Peasants, Pigs & Astronauts

I am kind of guy who barely remembers a movie that I watched a day or two ago. Yet, I remember this one cool movie I saw over the weekend, "The Insider", starring Russel Crowe and Al Pacino. The movie apparently is based on true story of Jeff Wigand, a former research executive at Brown & Williamsons tobacco firm. As the story goes Russel Crowe gets fired and seeks to tell all. Al Pacino plays a hot shot news producer for CBS' 60 minutes who is out to encourage Russel Crowe to tell his story to the world on the show. What follows is high drama and tension as Jeff Wigand deals with threats to him and his family, his break up with his wife and bouts of delirium and despair. Certainly worth a watch. It kind of reminded me of 1976 classic "All the President's Men" .

As it turned out, I had rented this DVD. The DVD was pirated from the looks of it, but the quality of the video however was as good as original. That got me thinking about piracy. I firmly believe that movie industry cannot just seek to end piracy by imposing their standards of morality on people. We have all heard about how piracy increases the costs of the product. But the fact of the matter is costs are increased for those who are willing and are able to pay for it, the rest buy the cheaper pirated stuff. The end to this vicious circle of finger pointing is not by imposing moral standards (because that never works on a larger scale) but rather by research and development of new technology that makes it virtually impossible make pirated copies in the first place. That way everybody would be forced to buy the original movies and the prices would automatically find their way down.