Columns

I want you to picture me as I was just over half a century ago. I am a little cherub, skipping along to the Gaumont Cinema for my weekly fix of Saturday morning cinema. I clutch six hot pennies in one hand, my little wooden yo-yo in the other and I am blessed with a mouth full of perfect teeth, because although sweets are still rationed, you can score chewing gum off the Yanks at the airbase. No harm can befall me when the lights go down in my cinema, apart from inadvertently mixing fag ash with my gum when I store it in the seat-back ashtray. And apart from dodging a sprinkling of widdle from Runny Ronnie Walters up in the balcony, I am safe.

Not so today. These days, going to the movies is a very threatening experience. No sooner am I hunkered down in my plush velvet seat, and even before I can tuck into my five-litre bucket of chalk'n'cheese popcorn, let alone unscrew the plastic cap from my quarter-bottle of Borzoi-flavoured vodka, than a naked giant appears in widescreen and surround sound to threaten me with a branding iron. He warns that if I even think about illegally copying the film I am about to see, I will be thrown into an underground dungeon, suffer an unlimited fine and have all my perfect teeth repossessed. Ouch!

A pirate's life for me

The same goes for today's computer software, video games, recorded music and print. The anti-piracy giant extols me to grass up anyone offering illegal copies of anything, and I am reminded that the unauthorised duplication of copyright material is the greatest threat to civilisation there can possibly be, because "piracy is a sin and must be stopped".

Yes, but in my long, long experience, piracy is not a sin and there is no need to stop it. To my

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certain knowledge, piracy is greatly beneficial to creative people and the law is running several years behind the facts, as it always does when it comes to anything to do with the digital revolution. I can think of no better anthem in praise of piracy than the one I used to sing out in that fleapit of my childhood cinema, along with several hundred other little pirates half a century ago. It went like this:

We come along on Saturday morning,

Greeting everybody with a smile.

We come along on Saturday morning,

Knowing that it's well worthwhile.

We're members of the Gaumont Club

And we intend to be

Good citizens when we grow up

And Champions of the Free!

Please note that our watchword was "Free!", and I am greatly amused by the current generation of consumers who have no concept of free stuff, but instead think it is natural to pay for everything, not just once, but time and time again. They pay to talk. They pay to listen. They pay to write messages. They pay to read messages. They pay to hear downloadable music. They pay to view commercial television channels. They pay for the ringtones on their telephone. They pay to drive through town, and they pay to park outside their own front door. The silly sods even pay to drink the free waters of life.

They pay and pay and pay again, but they have no idea why they are paying for stuff that in my austere childhood was held in common ownership as common wealth, without toll or charge - they simply accept it as 'normal'. Piracy does no harm to this culture of never-ending payments; in fact, it is the catalyst.

Box office takings at UK cinemas grew by 7.7 per cent last year. DVD sales grew by 10.4 per cent. UK sales of computer and video games have hit an all-time high, with over £1.52 billion taken in the past year. UK software sales for the first quarter of 2008 have broken all previous records, with 17.89 million units sold. Sales of downloadable music have increased so much that far from killing the music industry, they have saved it. It does not matter in the slightest if someone downloads 1,000 bootleg movies, 10,000 illegal ringtones or 100,000 pirated music tracks. What are they going to do with them? There's no point trying to sell them to their mates, because their mates have already downloaded them.