nixsight

So championship communicator Jeremy Nicholas apparently had a problem getting into a Cineworld cinema with his laptop.

Now, this sort of story always gets people frothy. For a start, we don’t like being told what to do by someone operating as an automaton on the part of a faceless organisation, not least because the things they end up telling us to do are generally a little bit stupid.

When piracy is invoked, it gets our blood up that little bit more. Those of us who don’t drink at the furry cup of illicit movie file-sharing see it as an attack on our civil liberties, and that we are innocents being treated as criminals. Those of us who are evil, reprehensible, filthy pirate file-sharing pirate-pirates have normally worked out our own tissue-thin rationalisations of why it isn’t a proper crime anyway, and proclaim that if the entertainment industry deserved our money, we’d be happy to spend it.

The entertainment industry holds no truck with the second point of view, and in dealing with the first uses child-protection logic – that it doesn’t matter how many innocent people are inconvenienced or abused, if it means that just one single movie goes unmolested.

Where I stand on this is I sit. Down, around the middle of the cinema but near to the aisle for Girl One, and try and watch the movie in peace. Which is pretty rare in your average cinema screen.

I understand that the industry feels the need to do something about this rampant plague that is killing their ability to make steadily more overblown nonsense-poems, but I can’t help but get agitated when I see ever more hysterical measures put in place to try and stop illegal filming at the cinema.

Because it’s a showy, officious performance, but it’s also entirely counter-productive and arbitrary. Once a movie has been illegally filmed in one place, it’s already available everywhere else that there is an internet connection, so in real terms, the only screener that there is any point trying to stop is the first one.

Which is to say that a quick online search should show that by the time a film is on in London, security measures are probably not only an irritation to your customer, they also don’t really make a difference to piracy, because the film will already have been filmed somewhere else and shared from there.

More than that, though the industry would have us believe that file-sharing is the chosen method of people who are evil, and one stage away from drug-dealing, car-theft or terrorism, but a bit of actual, honest-to-goodness research would probably show that it’s more likely to be the result of laziness and apathy. People don’t only download films because they want something for nothing – and the idea that downloading anything is free is a bit of a fallacy anyway – they do it because ultimately it’s less hassle than going to the cinema, with not enough of a drop in value to make it unpalatable. Like any other consumer, they do the sum in their head, between what they invest and what they get back, and the cinema loses out.

And part of the reason the cinema loses out is petty policies like the one Mr Nicholas had to deal with. Another is the increasingly bad behaviour of other patrons during movies, with seemingly no desire by the cinema to do anything about it. As galling is the fact that, while we are battered by piracy warning after piracy warning, there is nobody in place to stop people using their mobile phones for noisy phonecalls.

Worse than all of these is the fact that, appallingly often, there are issues with sound or alignment of the film projection that aren’t resolved until one of the customers leaves the theatre to find a member of staff. Normally, it turns out, that customer is me.

One of the main reasons why people might not download a poorly dubbed hand-filmed version of a movie is that the quality will usually suck. So in some ways the expectation that a professionally projected cinema presentation will be high quality is the unique selling proposition of paying instead of downloading, at least when talking about this particular sort of piracy.

On Twitter, one individual suggested that the simple addition of an usher in every screen would deal with any number of the problems with cinemas. They could quickly deal with sound and projection issues, handle behaviour problems, and even keep an eye out for the evil and quite unlikely pirates, without the need for petty box-ticking policies imposed overtly on customers. And it wasn’t all that long ago that this was actually the case.

I think there’s some value in that idea. Not because it might help stamp out piracy directly, but because anything that makes the cinema-going experience more comfortable for the people who actually want to watch films is going to make the experience of watching a film at the cinema more appealing. The knock on effect of which is that more people want to watch films at the cine… I don’t need to explain this part, do I?

But anyway, “providing a better service makes more people want that service” wasn’t the big solution that the title of this post promises, even though it should, you know, be common fucking sense all by itself.

No, if file-sharing of screeners is considered a loss of revenue, because they take away custom from cinemas, the trick is not to come up with ways of stopping them… it is to not bother trying to stop them at all.

Because like I mentioned before, once that first decent screener is filmed (and “decent” is an entirely subjective metric at this point, because generally those things are unwatchable), and goes out onto the net, it’s out there. Before long, it’s proliferated across the main peer-to-peer sites, and the more people share it, the more people can share it, because download speeds get higher the more people there are with that one version.

Often people will take that one version and repackage it, but while there’s just that one version, in a few limited iterations, it becomes very easy to get that film.

What happens if, for whatever reason, more and more people attempt to get and share a newly filmed copy of that movie, is that the amount of people wanting to download it get spread across a wider pool of copies of the film. Downloads start to get noticeably slower, but worse for the file-sharer, the more copies, and the more amateurish jobs done on those copies, that are out there, the more time and effort is spent trying to search through for a trustworthy and decent quality one, and the more time each individual will spend waiting for a film to download that ultimately turns out to be unwatchable.

Any individual that isn’t that bothered about watching the film will probably give up after the first or second try. Anyone who is interested was probably just trying to get a copy so that they didn’t have to wait until they got a chance to watch it at the cinema, or to put up with the crappy experience that cinemas have become. If it becomes easier to go to the cinema, and more rewarding, than trying to find yet another shitty download of the same film, they are more likely to do it, because it becomes the path of least resistance.

So as long as the people willing to put themselves through the probably quite annoyingly fidgetty process of trying to film something secretly don’t put off the other patrons in that particular screening, I reckon the cinemas shouldn’t put any more energy into stopping them than they do any other disruptive behaviour. The more of these guys there are, putting poor quality copies out into the wilds of the internet, the less value there’ll be in doing it at all.

So, that’s Jeremy Nicholas’ problem solved, as well as that of the cinemas, many of the movie-goers, and even probably some of the pirates.

You’re all welcome!

* * *

You’ll note I haven’t actually come up with a solution for DVD piracy, or those awesome pre-screen versions of films that sometimes do the rounds, but as far as making cinemas less upsetting experiences, and potentially actually that little bit more profitable as business ventures, I think there’s some workable stuff in here.

Course, I’m probably actually talking out of my hat – not that I’m wearing a hat! I am very opinionated and knee-jerky on the subject, and this has all been written with the benefit of some sort of inner-ear oddness, and a tight deadline. If you think I’m full of poop, or even if you agree, please do leave me a comment!