Of Facts and Fallacies

"Don't Copy that Floppy" or something like that.

It's an old slogan but the principle still stands. There is an on going campaign to prevent the copying copyrighted materials. To aid in their copyright crusade, proponents of ant piracy have resorted to using a digital DJ... in what I can only assume is an attempt to connect with today's youth. They are so enamored by that bling you know.

Now then, we are here to look at this fantastic piece of propaganda and analyze it a just a wee bit.

It's not a hard stretch of the imagination to assume that everyone present at the start of this video is at least a teenager. This gives us an assumed target audience. The kids in the film are laughing at another commercial from the 1990's. This older commercial features a goofy looking rapper who warns kids not to copy floppy disks and other material that may be copyrighted. This is an attempt at Pathos, or the use of humor to touch the audience. The older commercial is actually quite silly looking. Times and styles have changed and something that may have been slightly silly a decade and a half ago is now prime comedy. This is further propagated by the teenagers poking fun at one of their friends while he makes copies of CD's and DVD's, which are the floppys of today. There is an irony that old the anti piracy commercial should be playing as this young man makes modern day versions of what it is advocationg against.

Now then, the comercial is on it's way, we have laughed at the funny little DJ man from a decade past and we know that no one in the room takes copying serious. So what's the next thing the ad does? It slaps us in the face with a new, and rather hip looking, DJ. Thankfully this one comes with a better song and sense of attire. Together with some plays on words and the singing of a woman in a sound recording booth, the ad attempts to use Logos, the use of logic, to reach the audience and get them to reivalutate any pro piracy stances they may have had. We see talk of money lost by the artest and how police my kick in your front door and arrest your mother. Logicaly, illegal copying is a bad idea because you could be sent to jail if caught. Besides, as the song goes, you could spend you talents making a career instead of stealing.

To finish this fiasco off, there is an interview with a real life pirate. Argh! He lacks the parrot and the eye patch but is appearently spending 4 or 5 years in prison for the illegal downloading, copying and selling of copyrighted materials. He personally pleads to the veiwers to not do like him. That once he's out, he will always be listed as a fellon. This is Ethos, or emotion. You are meant to peel pity for this man's predicament and fear for yourself lest you end up in his place.

Beside the somewhat lame visuals, the message of "it's not just a copy, it's a crime" is clear. I had to look rather hard for a logical fallacy, a weak point in the presented arguement. I looked hard and found none so I've decided to make one. I have a point about fallacies that needs to be made and so it shall.

Had the advertisement decided to use the arguement that... oh lets say Hitler, copied copyrighted material and sold it for a profit, it must be wrong because Hitler was a monster. While both Hitler being a monster and the act of selling copyrighted materials is wrong may both be true, they do not coralate. You can not take two unrelated subjects and use one to suport the other.