audio-visual industry. This input will be used to give European Members of Parliament a new perspective on the subject.

You can easily participate by answering our three-step questionnaire available here. Your e-mail address will be kept confidential.

If you love cinema and if you have an opinion to share, please show your support and send us your feedback.

So go over to helpcinema.eu and share your thoughts. Not surprisingly, I answered ‘no’ three times.

-Timo