Yes, it's Oscars season again, and you know what that means (if you're in the motion picture industry, that is): lots and lots of awards screeners! And with the advent of computer technology, it has become rather simple for the odd jerk to make bootleg copies of movies for the black market, with awards screeners being of particular interest presumably because they are often of movies which have yet to be released on home video (and occasionally theatrically as well). Well, to combat this potential for pirating, the motion picture industry has chosen to put warnings all over the place in as intrusive a manner as possible, thinking that we all must be secretly pining away for a life of crime, but that this strongly-worded warning stamped on the movie will cause us to think twice and realize that crime does not pay. (Unless you're too big to fail: then you get extra money from government bailouts on top of what you steal.)
But are these written warnings, as threatening and intrusive as they are, really going to resonate with us? Most people I know simply find them annoying, and distract from the movie they're trying to watch. So seeing as how Hollywood is in the business of making movies, why not make a little dramatic movie warning us not to pirate the movie? And I think I have just the scenario for such a warning:
A famous director or actor gets an awards screener of a hot new movie in the mail. But also in the mail comes a ransom note saying that his family has been abducted by mobsters who want that awards screener so they can pirate the movie, and that if he ever wants to see his family alive again, he'd better deliver the screener (!). So feeling he has no other option, he agrees, and he goes to some secluded spot in an industrial park area to go deliver the screener. Oh, but when he shows up to deliver it, it turns out that it's not mobsters after all, but agents of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (!!), and they say: "A-Ha! The warning clearly states not to give the screener to anyone else for any reason, yet here you are handing it out to people you believe to be criminals! You traitor!" So they throw a black sack over his head and deliver him to the FBI anti-piracy division, where he is publicly flogged and executed, proving that nobody, but nobody, may give away or loan awards screeners for any reason whatsoever: not even to save your family (!!!).
And after seeing that little movie, we'll all realize how serious this whole piracy thing is. (But they would really have to execute the famous actor/director, just so everyone would see that it's not just an imaginary issue, and that if you pirate movies, they will get you!)
Another possibility for this dramatized warning would be for them to make a little movie trailer type of video piece that says: If you pirate our movies, this will happen to you! And then they could show a series of violent scenes of people being killed from horror and action movies, implying that you will be the victim of such carnage if you try to pirate movies.
And the truth is, pirating is a problem for the motion picture & television industry, and if they really want these warnings to sink in, rather than have us bristle with annoyance at them, they really ought to make them fun. It's like advertising: make it lame and annoying, and people will mute it or tune it out; but make it fun and entertaining, and people will watch them happily, like with Super Bowl ads. Plus, if the warning is fun and entertaining, rather than intrusive and annoying, we might just care more about them and the well-being of their industry.
