It’s amazing to me that people actually get upset when I mute the commercials as we watch television. Even more amazing, some people are not upset about paying $13.00 to see a movie, then sitting through advertisements. People seem to actively resist the idea of thinking about the material that is being inserted into their brains via their eyes and ears. People actually want to be advertised at.

The latest manipulative content forced on movie-goers before they earn the privilege of seeing the film they paid to see is a campaign against movie piracy, featuring bits created by Twentieth Century Fox, a subsidiary of News Corp.. These bits feature people involved in the industry of making movies, telling the camera why it is so wrong to illegally copy movies. They are, at least to me and everyone I know who has seen them, quite offensive.

The people shown benevolently informing us, the ignorant movie-going masses, of the hitherto unconsidered evils of cinema piracy are always (supposedly) working class regular-Joe types, just like us. These individuals discuss how many, many regular people put so many hours of hard, hard work into these films, and how it just isn’t "right" to see the final product without paying. (I have no access to the latest salary figures, but a stunt man doesn’t seem all that regular to me.)

I remain to be convinced that a financial crisis is hitting Hollywood as a result of movie piracy.

These anti-piracy spots do not address foreign, Canadian, or any non-mainstream film. (They don’t explicitly single out Hollywood, but how many films have extremely lavish sets and cars flying into the air before rolling a dozen times?) They don’t address important underfunded alternative artists who have been hit hard by grant cuts resulting from the ever-increasing economic class gap, the very gap caused by ever-wealthier executives who care nothing for culture or people.

These spots do not address the decadence of Hollywood, the Rodeo Drive boutiques who manage to stay in business despite the “robbery” of piracy, the publicized drug problems and vandalism of some Hollywood stars, or the wastefulness of mainstream American cinema which is so extreme as to virtually mock the blue-collar working class.

Finally, these spots do not address the astronomical amounts paid to the actors in the films. How can we the public swallow the earnest egalitarian plea of working stuntmen and set designers when they agree to work in such farcically unequal circumstances? You want fairness? Fire the actors! Sue the executives! Piracy is not driving up movie prices. Prices are being driven up by actor salaries and by people who consent to pay the higher prices.

In an interview, Motion Picture Association of America President Jack Valenti said "This is a campaign of education and persuasion. You're hurting someone, maybe someone like your own family." Also, Peter Chernin, president and chief operating officer of News Corp., said "What we are endeavoring to do is both communicate that it's wrong and also communicate that there are human stakes and that those stakes are not just millionaires making less millions."

Chernin thus acknowledges movie-made millionaires in the same breath as blaming working class movie pirates for any losses to film industry workers. If workers are suffering, it is because big studios fight against union contracts, because executives pass losses onto the end consumer by raising prices, and because actors are over, over, overpaid.

Piracy is illegal. I do not, in this column, advocate it. But the biggest insult in this new campaign is that we average cost-of-living types are expected to believe it.