On ethics

On ethics

William Ahearn
© 2005 William Ahearn

Down in the corner bakery, my friend offered me a pirated DVD of the new Star Wars movie. It was the version with the editing time running across the top or bottom or whatever. The local news in New York City was full of the pirates-hit-Star Wars story and hairdos and suits with microphones were showing up on the six o’clock news standing on Canal Street or Times Square showing how easy it is to buy one.

I stop into this bakery every Saturday to get a cheese danish or apple turnover to eat while I do the New York Times crossword puzzle and try to jog what’s left of my brain cells toward something productive. The Saturday Times puzzle is my favorite crossword and thankfully it hasn’t been dumbed down as has the fabled Sunday puzzle. (I could digress on whether it’s ethical to use Google to solve hard puzzle clues but I’ll let that slide.) Over the years I’ve had numerous conversations with the friend in the bakery about computers and I once gave him a Commodore 64 and he recently gave me a Macintosh PowerBook 165. So the offer of the Star Wars movie wasn’t surprising. He had downloaded it from the internet instead of buying it off the street and he offered me a burn of the download.

My interest in the DVD was as an artifact of piracy. I was interested in why this particular version had generated so much attention. That it was the last Star Wars movie and that the pirated version had appeared moments before the commercial release had a lot to do with it. But this wasn’t the typical pirated DVD; this was a production copy that came straight out of Industrial Light and Magic. It differed in its nearness to the source of creation and had the taint of a collectible prototype or a backstage pass. George Lucas had watched this version over and over to make final decisions prior to the release of the film.

That the burn wouldn’t launch on my Pismo is beside the point. I got the “This is a ProDos disk, do you want to initialize it