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MPAA to Launch Anti-Piracy Commercials
cfish writes "The MPAA is launching expensive 30 second TV commercials to preach about movie piracy. Featuring starving artists in the movie industry."
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I wonder if they will count the costs of the commercials in the money they are loosing every year to piracy...
Is somebody going to make commercials about video/DVD hardware vendors that can't make new products sell as well since they have the extra expense of DRM?
the war on piracy....it'll have the same results as the war on drugs, or the war on terrorism
Actually, the war on piracy has been going on longer than you thought! I have a video, and there are still posters of "Don't Copy That Floppy," an effort to prevent people from copying floppy disks of games. There are still quite a few of these posters in Gov't buildings, featuring a young, rapping Arsenio Hall look-alike, a couple dumpy kids, and an Apple][ E. Google for "don't copy that floppy video" and you can probably download it somewhere.
- Just not getting it
- Delusional
- Playing games (i.e. laying foundations for more legislation)
I agree that piracy is a crime and folks who are engaging in it are making it harder for the rest of us, but honestly does the RIAA/MPAA expect that the people engaged in this are going to reform by looking at 30 second commercials?All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be
Yeah right, I'll bet they are getting buddy buddy with the TV networks and telling them things like "Either you're on our side, or you'll stop showing our movies." Perhaps I'm wrong. Actually, I hope that I am.
Pan out the windows of his dorm room
Show a copy of his bank account with $32 in it
Show you being a heartless bastard and him opening a subpoena
Show him getting really pissed off just because you think the world owes you because you managed to rip off some recording artist.
Show that, and I'll be impressed.
Fuck the RIAA
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
I think its hilarious that they want to use morality to try and persuade people to not pirate their movies. For years the entertainment industry has come out with morality killing movies, tv programs and music, now the monsters they have created couldn't care less about morality of it. I think its nice for them to have to eat it.
Nobody is telling them that they can't attempt to make a living through acting, singing or dancing. Make your living any way you can. But if your business model fails don't cry foul.
When you mass produce art it loses its value. Yet here is an industry that insists upon using any method possible to prop up a broken method of enrichment. So as far as I can see the problem is they don't understand that people don't value their work, and they need to adjust it if it is to be more than simply personal gratification.
Schwartzenegger $30 million for T3
Jim Carrey $20+ million a film
Cameron Diaz $20+ million a film
Mid Tier actors make around $10 million a film
Lower Tier actors make around a few hundred thousand up to multiple millions
The at home user might dl a divx copy of a currently released film playing at the theaters only to go see it at the theater and/or buy it when it's released on DVD.
So the user at home spends around $9 to see the movie at the theater and another $20 to buy the DVD and the actors take many, many millions in salary to make the movie. How does this constitute taking money from the movie industry?
Who is actually taking the money (actors/marketing) and who is supporting the industry (user/consumer)? This is a very simple question without factoring in the obscene amount spent on marketing films. We're talking 10's of millions in marketing films.
It is not out fault that most movies these days are over budgeted and spend too much on marketing to turn a profit. This almost reminds me of the dot-com business model where they just spent to spend without having a sound business model in place.
Don't blame the consumer for your shortsidedness and/or lack of envisioning a film's realistic chances of making money.
This is definitely the day of scape-goating at the pc user/consumer's expense. They can get creative with the books anymore so now it's time to blame the consumer and spend money in support of the propoganda. What better way to distratct shareholders and such from realizing it's just bad business decisions and irresponsibility!
Once again I'm still exersizing my right to boycott because I refuse to support an entity that will only try to sue me into financial ruin with the money I give them.
You aren't free to do anything, until you've lost everything.
Pro file-sharing? That's just half the story. From your link:
...part of an ongoing campaign to protect the rights of people sharing music online while compensating artists
People often forget about the compensation part...
I completely support the (MP|RI)AA doing everything they can in the court of public opinion to lobby peoples' attitudes about copying. People can talk to me all they want, as long as I can change the channel or choose not to listen - or choose TO listen and consider their views.
Lobbying to pass laws to criminalize behavior is a whole different matter - that's the brute-force approach that leverages the State's monopoly on legal violence to achieve their aims.
Run as many ads and try to change as many minds peacefully and through reason as you want. Appeal to peoples' higher instincts. That's perfect.
Don't make using tools illegal.
-- http://frobnosticate.com
I've got 1.5 DSL, thanks.
There are 5 of us at the office that all put in for the movies. We buy them for $10 off the street and split the price at $2 each. We've got quite the library that we can take on the road/home and watch wherever we want. A)It ends up costing less than blank DVD media. B)We get new releases. C)We don't have to pay to go see the movie in the theater. (A few of the guys have kids and would rather not pay $35 for kid's movies and can't go see PG-13 or R without sending the kids to a babysitter at $10/hr.
"Want in one hand and spit in the other and see which one fills up first." - My Dad
Probably because others have come to realize the unreasonable extremism of your stance. I concede that the current state of the copyright and patent systems is absurd and insane, but Ifind nothing wrong with reasonable copyrights and patents. A creator of a work, be it physical or intellectual, should be granted the exclusive rights to reap the rewards of their labor for a reasonable length of time. And while I think inventors should also be allowed a shoirt-term monopoly on their inventions, I do not think that it is reasonable in the least that someone can patent a sequence of genes that they found.
As for trademarks, I have no problem with trademarks at all. If I create a company I want customers to have a reasonable level of assurance that when they by Dogfart brand toothpaste, that they are buying my product and not some cheap knock-off.
The problem is not that intellectuial property is immoral. The problem is that the IP system in place in the USA right now is out of control and has been coopted by the interests of big business at everyone else's expence.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
>with morality killing movies
What does that mean? Because a filmmaker dares to upset the socially conservative status quo by tackling subjects like sex, drugs, violence, bigotry, etc suddenly they have no moral standing?
Sorry but try as you might, you Christian Fundamentalists or whatever you are cannot co-op the word morality and throw it around in the use of a really bad straw man argument.
There's a lot of things to criticize the content industries about, but the content itself should be hands off. Maybe in your world everything should be a Disney fairytale, but don't expect to be taken seriously by those of us in the real world.
That's your whole reply? Okay... Your problem is your view of what constitutes valuable property. What about time? When a plumber fixes your house, should he be paid. He hasn't lost anything tangible. If I spend a year formulating an idea and you take it, you've taken advantage of my time just as you have for the plumber (or lawyer, or any service profession). I don't really expect you to get anywhere with objections, because your point is untenable; however, if you keep posting nonsense, i'll keep replying.
The safest way to approach lava is to have another person with you and he goes first.
I was thinking the same thing. I hadn't really heard about Napster until the RIAA started trying to shut it down. In the same aticle, I also learned about AudioGalaxy, Morpheus, and Kazza. In a way, what they are doing is backfiring. They are not stopping copyright infringement, but they are educating people as to how to do it, and the benefits of doing it. Is the wholesale infringement right? That is a question each of us must answer ourselves, but from the number of people doing it right now, it would seem that a sizable portion of the population doesn't think so, and it might just be enough people that it will break the backs of the RIAA and MPAA.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
The same site has an even better link.
Use it to make them know exactly what you feel about their "campaign".
I suggest that you be very polite, just ask them some questions.
Yes, you are not accusing them of anything, in fact, you'll be happy to support their cause if they just explain certain issues that you find confusing...
Like, for example, wouldn't they agree that taking say, 5-10%, of the $30,000,000 that a single actor might get paid fro a single movie and distributing it among the poor, starving stage workers will help them much more than spending large amounts of money on dishonest advertisements?
Oh, and by the way, when a movie makes some X millions of dollars, how much of it is distributed among the workers and how much is kept by the middlemen (the studios)?
And one last thing, could they you how much the top 50 movies gross in 2002/2003 and what was the average stage worker salary at the time? And would they be so kind as to compare those figures to a time before the wide spread of DVD recorders and high-speed internet (say, 10 years ago?) - adjusted for the usual economy-strength indicators - just to show you what was the effect of piracy on the figures above?
Thank you in advance, best regards, merry christmas, yadda yadda,
Be creative!
Then, if you do get an answer, rip it apart, exposing all its flaws and fallacies (in an extremely polite matter, of course) and ask them for better ones, because it seems to you that they are the real "pirates" in this saga.
The way I see it, with movie piracy, biggest losers here are non-action flicks, comedy, and romance movies.
Personally, I cannot see how one could watch an inferior rip of Matrix Reloaded or T3 on his computer monitor or through Divx on a TV. The quality just isn't there anymore. You're not experiencing the picture and audio they way it was intended. When a studio throws hundreds of millions at some flick which has a decent plot, then $10/ticket is a no-brainer. In case of downloading the movie you are just cheating yourself.
For dialogue based movies which do not feature explosions, sophisticated camerawork, etc it would be fair to say they will suffer more piracy than action-based ones.
Due to this inevitable trend, studios usually have no choice but to upping the action movie production quota just to be more profitable in the box office.
The thing that irks me with the market today is the lack of diversity (below each title it shows how many screens the movie is playing on). Every theatre features the same pictures in proximity of 20 miles from each other. (HEY! Sort of like RIAA's with music distribution). The smaller, more thought out movies are not even on the radar. Take Man on The Train for example. I live in Hollywood, CA and would have to drive 300 miles north (Merced, CA) to watch this movie. That's the closest. But finding a theatre playing Legally Blonde 2 or Bruce Almighty would be easier than finding a Starbucks around here.
Then, we have the international opening dates sometimes several months away from each other. Hey MPAA, get a fucking clue. This isn't the 1920's anymore. When I talk to my friends in Holland, I should automatically assume they have the same roaster of movies playing at their theatres. We are connected globally nowdays. Bumping release dates of movies hurts the cause and encourages piracy.
So in conclusion,
music sharing = death of 1 hit/1 track wonders
movie piracy = death of dialogue based movies.
The gaffer has a union, and can't get laid off. The correct movie would say: "here is the gaffer that worked on the movie, but the studio is producing their next film in the czech republic " The worker bees in the movie biz are really hurt by movie production moving overseas.
Sig removed because it was obnoxious
It's time for the governments of our respective countries to realize we aren't pirates; We're voters. And citizens.
Sure, until we're all convicted for felonious copyright infringement, which would then cost us our right to vote, leaving the current administration and their *AA sugardaddies in power, untouchable by anyone who disagrees with them.
Spooky when ya look at the longterm picture, yes?
-72
-Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music.
I'll spare you the standard phrase about assuming. Not knowing your income (as you don't know ours), I can't address that topic. Just to do a little math for you, a babysitter will usually get you for about $50 + $30 dinner + $20 for the movie. That's $100 for one of the guys and his wife to go see a steaming heap like The Hulk. If you have kids (I don't), $100 buys a lot of stuff for them. It's a matter of priorities. Ours don't lie in redundant media purchases.
In our collective opinion, it's stupid for us to buy 5 copies of 1 pirated movie when we can buy 1 and pass it around. If the movie is good, we go see it in the theater. It's worth $2 each for a preview. So, if you have a better method for previewing _entire_ movies, let's hear about it.
"Want in one hand and spit in the other and see which one fills up first." - My Dad
120 character sigs suck. Make it 250.
>> ..selling albums is not the optimal way for artists to receive compensation...
...artists often forget that once the unnecessary middlemen are cut out of the picture, there is plenty of money to be made in concerts alone.
Says who? In any case, how an artist wants to make money is a matter for that artist, and no one else.
>> Pre-recorded albums should be free promotional material and a service to the fans.
Self-serving bunk. People can try to sell whatever they want. Your use of "should" implies a moral judgment at work. Morality has nothing to do with this. As my mother used to say, people in hell want ice water. And you just want free CD's.
>>
First, it's a safe bet that every entertainer knows there's money in selling tickets to a performance. Second, what's with that "unnecessary middleman" stuff? You want someone to be a fullt-time entertainer and fly their own planes, do their own accounting, arrange their own bookings, run their own payroll, act as their own lawyers, write their own contracts, prepare their own taxes, etc.?? Without middlemen, those bands you keep referring to as "artists" would never break out of the college bar circuits.
In general, just one more immature post trying to dress simple greed in bogus moralistic rationalizations.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
They stay in business by controlling and monopolizing the distribution channels. Take that away, and they are a worthless entity. We just need the artists to understand that. If they do, music CDs will cost $2-3, or online downloads will cost $.10 a song or less, which is what they should have been costing anyway. This is all about useless people attempting to justify their worth in an Internet-based digital economy. They will lose this war within five years.
... hundreds of other people who work on films that make enough money to get by in life. Even on those same films. Just because Jim Carrey made $20 million for Cable Guy, there are still electricians, lighting, cameramen, editors, etc. who put in their effort and labor to make the movie happen.
Downloading a first-run in theater movie and watching them for free is stealing. It is breaking the social contract that drives our economy. End of story.
Movies may be overpriced - but so is bottled water. Does this give us the right to steal bottles of water from the local 7-11?
Movies may be intellectually devoid - but junk food is devoid of nutrition. Does this give us the right to steal from McDonalds?
NO.
The arguments I've seen in this thread are fucking >>PATHETIC coming from so-called smart techno-nerds such as yourselves. Downloading movies or music that the owner charges for is stealing.
End of story.
The theaters already show about 20 minutes of advertisements before each movie, and this is after I already paid to see the thing! They waste 20 minutes of my time for what, a nickel? Now they're going to add a 65 second PSA to the wasted time. Don't forget, the people going to the movie are paying customers. If they were downloading movies off of the internet instead of seeing it in the theater, they wouldn't be there.
This makes as much sense as forcing patrons of a retail store to listen to a 65 second speech about how shoplifing is bad before they are allowed to pay the cashier.
I go to movies for the chance I may see something insightful. They don't deliver that very well, and they want me to sit through a bunch of commercials as well. What point is there in going to a movie anymore? The entertainment cartel just wants to waste my time no matter how much I pay. I used to go to some movies because I thought the companies who made them weren't so bad. I don't see how wasting the time of paying customers would help their cause--assuming stoping copyright infringement is their real motive. Then again, I suppose if you're paying money to a MPAA company, you're an unwitting collaborator to their fascist plots. Screw them all.
Don't forget the perennial favourite: Occupation is liberation
The Ring is a remake of a japanese film called Ringu. So basically that fits his point about MPAA doing nothing but remakes and sequels.