Below you will find an email I received from one of my industry colleagues who wanted to contribute to the piracy debate. I have promised to keep him anonymous because he wants to continue working in this town.
If anybody else wants to send my anti-piracy hypocrisy stories anonymously, please do.
Here it goes:
Piracy is R&D
A slightly different perspective on the piracy debate…
Many years ago, I was employed at one of the Major Networks in an R&D capacity. What our team was tasked with was figuring out how to build streaming networks. Building a parallel to the broadcast networks where a program could be digitized and then never go back to the analog world again.
It’s one thing to convert a single file to a different format. But when you’re working at the level of a network, there’s too much to be done by hand, and you have to design systems. For digitizing. Transcoding. Asset management. Dealing with different audio mixes. Subtitles. Error correction. Multi-bit rate streaming for a wide variety of clients. Evolving formats and containers.
How did we figure out how to do this? Easy. We were all pirates.
I’m not saying we leaked material to the internet - nobody was that crazy. But everyone illegally downloaded media. We traded tips on our setups, best practices, the most efficient tools and workflows.
Everyone was downloading illegally. The VPs. The head of content security. EVERYONE.
And while we waited for the powers that be to take years to approve necessary projects, we practiced in the pirate world. We honed our skills, our design ideas, our workflow concepts in illegal waters. So when we finally got the greenlight to build something, we knew what we were doing. We were fluent.
So when I look at all the complaints about piracy costing corporations billions of dollars, all I can think about is the billions of free R&D the corporations have received from the pirate economy. Of all the money and resource we we not given by our bosses, which led us to solve problems with the tools that were available to us.
And anybody who knows Hollywood’s history knows that it was built on piracy.