Starz seems to have settled on explicit sex and violence as the keys to its brand precisely at the moment when the flagrant use of both of those elements in television drama has ceased to be a novel advantage cable held over the networks and started getting embarrassing, and not a little dull. And even though Spartacus, the franchise that perhaps made the best use of those elements in service of genuine ideas, has just finished its run on Starz, the network appears to be doubling down with Black Sails, a pirate show that’s being advertised as an opportunity for Michael Bay to move on up from showing Megan Fox arching her back to depicting actual lesbian sex and for Toby Stephens to get another crack at the American market after playing Fergus Wolfe in Possession didn’t exactly set his career on fire:

There’s a good show to be done about piracy. But it’s one that requires the showrunners to know as much about Caribbean governance, and economics—some privateering contracts guaranteed fair, consistent monthly wages and advance pay—social dynamics that gave pirates a certain amount of social capital in polite society as well as in island enclaves, slavery, and cooperative organizing as about how to make a lady look fetching in a corset.

It’s notable that this season of Game of Thrones has—with the exception of this weekend’s scene in Littlefinger’s brothel—dramatically scaled down its use of nudity and scaled up its discussion of policy issues, from the ethics and efficacy of purchasing a slave army to the impact on Westeros of the particular people who have helped the country run up a sizable national debt. There was a sense in some of the commentary on the show last year that the prodigious use of nudity in both non-consensual scenes and situations involving prostitution was cheesy, a sop to less sophisticated viewers who might not otherwise be inclined to keep track of the show’s enormous roster of characters or engage with its big ideas about the morality of war. In other words, a clear distinction was emerging between adult drama and “adult” content. And in the show’s third season, characters have talked more about sexual assault and sexual experiences than we’ve actually seen on screen. How characters like Brienne of Tarth and Jaime Lannister respond to a threat of sexual assault, or how Tyrion Lannister interrogates Podrick Payne about his first sexual experience matters much more than watching their bodies in motion.
Read more

One of the things that has interested me watching the SOPA debate evolve is the role of consumers, whether they’re like-minded tech enthusiasts or fans of certain products, in lobbying against the bill. They haven’t always been successful — some SOPA advocates have, for example, dismissed Reddit advocates as a loud but insignificant minority. But it’s not necessarily the reaction of the lobbied that matters in this one. It’s whether, having gotten a taste of activism, fans decide to become forces on other issues.

I’ve been interested for quite some time in communities that do public service and volunteer work based on the principals of their fandom. There’s the Harry Potter Alliance, of course, which grounds its campaigns in Potter-driven values. The Browncoats volunteer groups are inspired by Firefly. AnimeAid got together fans of the genre to raise money and coordinate efforts around Japanese earthquake and tsunami recovery activities. And I suspect that as fandom becomes an increasingly important basis for identity or community, we’ll see more work and organizations along these lines where the values that motivate service are drawn less explicitly from political parties or religious faith and more from powerful fictional texts.

Of course, it’ll be fascinating to see if, and how, these groups scale, and if they develop into ongoing organizations or function more like loose networks that can be activated when issues are on the front-burner, but don’t require as much maintenance in fallow periods. If nothing else, the SOPA debate seems to suggest a generation gap on Internet policy between legislators and consumers that could be usefully filled with education campaigns and citizen lobby visits. On both sides, this is a battle, not the war. And fans have a lot to offer.

One of the arguments that Stop Online Piracy Act advocates have made fairly repeatedly is that consumers don’t know which downloads are legitimate and which aren’t, especially when sites offering material outside of legal channels charge fees. On an instinctive level, I’ve gone back and forth about how I’ve felt about that claim. There’s just such a difference between the production values on legitimate outlets like Hulu and Amazon and something like, say, EZTVStream, which just looks terrible and fake, that it’s hard for me to believe someone would fall for it. But given the level of knowledge about how the internet works in, say, Congress, there’s probably some truth to the idea that innocent people are lead astray.

There’s some interesting data out from the American Academy about file-sharing practices that might provide a useful jumping-off point for further digging in to this kind of argument, and separating out intentional and accidental piracy. Apparently, about 15 percent of people who use file-sharing software hide their IP addresses while they’re doing it (25 percent of sharers between 18 and 24, and 5 percent of sharers older than 44), which suggests they’re aware they’re doing something that is not legal. TorrentFreak reports that an IP address scrambler has seen its business go up recently, and attributes that growth to the introduction of and debate over SOPA. Those people are probably not ending up the wrong place by mistake, and SOPA may harden their stance and practices — and it’s bad news for anti-piracy advocates that younger folks are hiding their IP addresses more than their older counterparts. That generational trend is in the wrong direction.

So it’s probably worth figuring out in granular detail what’s happening with that other 85 percent of filesharers and what makes them change their behavior. Do they stop going to filesharing sites when they learn about services like Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime? Do they stop going to sites that offer pirated material when they’re taught to recognize them? The creative industry is going to need two strategies, one for people who are accessing their product outside of legal channels on purpose, and one for people who are doing it by accident or out of ignorance.