The IT Crowd
8 HN mentions · mentioned in 8 months, 2012–2025
1:05 · 3.2M views · Mar 18, 2009
The parody anti-piracy warning from The IT Crowd Series 2, Episode 3, a spoof of the 'you wouldn't steal a car' ads. It is a one-minute comedy sketch.
Commenters drop it as an obligatory joke in threads about piracy, DRM and copyright enforcement.
8 comments from Hacker News
> I think following the law is ethical, and copyright is not only the law, it follows directly from the Constitution. Copyright was 14 years at the time of the Constitution. If it was still that, I’d have no problem waiting it out and only watching material 14 years old. Following laws isn’t always ethical. The constitution also allowed slavery. Do you think owning slaves was ethical? There’s lots of instances where laws are out of sync with ethics and morality, and, hopefully change over time. In the past 20 years gay marriage became legal and I would argue it’s always ethical. Same for recreational drug use. And therapeutic mdma and ketamine. The list goes on and on. Especially when the copyright laws aren’t the result of some specific debate and determination but by very targeted lobbying by Disney and others to extend copyright from 14 years to its current length of life+70 years or 95 years for corporate works. Upending copyright would have nothing to do with trademarks (perpetual as long as in use) or patents (usually 20 years) and can be reformed completely independently. Although those other IP topics could also be improved. I’m not making a judgement on your beliefs or how you formed them. I don’t know you. But there are PR campaigns to promote copyright targeted toward school kids (remember “don’t copy that floppy” [0] and “you wouldn’t steal a car” [1]) and I think they are in alignment with “copying a friend’s video is like stealing bread” so you just seem to be u
If you were around and paying for media at the time, good have seen it before films at the cinema and as a pre-menu sting (sometimes unskippable) on some DVDs. One of those examples where paying customers were the only ones irritated by such a measure. It certainly had wide audience awareness in its intended form, which is why the many comedy interpretations ( this video probably being the most famous) came into being and worked so well.
This "piracy war" is starting to look more and more like the drug war. I could see how in US especially, if marijuana is going to be legalized, all those agencies which would now be left out of work, could refocus on raiding "pirates", barging in and shooting people's dogs, and whatnot. Then this parody might become a reality (the part with the girl at the end): this video
Yeah and what does Dodd and the MPAA call those stupid warnings and crap they add at the beginning of every movie telling us we are thief etc. ? If you don't know what I mean, here is a funny parody of these warnings: this video The Hypocrisy is at an all new level.
"You wouldn't shoot a policeman, and then steal his helmet. You wouldn't go to the toilet in his helmet and then send it to the policeman's grieving widow, and then steal it again." this video