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Movie Industry Cries All the Way to the Bank
shandrew writes: "Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, has reported that the year 2001 was the "greatest box office year in film history" with movie admissions reaching their highest level since 1959. Isn't this the same industry that is complaining that piracy is putting them out of business?"
There's the fundamental weakness of the arguement. When dealing with intellectual property the stealing doesn't cost you (the owner) anything directly. You're only losing the potential profit.
Now the problem is figuring out what that potential profit might have been. Only a small fraction of the people who downloaded your CD for free would have otherwise purchased the music. Against that you have to (or should) weigh the benefit of additional exposure - more people will hear your music and will tend to make it more popular, thus selling more CDs.
I don't think anybody really knows what the impact of all these free downloads is. It is clear that the figures the RIAA throws around are nonsense, since they count each download as a lost sale.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
I'll admit I'm guilty of "Movie Trading". It's how I decide what I'm going to buy. For example none of my friends have Neon Genesis Evangelion and I'm sure as hell ain't going to find it at my local blockbuster. Since 25-30 greenbacks is way to much for me to spend on something I'm seeing for the first time, and might not even like.
So I became one with the devil one fateful day and fired up Morpheus. And on that day the worlds biggest evangelion freak was born.
I didn't play with linux for two weeks, cause I didn't want to reboot out of my win2k partion so I could keep downloading. Eventually I had the entire series all mine for free, some were fairly decent quality too.
Did I stick it to the artists who created such an animation masterpiece? Well some would say yes. Some would say they deserve to be ripped off simply for the fact that they charge so much for a three episode dvd. I'm not going to get into that. Plenty of threads covering that topic as it is.
In my case it dosen't really matter anyways. I purchesed all eight dvd's, have an almost complete collection of evangelion toys (Just need to get Unit 01). And a gorgeous Askua poster in a black frame hanging on the wall above my monitor.
Maybe my case is an exception. I never would have bought all this stuff if I never saw the crappy divxes. I relize they're is alot of freeloading on the p2p networks, but because of software like Morpheus and Gnutella I shelled out quite a bit of cash at my local Suncoast. This stuff isn't cheap!
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Now maybe they can cut some of the cinema prices? I couldnt help but notice that the prices keep ticking up
This is my major beef with box office statistics -- they're reported in $$ instead of the number of butts in seats. That metric would hold across time. Sure, Harry Potter (as an example) made lots of money, but did more people see it than Gone With the Wind?
In walking, just walk. In sitting, just sit. Above all, don't wobble.
-- Yun-Men
That's funny. A big question that has been on my mind recently is "Why do the cinemas think they have the right to show *any* advertising before the movie, basically lying to me, the customer, about the movie's actual start time?" I paid a huge admission price, for 's sake! Not to mention the lofty prices for the refreshments! If that revenue can't keep them going, then maybe they shouldn't be in business to begin with.
Am I the only one who actually feels economically insulted/assaulted by having to sit through these ads?
Check out Commercial Alert for their ongoing campaign against commericials before and during movies and other rampant commercialism.
I'm still haunted by the rampant, conspicuous product placement in Mission to Mars, a crap film otherwise but even crappier with all the ads.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
- But people aren't stealing movies/music as much as the MPAA/RIAA claim to justify the SSSCA.
Indeed. They've never said it was putting them out of business. They claim repeatedly that piracy is costing them billions in lost revenue every year. To date, however, they have offered ZERO proof or statistics to back up their claims. They make sweeping generalizations based on anything from rumor to flawed market studies (polling 10 high school kids isn't very statistically valid) to extrapolations from what they think they should be making.This kind of theft is very hard to quantify. People aren't breaking into a warehouse and taking thousands of CDs. The contents of one (paid for) CD is distributed to hundreds or thousands of people. How much revenue does that divert from sales? Likely far less than it generates. People are much more likely to purchase CDs of the music they have heard and liked. Case in point, I never would've known Gus Gus existed if WB hadn't placed one of their music videos on the jukebox -- Believe. I've bought every CD they've produced. I've bought numerous CDs from 800.com (recently defunct) beacuse they had samples of the songs.
Basically, the MPAA and RIAA are stupid and greedy. Organized piracy (factories producing bootleg CDs and DVDs) costs them a lot of money -- and that's very proven. However, they have taken no actions at all to thwart such piracy. Instead, they harass, berate, and criminalize their actual patrons who are the very foundation of their billion dollar a year industry. They draft one stupid (useless) law ontop of another. They throw one horrible, non-compliant, hack after another at us to "combat piracy" that just makes the disks useless almost everywhere.