What’s So Bad About Bootlegs?
When it comes to bootleg musicals, conflicting opinions abound. Sure, they’re technically illegal, but isn’t it a victimless crime? Or are they doing damage to the art that writers, actors, and many more have put painstaking effort into creating? Do they wrongly cheapen what should be a top-drawer experience, or do they better the theatre industry by making it more accessible to the masses?
Bootlegs are illegal recordings of musicals or shows made by people in the audience and distributed, often via YouTube, for people online to see. Nowadays, they’re usually taken on smartphones and the quality tends to be awful. Yet these recordings often fetch tens, even hundreds of thousands of views, despite normally being taken down after only a few weeks due to copyright laws. As a form of pirac...