Assorted Videos from Commonwealth Films (Summer, 1993)
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Review by Emmanuel Goldstein

The corporate world contributes a great deal to the lives of the everyday
human. Perhaps the most significant gift they offer, second only to global
pollution, is the wonderful art form known as corporate comedy.

We've all seen it in some way. Whether it's a phone company claiming one of
their memos is worth $80,000 or a governmental agency saying they believe a
raid can actually help a business become profitable, it's all part of the same
humor. After all, it is just a big joke, isn't it? An escape from reality into
the world of the absurd in order to make life more bearable. Art in its truest
form.

Those of you who wish to enjoy the latest in corporate comedy ought to check
out three videos recently released by Commonwealth Films. We Lost Control:
Illegal Software Duplication is easily the funniest. This 16-minute piece is
designed to put the fear of the Lord into anyone who's even thought of copying
software.

The story unfolds through the eyes of Steve Roberts, head of a company that
wasn't careful enough. Federal marshals conduct a raid and find that, lo and
behold, every piece of software is not accounted for! This could spell doom for
him and everyone he s ever known, according to his lawyer who can't seem to say
a single positive word. Yes, Steve, the Software Piracy Association did their
homework you re not exactly squeaky clean - out of the hundreds of cases SPA has
prosecuted, they've only lost one - you're liable for up to $100,000 per
unauthorized copy of each program, including the ones you've bought you'd
better hope the media doesn't latch onto this and ruin your life even
more....Steve does some serious soul-searching ("I had no idea we were in so
deep') and realizes that copying a program is indeed exactly like stealing a
computer. "For some reason," he ponders, "it didn't seem serious." At this
point, the viewer feels compelled to shake the TV and scream at Steve to come
out of his corporate coma. But alas, it just gets worse. In a rather
patronizing tone, his lawyer says, "Let's set the basic facts straight and
eliminate ignorance." Oh, if only we could.

The "facts" that we are hit with run counter to every instinct a human being
could have. The SPA, and anyone who falls for their self-righteous dogma, lives
in a fantasy world. They actually expect everyone to not only pay outrageous
prices for every bit of software on their machines, but to pay these prices
again whenever they copy a program to another machine. And for those people who
can't afford to pay $500 for a word processor, SPA takes the position that such
people simply should not have access. In other words, admission to technology
is solely for people with money to spend. It's precisely this philosophy that
has inhibited progress in the past and will continue to do so to a far greater
degree if left unchallenged. Access to the future is something that needs to be
encouraged, not restricted. Software developers should, and will, make tons of
money. And when the dust finally settles, it ought to become quite clear that
the SPA position articulated in this film was never about fair compensation. It
was simply greed.

The other two films, Virus: Prevention, Detection, Recovery and Back in
Business: Disaster Recovery/Business Resumption actually offer some useful
suggestions, the most basic being to make backups and keep them offsite.
Newsflash.

There are a few good laughs in these offerings as well since everything has to
be exaggerated beyond believability in order to drive the point home. For
example, we are introduced to a dark hacker who speaks to us from within a
shadow with a disguised voice. His sole reason of existence is to make our
lives miserable. Remember that.

Although we could find little more than sentence structure to agree with in
these offerings, we do recommend them to our readers as a fascinating study of
alien culture. As a final example of the utter thoroughness of corporate
comedy, the price for these three films (63 minutes total viewing time) is
$1,338.75. Happy viewing.