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Harry Potter & The Chamber of Secrets Leaked
huh12312 writes "Illegal piraters have done it again. On Monday, the second movie in the acclaimed series of seven was leaked onto the internet to the horror of Warner Brothers. With so many blockbusters due out this holiday season this problem will only increase in the coming months." Also note that it will make millions and millions of dollars anyway. I'll probably be there opening night.
.. it will make millions, because nobody who really cares about seeing the movie will want to watch a grainy telesync with poor sound.
That movies are always going to be leaked and pirated should be no surprise to the studios. And it shouldn't worry them: even the pirates will pay to see the movies at the big screen - those who care about watching a flick will want to see it *properly*; those who would only pirate the film would doubtless have waited for the video release, at best, and the TV release at worst.
I know my kid wouldn't settle for seeing some grainy rip of a movie at 200 x 180 (or whatever crappy res it looks least bad at).
Hardly a comparison to the movie on a big screen.
It's also not like you can't read the book to find out the ending, sheesh.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
Also note that it will make millions and millions of dollars anyway. I'll probably be there opening night.
Oh, okay, so piracy is okay. Thank you for your social commentary "CmdrTaco," I'll be sure not to feel bad when I download it and the company doesn't get my money for a movie ticket or DVD purchase.
This has nothing to do with Kazaa, WinMX, Limewire or any other P2P network. Its got nothing to do with pirates, or filesharing, or DivX. Its not the fault of DeCSS, or broadband, or the cost of cinema tickets and videos. It is totally, entirely, and completely the fault of poor security at the film distributor. There is blame on the part of people using filesharing, and no law will ever make that the case.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
I really enjoy watching a poor copy of a film on my small computer screen and 2" speakers, day's before going to see it in the theater. I was worried I'd have to see it for the first time on the big screen with surround sound. Thanks for saving me, kudos to you!!!!
Shop smart, Shop S-Mart.
that the new state of lawmaking is to take away all responsibility from everyone and place it all squarely in the hands of the government. Once that responsibility has evaporated, along with it goes liberty, freedom, and the ability to choose to ignore the laws made by disconnected legislators.
The release of Harry Potter is a crappy cam, and won't affect Theatrical revenue. It's almost unwatchable.
The bigger question is, does film piracy affect revenue at all? A film is not like music: Nevermind and Sticky Fingers will be just as valuable to me in ten years, and I'll listen to them a lot as a soundtrack to whatever else I'm doing. A film takes 100% of my concentration, (well most of it anyway) and you can't watch a film while you do something else..so film and music piracy are vastly different things.
Let's look at a few examples: In the Theatrical Window, Spiderman both broke box office and piracy records, hitting tens of thousands of copies a day at its peak.
In the Home Video window, the Spiderman DVD was released on pirate channels more than a month early and yet it still is going to break all sales records. 28 MILLION in preorders, which blows away anything before it.
The exact same thing happened with Shrek last year..most pirated film - most pirated DVD - best selling DVD.
While it would be difficult to quantify, it's possible that piracy acts simply as promotion when it comes to film: it certainly didn't cause the films above to fail on any scale, and probably won't affect Harry Potter either.
The million dollar question: could the use of piracy channels as a promotional venue actually increase film revenue?
Everyone assumes Valenti and Rosen are right: that piracy is damaging the film and music businesses. But Valenti was dead wrong about VCRs in the 70's and I suggest he's wrong about digital delivery and piracy in the 21st Century.
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."
Props to UTi for releasing this. people who don't understand the scene suggestin' leaks? It was a DV camcorder in one of the previews, trust.
Yeah, I do call you paranoid, if you don't mind. This is nothing but speculation. And poor speculation it is.
Sigh. That a movie has been leaked is bad. The MPAA is responsible for everything that is bad. Therefore, the MPAA must be responsible for the movie being leaked. That's the logic, right?
I can see why you would like to feel like you're standing on high moral ground when watching this movie on your box for exactly $0, and saying that the MPAA leaked it intentionally provides that ground. But merely wanting something to be true doesn't make it so. This is +4? Slashdot these days...
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance" - Derek Bok
thanks kindly. I'm not big on IRC and the usenet structure is so friendly.
Anything you say will be held against you.
I'll probably be there opening night.
Way to take a stand against the MPAA, Taco.
No, that's not the logic. The logic is more under the "self fulfilling prophecy" world.
...the movie leaked.
The MPAA claims that they need ultra-strong protection to avoid movie leaks.
They currently don't have these protections and look...
See? We need these protections.
Needless to say they could guarantee that the "crisis" occurred by leaking it themselves. (This is not saying that they did, but that's the logic of the original post, not leak == bad, mpaa == bad therefor leak == mpaa)
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
No, the logic is that we have been shown repeatedly that the MPAA and RIAA will stop at nothing to show that the internet is a huge problem and that laws need to be passed to limit it.
You're paranoid. They're not that smart.
More likely, it's one of the following...
* someone at the replication shop who stays late from time to time.
* An exec's assistant who dubs the prerelease copy before handing it off to their boss.
What's the quote? Never attribute to maliciousness that which can be explained by incompetence. Heinlein? William of Occam?
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
Also note that it will make millions and millions of dollars anyway. I'll probably be there opening night.
As always Taco, you are right on the mark. They'll get a lot of cash anyway, and this clearly justifies piracy. That it's their product and that they should have the right to choose whether or not to share it with the world prior to its release, even if it was proven that it could boost revenue, is of no importance. Nevermind the tenets of capitalism. Who needs basic IP property right when you can have movies for free?
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance" - Derek Bok
The fact is that the entertainment industry does not take 'value added' seriously enough. They put two good songs on an album (blues traveler 'four' comes to mind) and expect the populous to pay $20. Why should they, just download the two songs from the net(or, for those who can remember, record it from the radio, anyone got albums from the late night full play?). The same is true for movie theaters. They have 30 screens, 5 movies, only of which one are worth seeing at the theater, and the staff antagonizes you the whole time. How much money do they expect make. And yet I do not see the movie industry, those great champions of legislating profit from intellectual property, doing a thing to help the poor suffering movie theaters. Rather the studios leave movie theaters to fend for themselves and legislate for copy protection in hope of making money on the DVD release.
Harry potter has buzz, is probably a good movie, and is squarely directed at the annoying child demographic. The leak will certainly affect ticket sales in some minuscule manner, but isn't going to make anyone homeless. It is too effective of a method to keep generally undisciplined children quite for an hour or so.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Also note that it will make millions and millions of dollars anyway.
/. mirror but with my own advertisers. I know you won't mind if I take your work and profit from it.
So it must be ok! Thanks Taco...I think I'll put up a
Heh, in a way, I'm already doing the equivalent of p2p trading wrt slashdot. I'm running The Proxomitron which wipes out all the ads. So I'm benefiting from your work without making you any money.
Now here comes the part where all the Taco lovers mod me down without considering the point I'm trying to make...
"Look, someone's leaked the new Harry Potter movie onto the Internet! Geeze, being as how I'm such a tremendous fan, I think I'll download it."
(days pass, as the movie is slowly and painfully downloaded, in pieces, from any number of p2p networks)
"Boy, the movie was awesome, but the pirated copy sucked ass! The picture was lopped off at the edges, someone didn't adjust the camcorder and the colors were washed out, the dialog was basically incomprehensible, and people kept standing up and blocking the screen."
"I'm SUCH a huge Harry Potter fan, but since I've already seen the crappy camcorder rip, I guess I don't need to spend $8 to go see the movie anymore. And I certainly don't need to drop $30 on the DVD, nosir. 'Cause the noisy, incomplete DivX-encoded version was enough for me. Come to think of it, perhaps I'll stop buying Harry Potter merchandise as well."
I'm not going to argue that it's *right* to distribute copyrighted works over the Internet. But you cannot by any means claim that Chamber of Secrets being leaked is somehow going to cut into the movie's box office gross. At best, the camcorder rip or the telesync (which is what they call it when they pipe the sound in from a theater-supplied hearing aid) is a pale imitation of the real cinema experience. People who were going to see the movie in the first place, won't be satisfied.
Film piracy is never going to cut into box office dollars, period. No computer setup -- not even one with a projector screen and 5.1 surround sound -- will ever duplicate the theater experience, especially with a grainy telesync. The big screen and crowded theater hold too much fascination for us as human beings, and it won't go away any time soon.
The place where film piracy will hurt the most is in the home video market, because DivX rips of DVD films are at least VHS quality, usually better in some cases. Still, the movie industry has an advantage over the music industry here, because DivX rips are hard to download and DVDs are cheap. Hell, it's easier to rent a DVD and rip it yourself then to hunt down a film on Gnutella, and even then, you're still supporting the filmmakers in some small way, because you're paying the rental fee.
If the movie industry can improve the video quality and service quality of sites like MovieLink and CinemaNow, they'll have the one thing the music industry never really created -- a convenient, inexpensive alternative to piracy in the marketplace. Gee, is that all it takes? Who knews?
Visit me on the web at Permanent4.com.
Copying work without the owners permission is theft. No amount of self-serving rationalizations will change that. You are not stealing your friend's cd of the Back Street Boys when copy it, but you are stealing money from the record company that owns the rights to the music (and Lance and his little friends).
Hide behind semantic hair-splitting all you want. It won't make a difference.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Definately, I've bought DVDs of movies I previously refused to view in movie theaters (such as South Park, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, The One, The Emperor's New Groove, Princess Mononoke)...
Frankly I've had my movie viewing experience ruined (for example, Lord of the Rings) with people talking on their cel phones, talking through the movies, walking back and forth since they couldn't handle sitting still for 3 hours... Either way, the MPAA gets my precious money...
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Because I, in reality, heard someone say, and it seemed quite sincere to me:
"Jeez, they left that one wide open for a sequel."
For the record, I think the MPAA has a lot less to worry about from internet leaks than the RIAA. The theatre is a good place to watch a movie, most of the time (if you wait a week or two or even three for the big releases, or your movie is a little more undeground, you have less people even.) Don't underestimate the environment. I listen to music in my car, mostly.
The avg. movie still is around 700 megs big and often has bad compression artifacts. An album is of course, smaller.
Unless, of course, it's a really bad movie, one of those that they don't show to reviewers first, and they download a copy and tell everyone it's shitty.
Of course, occasionally the power of people to detect crap is amazing. Only occasionally. The Cast Away movie with Madonna only grossed a couple hundred grand the first week. More money than I will ever make, but maybe it'll be a lesson to the studios.
Dan
The number of people that are able to download movies P2P *
is probably going to cost them about $200 bucks.
Then factor in how much they'd lose in DVD sales eventually to the hard-core fans that aren't morally shy about downloading a DivX rip off Kazaa. If that would be substantial, they can release their own crappy-quality leak that will be instantly proliferated throughout the community, since it's the only one there at first. This will make finding the high-quality rip that will eventually be made from a DVD that much harder. It's much more insidious a way to spoof than just having void files that are the same size, ala the RIAA, because plenty of people will download and share it, thinking they've got the "real" version and not knowing there's a much better one out there.
Add to that the publicity value in the war against terrori^H^H^H^H err pirates to "Congresscritters" and the public. "Hollywood bribes Democrats, Republicans" doesn't capture the public headlines as well as "Hollywood campaigns to combat pirates" - "Avast, ye scurvy dogs" says Jack Valenti.
I'm not saying the MPAA is behind this leak, I'm just saying that, if they weren't, the might want to think about it...
Schnapple
However, there's one facet you overlooked - and that's the movie theater OWNER, who for some reason enjoys allowing copies to be made.
I have heard it told - not witnessed myself, mind you - that some of the "theater tapings" have been made in completely empty theaters, with only the camera running, and often before the official release date.
The theaters HAVE to get the film before opening day, after all... well before it in most cases, because you do NOT want to have half a premiere because of some fedex delay.
Couple that advance availability with just one owner who feel philanthropic, and you have a very high quality theater recording hitting the streets in advance of the release.
Yep, nothing like
Yep, I'm sure there aren't any good reasons to sitting at home in front of a good home cinema.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
There's a big Bond movie opening in a week, and so the marketeers for HP have to get attention on their product before they get run over. So anything that gets people talking about the movie...
No, I think folks know it's stealing in the same way they also know that going 65 in a 55 zone is breaking the law. "It's okay, everyone does it." "I'm not hurting anyone (at least that I know and care about)." "It's cheap and painless." "Nobody will ever know." "Nobody will bother me for doing this, so I can do it with impunity."
This doesn't make it right, it just makes it common.
No bickering on your point, just the language.
Your last statement intrigued me. This whole debate has little to do with what is "right" and "wrong". It is rather a debate over what is "legal" and "illegal". The distinction being that right and wrong have some sort of (probably) subjective moral sense underlying the determinations. The latter debate is simply a decision resulting from the existing political power structure that has happened to come to govern each of us.
That being said, I think that unauthorized copying is morally objectionable to me, and I disapprove of it. Is it "right" or "wrong" to do so, or will some hypothetical god send me to hell for doing it? I dunno. Clearly, the Ten Commandments are a little vague on P2P file sharing. My knowledge of the Torah and Koran is limited, so I can't really render anything but a guess, so I won't. Perhaps some other ecumenical peanut galleries can speak on this one -- anyone got the Buddha's cellphone number? What about Vishnu?
Is it legal? Clearly, no, it isn't. Right or wrong? You see the obvious problems.
Lots of petrified grits
First, I do have to agree with you on one point. Intellectual Property balanced with Fair Use and Unregulated Use is very promising...
I'm not just be a semantic prick here, you are being obtuse equating two very different things.
Equating copyright infringment with theft is like equating manslaughter with murder. In both examples, the similarities make you want to equate them, but there is that one semantic difference that changes everything.
Is it theft when there are no copyright laws?
Is it theft (copyright infringement) when a teacher photo copies an newspaper article for the class to read?
Is it theft (copyright infringement) when copyright law allows for non-commercial copying (selling unauthorized copies)?
Is it theft (copyright infringement) when you videotape a party with copyrighted music in the background, and send copies to your friends? (Assume the quality is near perfect)
If copyright is theft, why don't you enlighten us, when situations ARE and ARE NOT theft?
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
you know its shit like this that gives the MPAA and the RIAA their cannon fodder when buying laws in congress. why don't people have some fucking resposibility? shit! we're making the case for the RIAA and the MPAA by pulling shit like this!
Sneaking into a theater with a camera is nothing new. This wasn't any more of a leak than borrowing your movie critic friends VHS tape was 10 or 15 years ago. It's sad that such powerful software progress like P2P will pay the price for "leaks" that have existed for years. And I'm still under the impression that with movies this big, "leak" publicity stunts like this only serve to promote the movies release, not hinder it. I'de have to agree with schlach that we are talking about a very small demographic that would cut into movie sales.
I give up. Why is this a problem? This is not a rhetorical question.