"You Can Click, But You Can't Hide"

This visual rhetoric is a piece of propaganda against piracy, specifically downloading things onto ones computer. The ad plays on the movie rating system such as PG for Parental Guidance, or R for Restricted. This ad displays I for Illegal Downloading. It plays off the common phrase of “You can run, but you can’t hide,” but changes it to relate to the theme of piracy. It says that you can click, meaning download music or movies, but you can’t hide. It is trying to scare the idea into people who practice piracy that they will be found and punished eventually. This is definitely a persuasive message and an attempted scare tactic. It is designed to put doubt in the person’s head.


The people who made this ad also want to create awareness that downloading these things is illegal and that there are people who are seeking to find out those who do practice piracy in order to punish them.


In addition to the movie rating theme and the play on words of “you can click but you can’t hide,” The ad includes a picture of someone about to click a mouse. This too sends a message: The finger is raised and about to click the mouse but hasn’t clicked it yet. This seems to suggest that there is still a chance for someone to not click and stop their illegal downloading. In addition to all of these things the ad makes use of different coloring. The picture is in black and white which makes it look more bleak and foreboding. It creates an emotion in the viewer to see this as a bad thing and ads to the persuasion.

What is Piracy?

So before we can really get into deep discussions about piracy and plagiarism, we have to define what they are. Concepts such as these deal very much in relativism and are thin lines to walk along, or at least they seem that way for many. In the earlier part of this blog I will focus on piracy and move on to plagiarism at a later time. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, piracy is defined as “the unauthorized use of another's production, invention, or conception especially in infringement of a copyright.” So what does this mean?

When I think or piracy a few things come to mind: The piracy video that plays in theaters with the intense music, the copyright warnings before movies, downloading illegal movies and music, torrents, Napster, Limewire, etc. So basically, we are using or taking someone else’s things without their permission and without paying for it. It sounds a lot like stealing to me.

The video below suggests that you wouldn’t steal a DVD out of a store, so why would you steal or pirate a video online? Is it only because we are less likely to be caught doing it online? Or is there something more? I think that pirating movies and especially music has become so commonplace and ingrained in our culture that we don’t see it as wrong. I wonder if part of this is due to the websites that offer music and movies to be played for free but are still legal. These sites make their money through advertising and perhaps by selling your email addresses to third parties, but we don’t have to pay for them so we think they are going unpaid for.

Because there is so much piracy that goes on and we can so easily find free music and movies (as well as many other free things), we have started to come to expect to get these things for free. We don’t deserve them for free, right? Someone else put their time and money into creating the movies and music and software. That is their livelihood. If they were intended to be free, the people wouldn’t get paid to do them. If they didn’t get paid to do them, the creators likely wouldn’t have as much time or as many resources to devote to creating those things, and in turn we wouldn’t have them. But somehow we have gotten into the mindset that we deserve to get the latest songs, movies, and software for nothing! 

Inception

I have grown up heavily immersed in the digital world. Being born in 1989, I grew up along with the internet and was able to start learning about it and experiencing it from the time I was young. I have always been adept with computers and digital networking. Because of this I learned at an early age how simple life can be made through the information accessed in the digital world. There is a plethora of information that is available on the internet, and I have often been told that anything can be found there if you know how to look for it and find it.

                     

Because of their interactions with the digital world from a very young age, many people (especially those who are kids now) have grown up with expectations about what they can find and what they deserve to find online. This blog will seek to examine these expectations and their effects on the law and education. Specifically, I will investigate the ideas of piracy and plagiarism and the change in the perceptions of these ideas in recent history. Some of the topics I will explore are:

• How we really define piracy in the modern day?
• Is piracy now accepted as the norm in our culture?
• What are some different ways of information sharing and appropriating?
• What is the background and history of piracy? Where did it start?
• What does it mean to own digital media?
• How has plagiarism through the digital world affected the education system?
• How has the ease of access of information online affected the modern day student?
• Has the digital world spurred creativity or has it allowed for an easy way out to learn information?