Propaganda about piracy

Most scholars of propaganda seem to agree that the best propaganda is the one based in truth. This is not a shocking revelation, I’m sure, indeed it seems rather obvious this is the case. Truth holds an inexorable power over the human spirit – though not as much as one would perhaps like.

While the Japanese government launched a large-scale propaganda offensive during the Second World War, it was severely hampered by their great reluctance to at all handle truth - this despite it being quite humorously ingenious, distributing pornography among Australian soldiers depicting their wives getting it on with the drunken British and American soldiers stationed there. (No, to the best of my knowledge, that was very much ineffective. I imagine it provided relief material and little else).

It is an easy and omnipresent lesson – use truth in propaganda, it makes it more effective.

So, yesterday I saw Ford’s The Searchers. Mediocre movie, though it got very entertaining once it stopped taking itself seriously and delved into subtle farce. However, in the beginning of it, one of those Piracy – It’s a Crime! snippets was shoved into the faces of the audience – and this one was one I had not seen before. Likely because I never watch them, and frequently am spared them. However, it roused my interest, though not at all in a way it is likely intended to. This particular version was a rather pitifully clumsy example of propaganda being better when it is true.

The original trailer is an outright lie. It is always disheartening to hear the laymen decry piracy since “it’s stealing”, but when such a ‘fact’ is espoused even by the organization nominally in charge of  the interests of the involved businesses… Things are wrong. The MPAA – who indeed are the fine chaps who made the movie – know it is not stealing. While Hanlon’s razor is often very applicable, I do not think it is likely that MPAA is unawares that piracy is not, in fact, theft. It’s copyright infringement – a wholly different law. To the best of my knowledge, there’s not a legal system currently in force which considers piracy the same as theft. Not even actual piracy, which would more often be robbery.

Now to the one I found new (of course, it wasn’t, inb4 slowpoke.jpg). Now this is intriguing – I do not know if this replaced the earlier one or not (likely not, it just delves into another supposed problem, which people may be unawares of), but regardless, this one seems to be more sophisticated. Still as sophisticated as using a blunt rock for a hemispherectomy, but still, more sophisticated. For while this one lies, it does try to tone it down, somehow. No, buying pirated movies is not theft either. Even if you wanted to draw along with the piracy is theft equivalence, it would at best be handling stolen goods. Which it isn’t, either. Dowling v. United States said as much about American law; I do not think the matter is different in Swedish, British or Martian.

Nevertheless, it gets a bit more sophisticated. The disjoint between the actual thefts and the downloading in the early one was to jarring – one noticed the falsehood too much. Now there’s more of a break of reason – from theft to, all of a suden, a crime which isn’t theft, but on the other hand is more physical, and thus easier to group with the other ones. Perhaps one day there will be a MPAA trailer which does not even insinuate that copyright infringement is a criminal offence? One day they may even speak the truth (though severely lopsided to their own favour and full of equivocation – as is the way of truly sophisticated propaganda)? Mayhaps.

On a related thought – Does this perhaps mean that the ontogeny of propaganda recaputilates phylogeny?