A planning notice on last weekend's Harvard Free Culture Conference noted:

On Friday May 25th, Disney launches “Pirates of the Caribbean, at World’s End”, a movie about a diverse community coming together to fight the far-reaching and oppressive East India Trading Company to preserve their freedom-loving lifestyle (sound kind of familiar?). Free Software Foundation and Free Culture activists will be heading to the Boston Common theater . . . to help educate the movie-going public . . . .

The propaganda ju jitsu here is brilliant. Hollywood’s glorification of pirates does indeed undercut its efforts to brand illicit P2P file sharers “pirates.” Nor did the glorification start with Johnny Depp and PoC, either -- order up the 1942 classic Black Swan and prepare to be appalled at its depiction of rape, rapine, and murder as jolly good sport.

So the FCM logic seems to be that since Maureen O'Hara learned to love being kidnapped by Tyrone Power, Hollywood too should lean back and enjoy the P2P world.

Fortunately, that Black Swan style of thinking is rather out of favor these days, and it should go out of style with respect to creative content, too.

As National Review Onlinecolumnist observed, "Perhaps we need a refresher course in what pirates are."

Just as a carjacker steals your car, pirates steal your ship. A pirate ship would come alongside their victim, invade it, then kill and rape and throw overboard at random, keeping cargo and valuables for themselves. They had those skull-and-crossbones emblems for a reason. At one time, travel on the seas meant taking your life in your hands, and if that danger is rarer now, it’s because brave men still fight pirates. A small square white-on-black bumpersticker reading “Pirates are Mean” might be educational.

So the inference that the British government killed civilians in order to save merchandise from pirates is outrageous; governments killed pirates in order to save civilians, and it’s a good thing.