Video Dead

Still on a high from the Fare Thee Well shows.  I don’t really know how exactly to describe it, but, in short, it was awesome.  It was 70,000+ people per night all getting along and there for the music.  That’s not counting the innumerable who hit theaters for the simulcast or went the pay-per-view/YouTube route.  Right, Google, for pay, allowed you to stream it from YouTube.  Cool stuff. 

Naturally, like any person who follows a jam band, I wanted the music ASAP, so that I could hear it again.  I like to think that Phish was the first to really get that right.  Initially, you could buy the show you just saw from a site called www.livephish.com.  There was a guy from www.Nugs.net, who was a fan, who brought the music you saw in a live show to your desktop in a week.  Now it’s closer to within a couple of hours from when the show ended.  Amazing.  The Nugs dude also had quite a collection of Dead music you could sample for free.  Thanks, man.

Would something similar be set up for these Dead shows?  Having Trey involved raised my expectations.  However, news is that both audio and video won’t be commercially available until November in time for the Christmas rush.  OK, that’s fine…but I want it now.  Oh, gods of Google, reward me for being a decent (not perfect) human being, and provide me with the entertainment I so desire!  And the gods listened…and they were pleased, and low, a Torrent was made available around a week after the shows, containing not one, not two, but all three nights, in HD, ripped from a Verizon pay-per-view feed.

And it was good.

But, there’s a ton of ethical questions that come up when these “finds” are “found.”  Is it stealing?  Yes…not only from the Dead who plan to monetize these shows, but also, likely, from Verizon who broadcast it.  Will having the video feed from these shows impact my intent on buying a copy for myself?  No.  This feed is a placeholder for a better version that comes in true Blu-ray HD and 5.1 or 7.1 surround-sound audio and added features/interviews, etc.  It will be purchased by either myself or my family, and then, from those disks, I can rip myself a copy using Handbreak or something similar (use Google my friends).  Isn’t that also stealing?  That’s a gray area.  I would guess that legally, the Dead would prefer you to buy two copies.  Is it theft when you take a DVD and make a back-up, or run-copy for yourself?  Gray.  Why?  Because you’re clearly circumventing the protections put on those disks to prevent precisely that (see: Better mousetrap).  But, in my mind, and this may not hold up in a court of law, I’ve already bought it, and damned if I will be restricted to what device I want to watch it on, be it DVD/TV, laptop, or tablet computer. 

I don’t condone theft.  But, at the same time, I think that, as technology changes, and people’s consumption of art changes, the industries which make that art also need to change.  It’s imbecilic to have a business model which says “we’ve always done it that way, and so, instead of changing to meet our consumer’s needs, let’s sue the ones who bring about change.”  Digital media is here to stay.  And, like iTunes proved, if you make things more easily accessible and affordable (easier to buy than steal; see: HBO Go/HBO Now), you might be able to wring out some coin in a system where trading intellectual property is fairly easy, and isn’t going away.  To paraphrase Frank Zappa, “Media recordings aren’t dead, they just smell funny.”