Universal Music's Anti-Piracy Ads Even Crazier Than You Can Imagine

from the think-they're-bad?-they're-worse dept

By now it should be no surprise at all that the legacy entertainment and software industries liked to produce absolutely ridiculous anti-piracy ads, under the mistaken belief that if they just "educate" people a little more, they'll magically stop infringing. It's never worked. It never will work, but they just keep on trying. A few historical examples have been so Reefer Madness ridiculous that they've reached iconic levels. For example, the infamous "don't copy that floppy" campaign: Or the "Home Taping is Killing Music" campaign: That one has been subject to frequent mockery, including the time that the Dead Kennedy's did the following on one of its cassette tapes: Or this parody by Bo Patterson on "Home Sewing is Killing Fashion." And, of course, Dan Bull's parody song "Home Taping Is Killing Music." And, then the ever iconic "You Wouldn't Download A Car" ads (it's actually "you wouldn't steal a car" but everyone remembers it the other way): This one was fabulously parodied by the IT Crowd: Given all of that, you might think that the legacy entertainment industry couldn't possibly get any more crazy with these kinds of ads. You'd be wrong.

Paul Resnikoff, over at Digital Music News, has a series of fairly graphic anti-piracy ads from Universal Music that it used in Brazil in 2007, each one involving a dismembered body part, implying that downloading music leads to cutting off (or out) pieces of a musicians' body.



We've discussed this before many times: piracy is not an education problem. No matter how much "educating" the industry does, it's not going to change the fact that people like to get their content more conveniently. Apparently that message hasn't gotten through, so the industry keeps ramping up the ridiculousness of each campaign.

Filed Under: anti-piracy, anti-piracy ads, brazil
Companies: universal music