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6 Points On Movie Piracy
- Technologies that enable movie piracy
Camcorder
Disk burning
Internet
VCR
P2P websites 
- The industry is losing so much money due to piracy. FACT estimates that £486m was lost to movie theft in 2007 in the UK alone. Worldwide the industry is losing an estimated $6.1bn each year.
- This is ultimately making it harder to raise money for new movies, especially smaller indie and British movies.
- The advances in technology with P2P sites and compact camcorders have made it so much harder to catch people and clamp down on the crime. It’s become so easy that people don’t even realise they are breaking the law – or they just don’t care because they don’t notice any consequences.
- The movie business is partly to blame because they aren’t advancing with the technology. They don’t want to change the technology they are using because they don’t know how much money they might make in the future. It’s a risk they don’t seem to be willing to take.
- Even with piracy being so easy and taking so much money from the industry profits are still higher than ever, so is the problem necessarily that severe?
4 comments:
Interesting to read, Amy.
Do you think that the rise of P2P networks and filesharing represents a democratisation and liberalisation of creativity, with the potential to lead to a greater level of audience engagement and creativity, or do you think it signals a form of intellectual theft which will cripple the creative/ media industries?
Also, how could media companies dapt their business model to capitalise on this new phenomenon?
I'd be interested to see your views on these questions
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I think filesharing and illegal downloads could ultimately create a potential of a greater level of audience engagement as people are more likely to download a movie they don't feel interested enough in to invest their money in going to the cinema to see it, but if they download it and DO like it they are likely to buy some form of hard copy of the film as they will have only got half the experience from the downloaded version due to bad sound and picture quality. Therefore it could potentially boost box office returns as more people will become interested in films they weren't attracted to well enough by the advertisements.
P2P networks themselves are not illegal themselves, it's the files that they allow for users to transfer so nobody can technically point the finger and say they are doing wrong and the authorities can't close these networks down but they are allowing the ability for people all over the world to share these illegal DVD rips and camcorder recordings of movies so the problem is so hard to tackle, yes it is wrong, and it is allowing bootlegging and theft to become so easy that people don't realise it's a crime which somewhere down the line will be putting companies into financial dilemmas and forcing them to close. But the media industry as a whole isn't being affected, or at least it is so successful that the money lost from piracy doesn't seen as big of deal on the surface, but so long as we have companies like Universal and Paramount we don't realise the damage we are causing to the small independant companies, and probably won't until it's too late, which is saddening because they could create amazing films that may never be seen, and it's not their fault. But at the same time, it's not the audiences fault, if we were happy with the way the media - especially movies were distributed to us we wouldn't turn to piracy, films are expensive! The 'cinema experience' is almost not worth spending the money on when you can download it for free and watch it as often as you like for nothing. Also, with DVD's why go through the hassle of going out and spending a tenner on something you could get for free.
The music industry had the same problem a few years ago, but although illegal downloading is still happening it has been cut down a hell of alot and is no longer a threat to the industry's future because they adapted their business model to work to our needs, the way they did this was by making legal downloads readily available on places such as itunes and amazon, not only that but they are much cheaper than buying a single in HMV was ten years ago, and they feel exclusive because they are released very quickly after radio air and there isn't any worry about damaging the cd, back ups of the files can be easily made or kept for safe keeping on an ipod/mp3 etc. Now there is less need for CD's meaning that the cost of them has also gone down since not as many need to be produced. Now the music industry is back on its feet and thriving. Movies can be distributed in exactly the same way, they don't need to be so expensive in order to cover costs from the film, they make huge profits - following the idea of the music industry profits may not be as large but they don't need to be. But this could be a problem, because everything's about money and companies don't want to see their profits go down, even if in the long term it would... could help them by protecting their future as a business and removing this threat from the movie industry.
Interesting thoughts, Amy. It was also interesting to hear Eric Fellner state so emphatically during his closing words yesterday 'don't download illegally'. Presumably even the UK's biggest independent film production company is under threat from such technological developments.
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