This has always been a question at the back of my head but I have recently been bedevilled by it once more – who defines what constitutes piracy in magic? Granted, a singular effect utilising an original method and being marketed as a standalone trick should be protected against piracy. What of the various instructional DVDs out there? I mean, what is to stop a random guy from compiling a list of sleights from an old book somewhere and then selling it for profit? (now I know the problem is that random people probably can’t do it since without credibility you can’t sell instructional videos unless your name is Brad Christian)

My points can be listed in the following order.

1. If a person markets classic sleights and tricks under their name, should we denounce them as being pirates, since they are exposing methods (not invented by them, hence being guilty of plagiarism) for profit?
2. By the same line of thought, is it immoral to rent out instructional videos, since one would be having a detrimental effect of the sales volume of the author whose video is being rented out?
2a. What if this person produced his own instructional video with a compilation of sleights and tricks, and proceed to rent this video out? Should that also be frowned upon? And more importantly, if this is being frowned upon (presumably because this guy in undercutting other competitors by offering rentals at a lower price than selling the videos), should libraries also be frowned upon? Technically speaking libraries are quite huge pirates seeing how the rent out books for FREE.

What I mean to say is that when it comes to the art of magic, piracy and profit-making are sensitive issues but there doesn’t seem to be enough discussion and debate on what should or should not be allowed. Personally I feel that the rule, you should never reveal your secrets, was put in place with a certain amount of consideration given to the economic security of the industry. Perhaps more accurately, the rule should be technically read as, “You should never reveal the secret behind a trick for free.”

Isn’t that true? This is the centre around which the magic industry revolves. Like any other artistic endeavour, it takes a painstaking amount of time and effort to come up with an original trick whose method can fool magicians (so that they will be tempted to buy said product). When this trick is sold for a certain amount of profit, it compensates the magician for having put so much time and effort into making the illusion possible (thank you very much). In this way it is quite like any other job in the creative design industry. (i.e. create a new product, sell it)

Therefore, perhaps the whole thing about being anti-piracy is not that we should protect the secret, but that we should protect the financial interests of the magician. Cynical, perhaps, but the fact remains that if original magic is to be created, there has to be enough incentives for the magician to keep inventing new tricks (i.e. showmethemoney, a cheat code that gives you a lot of money in Starcraft).

The stand that claims we should protect the secrets of the trade has its roots deeply entrenched in the fact that deep down as magicians, we are all quite scared of having our little tricks exposed. Like what Alfred Borden (played by Christian Bale) in The Prestige, “as soon as you give it [the trick] up, you’ll be nothing to them.” Quite often the method used is a great letdown to the effect of the trick, and half the time it can make the discoverer quite pissed to see how simply he/she got fooled. But this topic easily warrants another long piece of writing, so I will stop here for now.