A lot of people think of Illegal movie downloads as stealing and decreasing the revenue of filmmakers. Even though the first is correct, the second is still under question. Are film producers truly decreasing their revenue through piracy? Read more to find out.
Ever since the introduction of digital media and the world wide web, people began to steal from content creators to avoid any royalty fees. This trend has continued throughout the times, and today almost everyone who has ever had access to the Internet has broken a Copyright, mostly without even realising it. Right now, there are many ways of pirating content, the most popular being Peer to Peer networks (more commonly referred to as Torrents). Torrents allow users to upload content and upload or “seed” it to down-loaders “leachers”. Torrents for popular content are plentiful, and get created almost instantly after the content’s release. Content spread by torrents include video games, music, software, books, TV show episodes. However, the most popular format for torrents are movies.
Movies are hugely popular pirate material because the interest in the motion picture never dies. The movie theatre has been a popular social destination ever since the creation of motion pictures, and has always been part of our lives. As new ideas are generated, film is created and shared in the theaters. A lot of “pirates” target film downloads because they might not have enough money to pay for the ticket, or are standing by a marginal decision and thus are not sure whether they would like to see it. Movie distributors are focused on these two points and automatically assume the piracy will decrease their revenue, but are they correct?
Lets concentrate on the first statement film owners make: “Piracy allows potential consumers to steal our content and watch it for free instead. Of course, this means that they will ignore the movie theatre completely and save some money by watching our content on their computers.” In order to repel this way of thinking, lets go deeper into the process of creating a digital copy of a new blockbuster hit. When the movie comes out, the pirate will bring a (usually low budget) camera into the theatre. He will find an empty seat in a full theatre and chances are, it isn’t going to be in the centre. The digital version of the film he captures will have both low quality sound and low quality video, which will most likely be out of sync and proportion. The dark theatre will mess with the hue, contrast and brightness of the digital copy. The pirate will then compress the file, decreasing the quality of the picture EVEN further. Down-loaders will look at the film and if it was a good film, they will most likely say “Man I can’t wait to watch this in the theatre!”, which brings us to the next point.
Are filmmakers concerned with the quality of their film? Are they trying to prevent you from watching anything else but the trailer prior to watching their creations on the big screen? If you really think about it, the only way you will find out if a movie is good without piracy, is if you actually watch the film, as the trailer of a bad film will be a compilation of the best scenes. By watching the film, you would have already paid for the ticket. If a producer is so concerned about their work being pirated, doesn’t that mean that they have a lack of confidence in their creations? A filmmaker that knows that they have created a breakthrough will most likely not care about piracy, and may in-fact promote it. In their mind, the people who have pirated the film will then spread the word about how great their work is, and might attract more interest for their creations in others. So does this all mean that Hollywood is running out of ideas?
If I had to put all of the reasons for stopping piracy aside, there still remain the actions filmmakers take to prevent boot-legging. They do exactly the opposite of their original job, they actually promote illegal downloads instead of preventing them! For example, in the UK, every legit DVD has a short anti-piracy clip which is titled as “Piracy is a Crime”. Even though they did go in the right direction by creating the image that piracy is stealing and criminal activity, their ad will more likely introduce people to piracy, and instead convey this message “Did you know that you could have downloaded this movie for free?”. It is a fact, that most people don’t think that it is possible to get free films on the web without some special equipment, but that clip shows clearly that a film is being downloaded using a normal computer.
In conclusion, piracy is both beneficial for increasing the revenue of filmmakers and motivating them into creating better films. Do you agree with the statements made above? Post a comment below and express your opinion!
June 18th, 2009 at 3:50 pm
You make a good case and to some extent I agree. If people know where they can get free copies of films they might not otherwise have been able to see, more often than not they’re going to take it. There are a number of websites I’m aware of that offer this service…though, of course, I would never use them………
As for those rather pointless ‘Piracy is a crime’ adverts that say ‘you wouldn’t do this’ and ‘you wouldn’t do that’, the makers of these ads don’t seem to realise that many people WOULD. The risk isn’t really taht great. There’s a fantastic Christopher Morris sketch that mocks these ads, which was used in the sitcom ‘The IT Crowd’