Moral Suasion at the Movies

Reader Rex Stetson notes that the MPAA's anti-piracy campaign now includes a series of ads running with the trailers before films.

These include testimonials from various folks who work on movies (downloadable here) in an attempt to drive home to individual viewers the idea that it's not just mega-wealthy studio execs and actors who are harmed by piracy.

This will probably be slightly more effective than the ham-handed "copyright-infringement-is-exactly-like-physical-theft" line that Jack Valenti pitched on a recent finger-wagging tour of American colleges, but that's not saying a whole lot. There are a few reasons I don't see this being terribly effective.

First, people who wouldn't have rented or bought the movie in question (I'm assuming downloads don't primarily compete with in-theatre viewing; people go see stuff on the big screen because, well, they want to see it on the big screen), can correctly tell themselves that their downloading a movie online has no effect whatever on revenues, and therefore on the ability of the key grip or the best boy to feed his kids.

Even for those who would have bought or rented it, there's a second, more psychological problem, maybe related to what's often referred to as the "diffusion of responsibility" effect, or a kind of moral collective action problem. Individual pirates are likely to think to themselves: "The few bucks I would have otherwise spent on this movie get split a thousand ways. So I can't be making a difference to any one individual of more than an incredibly tiny fraction of a penny. The difference of one more or less rental or sale isn't going to change a studio's decision to make a film, or the amount that anyone working on it is paid."

This latter case, of course, is bad moral reasoning, as Derek Parfit's famous example of the harmless torturers so vividly illustrates. But, barring strict Kantians, most people probably don't weigh the harms of their actions in terms of the aggregate effects of following certain maxims.