I should have mentioned this earlier in the week, but over the weekend a friend of mine bought a pirate DVD of An Inconvenient Truth off some bloke in a pub. When we sat down to watch it on Saturday, the disc turned out to contain a 90-minute Fox News documentary that was all about how climate change is all a hoax.
On the one hand this anecdote is an amusing moral lesson about why you shouldn’t buy dodgy DVDs off blokes in pubs. On the other hand it did get me thinking: why would you go to the lengths of copying the wrong programme on a disc unless you were politically motivated?
I know I’m liable to be accused of wearing tin foil hats in my spare time for saying this, but is there an agenda to undermine Al Gore’s campaign by flooding the black market with disinformation?
The other DVD he bought – Superman Returns – didn’t have a Fox New programme explaining how it is physically impossible for a man to fly and lift up islands with one hand.
Same thing happened on the torrent sites.
Which explains it, really. I don’t see why someone would go to the trouble of flooding the pirate market with mislabelled DVDs, but I can easily believe that the people who download torrents and then burn them to discs to sell in the pub can’t be bothered to actually watch what they’ve downloaded from a torrent.
Then you only need a mislabelled torrent for political argument, and there are easily enough nutters to do that.