With so many millions of articles being published every week, how do you get noticed? With thousands of new films released monthly, how do you attract the public's attention? With millions of tracks online, how do you get people to listen to your music? The simplest way is to tell people not to read, not to watch, not to listen!



So how many of you will click this banner? If you are under 18, almost everyone will take a peek. And what will you find? Something you really need and can't do without?

A link to yet another movie awaits anyone clicking on this image. The temptation comes in the form of an Australian film called Ken Park. banned left and right because the film-maker dared to keep it all in the family, so to speak. It is rude, challenging and you know you are curious. And the more I talk about its lewd, nude nature, the more curious you become...

And finally, when they thought that Elvis had been the epitome of controversy in pop, along came the Sex Pistols with Never Mind the Bollocks. Of course, with a name like that, the album was instantly banned from Radio, but that didn't stop it being number one album for 47 weeks. It was a piece of masterful shock manipulation marketing, and like the previous examples, played on Man's innate curiosity for the prohibited and rude.

The moral of the story, if you want people to read, touch or listen, all you have to say is Don't read, don't touch and don't listen. It is so simple, the marketing agencies trying to go the traditional route with millions of dollars of sophisticated promotion will surely try to ban this lid-blowing hard core article.

I was reading a well-written article by FiftyFourEleven on copying content, and another, a review by Tyler Cruz, about a company focused on detecting plagiarism Plenty of good illegal anti-copyright stuff for writers to get caught up in and angry about. But as usual, I got to thinking about the negative aspects in a different light. Copy me, baby!

If words are not precious, being copied is not annoying

I can understand that for most people, writing doesn't come naturally, and even when it is fun, it is inevitably hard work. So, if one day, a non-writer really squarts their ass off completing an article or a story or even a book, (and puts their pen down with that feeling of I couldn't (or wouldn't want) to do that again) I can see they would feel very protective of their achievements. Committed writers should feel different, though.

To my mind, litigation and anger and annoyance are a waste of time and effort for most creative types. When there is a whole world to fill with new stuff, why restrict your thinking to minutiae and silliness? Why be like the music copyright people and spend millions hunting down teenagers, when they could be spending millions promoting the wonders of owning your music? Move on.

Writers and bloggers should look at the bigger picture and forget hunting down the copycats for legal reasons. The way I look at it, if someone copies your work, the more people will probably read your work anyway, and the more you have to write about in your scandals column! Far from being negative, copying creates an outlet for your creative juices. Did you hear about so-and-so? The bastard ripped me off - a great headline to attract readers.

Protection against copying and plagiarism

I don't really care if anyone copies me or not, but if I were smart and wanted to optimize the marketing potential of everything I wrote, I would always include my Pisstakers site name in an article and include a link back to the article on my site, and date the article, and keep a hard copy of the article. To me that sounds like I am pretty much copy-proofed, especially as most copycats aren't prepared to edit anything. Take those steps, and bottom line, the more who rip you off and publish you verbatim around the internet , the better for you.

Use Copyscape out of interest and vanity, not so you can track a copycat down via ISPs etc and make them feel stupid.

When you look around the internet and see ideas identical or similar to yours, think how you can improve on what is already out there, instead of getting all possessive, bitter and twisted.

Write your heart out and press publish with a clear head, secure in the knowledge that nearly all bloggers come out ahead of nearly all copycats - as long as you remember to take the above simple steps every time you write. In fact, I would go one stage further and say that if you follow those simple rules, you should subtly encourage others to take your work as their own. When they do, you win, not them!

What about Google?

Some internet entrepreneurs out there would say that copying is a bad deal if Google get involved, because money is at stake. My view is, I would hope that the smashing folks at Google were reasonable enough to compare your track record as a writer with the track record of a scraper site, and decide not to close your Adsense account or penalise you for duplicate copy. And if they did come down on the side of the bad guys, at least you would have plenty of new material to blog about.

Conconclusion

When you get down to it, a few people get away with cheating in the long run. Copycats like Shakespeare or Microsoft Windows inventors spring to mind, and there are always plenty of cases to disprove the rule, but for the most part, the guys who produce original material day after day end up the winners. Keep on writing, don't be too precious about your work, follow those few "rules" and enjoy your ride to fame. I think therefore I am original.

After receiving an email from WMDTalk, a site I reviewed some time ago, I got to thinking about video and music piracy. Trae now offers links to major movies for your online pleasure. I am duty bound to point out that this is not illegal because the movies are hosted in Denmark. So that is alright then.

Piracy is theft

I think the main reason that people rationalise stealing as "borrowing" or "sampling" is actually their response to the stance of a bunch of numb skulls in the video and movie industry. If you read the Motion Picture Association of America website, it makes for some interesting and sad reading that is so black and white as to be almost laughable, and no wonder people are circumventing their rules.

Who are the pirates under scrutiny?

This isn't aimed at major mobs who get hold of the master tapes before they leave Hollywood. I am talking piracy involving normal people. The MPAA website and people on the piracy trail offer plenty enough fertile pickings for a pisstaker who, by nature, mocks the behavior of people who say one thing and do another, or make a stance that is so full of holes you could drive a truck through it. (This is why I make fun of my imperfect self too, just to be fair.)

To the pirates I say

I am totally against stealing. Crazy as it sounds, I feel I have to say this, because many people of a certain generation think that stealing, when couched in other terms, and applied to online activities, isn't particularly wrong. I suggest that most people have never created anything worth stealing, so they don't get it!

So, my main gripe, irrational maybe, is that 99% of "pirates" have not an ounce of movie-making creativity in their own soul yet they dare take the work of someone who has spent years and millions making something from nothing, and take ownership of the DVD as though it were their own.

Call it a quirk of old age, whatever, but I try to see things from both sides. For instance, I know for sure that if I played truant, then made a copy of a student's school notes and said I was borrowing them to see how they worked out for me before I copied them and used them as my own, the ripped off student would be anything from indignant to pissed off. Is watching a pirated DVD any different?

Of course the student would say "Yes! When I watch (or copy) a DVD, I have no intention of selling it, or making a movie using the excerpts or doing anything except watch it. It is for personal use."

And then of course, the creative person in me would get totally cruel and say that me taking his notes and him taking a DVD copy is exactly the same, because neither would I do anything with his notes with commercial intent, but I still want to have his notes as my own to read and entertain me. (Not to do anything with them, just to have them, taking them for the hell of having them on my shelf is plain vindictive, and that isn't nice either!)

And anyway, maybe I wouldn't do anything with his notes, but the truant mate of mine who I gave them to might re hash them, and sell them to classmates... (I know a university professor who sold his notes to students, so it isn't too far-fetched a proposition!)

When is copying OK, according to Ed's own black and white stance?

If you already own a full copy and wanted to make a back-up, then at last, we are entering the constructive side of copying. And if you were doing research to see if you wanted to add to a paid-for collection, then at last we can look to the movie industry to stand up and move the debate forward.

MPAA are causing many issues related to piracy

I am not an unfair pisstaker and am not down on people for the sake of it. I need to point out, however, that the MPAA are a bunch of dinosaurs who have backed progress and piracy into a corner. For a start, they say that studentss with little world experience act against the law, (which is true) whilst making out that the entertainment industry is a pure entity operating on a level playing field (which they aren't.) They have ripped off so many individuals in the course of their history it is embarrassing that they stand for anything ethical. Every penny invested in movies has come from a legitimate source, every contract has been fair to both parties? Right! They have tried to prosecute politicians for downloading stuff?

Grow the number of collectors via "preview piracy"

And the really stupid thing about their piracy is theft stance is that the online world offers the film industry endless opportunities for massive additional incomes, if only they could think outside their ivory tower and embrace change instead of fight it.

For instance, one of the students' justifications for taking a copy is to preview something before buying. That is a bollocks argument for most, but a small percentage actually do that, you know. There are folks with collections worth thousands, and the availability of free previews on Limewire gives them a chance to view more, and get suckered into owning more. Admittedly that small percentage of modern day collectors was also small pre-piracy, probably smaller than today in fact, but the MPAA are thick not to recognise the chance to grow that collector base by miles using creative use of previews.

Unfortunately, the movie people delight in quoting the truth - People wouldn't buy more just because of free previews of pirated movies. Correct. But they only see the "preview" model against a backdrop of DVDs at their current prohibitive price level. What the MPAA fail to embrace is that if they made full movie previews easily available and dropped the price of a DVD, and maybe played around with resolution quality options, then shock horror, the barriers to entry would drop and millions more people would probably start collecting. Oooh, 3 things at once!

That is some food for thought. There is also the flat-rate download all the digital you can for $50 a year option, but that is too big a step, I fear....

A final twist

Here is another piece of sadness. When I said students, that implies young people, but I also include the following demographic - people old enough to be parents who were interviewed in the Indicare project

• PC-freaks (high computer proficiency, high level of illegal copying; 10,3 % of the sample; average age 25);
• hobby-users (low computer proficiency, high level of illegal copying, 33,6 % of the sample; average age 29);
• pragmatists (low computer proficiency, low level of illegal copying, 49,5 % of the sample; average age 34);
• PC-professionals (high computer proficiency, very low level of illegal copying, 6,5 % of the sample; average age 38).

Stock up on your mega terabyte hard drives, all you data administrators in law firms and accountancy practices. Yes, folks, the laws pertaining to electronic communications are tightening up around your necks.

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