KasLog has a nice posting, “Identification, Friend or Foe, A Modern Lesson from the Military” which provides a few humorous examples of how an understanding of the difference between Friends and Foes might benefit various industries.

Military aircraft carry electronics to help pilots identify targets as friend or foe (IFF). The reason is simple: Shooting at friends is unhelpful, to borrow a term from diplomacy.

IFF for the Entertainment Industry

Case in point, the movie I just watched on DVD. I paid for it, yet I had to first endure a message targeted at pirates. Meaningless spam that wastes my time. Not once, but twice; first in English, then in French. So instead of saying: “Hey, thanks for buying this movie. Hope you enjoy it. We’re looking forward to having you back.” The message they want paying customers to see is: “Hey, you scumbag, don’t steal our stuff. We know you’re dumb enough to pay for this, which obviously means you can’t be trusted. The guys with guns are on our side. Beware!”

It’s useless. It’s insulting. Has this prevented even one person on the planet from illegally copying movies? No, of course not. Real criminals know what they are doing. Assuming the big pirates in Asia and the Middle East can decipher that legal gibberish, do they care? I know, a trick question; just kidding.

Now I know that a fair amount of DVD stamping and package assembly is performed in Asia, where some shops allegedly have been used “after hours” to produce copies of the same content they produced legally during the day. When I was in Bejing last week, I personally saw stores filled with pirated DVD’s (both first-run and DVD titles) being guarded by the local police.

According to the MPAA, piracy losses globally were over USD $3.5 billion in 2002 (USD $168 million in China) with 15-20% growth rates, which would lead us to have reasonably expected global losses of almost USD $5 billion and losses in China of USD $241 million in 2004.

If the Movie Industry was really serious about stopping piracy, they wouldn’t punish the consumers who pay them their hard-earned money. Instead, they’d punish the economies of governments that look the other way when it comes to large-scale piracy by refusing to spend money on plants, equipment, and staff there.

(Of course, it might also turn out that if the legitimate business left, they’d go over to the Dark Side full-time, but that’s outside the scope of the Example-Sized Problem here.)

P.S. Another thing that Kas doesn’t consider is that the Military really isn’t any better at IFF than the industries he selects for his examples. Something like half of all casualties in close combat and Maneuver Warfare are “friendly” fire incidents (not that fire is ever “friendly,” especially if you’re the one who’s downrange). Throw in the added complexity of multinational forces where the equipment and uniforms might or might not be familiar and the situation rapidly goes to Hell in a Handbasket.