I hap­pened to see a movie on cable, Colom­biana, which struck me as being too good for Hol­ly­wood. At the end (before the annoy­ing cable chan­nel adver­tis­ing inter­rupted), I got enough of the cred­its to see the writer’s name: Luc Besson. Well, that explains it.

When a char­ac­ter in a movie says, “We’ll ride out at first light,” the scene when they ride out should prob­a­bly not be shot at around noon. Just because Hol­ly­wood exec­u­tives are too stu­pid to tell the dif­fer­ence doesn’t mean every­body is.

You know you’re watch­ing a stu­pid Hol­ly­wood movie when a guy wakes up to find a baby polar bear lick­ing his face, and the guy doesn’t die a really grue­some death the next minute when the baby’s giant angry car­niv­o­rous mother doesn’t show up to tear him to shreds. I real­ize they’re cute when seen from a dis­tance (prefer­ably a very large dis­tance), but the real­ity is that polar bears are incred­i­bly dangerous.

India’s copy­right pro­pos­als are un-American (and that’s bad). India has long been one of the few coun­tries on the US Spe­cial 301 “Pri­or­ity Watch List” (PDF) as one of the world’s top offend­ers when it comes to piracy and copy­right infringe­ment. While the inclu­sion of Canada (yes, Canada) on this list has always seem patently bizarre to us, the case for India is more eas­ily made.

Here’s how bad it is: “The piracy rate for music in the online space is esti­mated at 99%… India was among the top 10 coun­tries in the world for ille­gal file­shar­ing (P2P) activ­i­ties… In one case, pam­phlets were being dis­trib­uted with the morn­ing news­pa­per offer­ing pirated soft­ware and refer­ring read­ers to the web­site www.cd75dvd150.20m.com to place orders… It is esti­mated that India’s cable com­pa­nies declare only 20% of their sub­scribers and that the piracy level in this mar­ket is at 80% with sig­nif­i­cant losses… The sale of high-risk trade books at traf­fic junc­tions in New Delhi appears to be a les­son; last year it was at epi­demic pro­por­tions.” [Ars Tech­nica]

Clearly the cul­tural approach to works of art is dif­fer­ent in India than it is in the United States. In the United States, copy­right law exists “to pro­mote the Progress of Sci­ence and use­ful Arts, by secur­ing for lim­ited Times to Authors and Inven­tors the exclu­sive Right to their respec­tive Writ­ings and Dis­cov­er­ies.” What this means in con­crete terms is that US copy­right law is bought and paid for in its entirety by a very large cor­po­ra­tion to ensure that a man who died in 1966 is moti­vated to con­tinue working.

We can tell how suc­cess­ful those US copy­right laws have been at ful­fill­ing their stated pur­pose by the fact that India has been pro­duc­ing more films per year than the US since the 1970s.

I real­ize that trib­ute must be paid to the van­ity of actors, but I’d really like to see a sci-fi show that didn’t have space­suits with lights inside the helmets.