Slashdot Mirror
New Piracy Loss Estimate
An anonymous reader writes "WSJ reports on a new MPAA estimate losses due to piracy. "The study, by LEK Consulting LLC, was completed last year, and people familiar with it say it reached a startling conclusion: U.S. movie studios are losing about $6.1 billion annually in global wholesale revenue to piracy, about 75% more than previous estimated losses of $3.5 billion in hard goods. On top of that, losses are coming not only from lost ticket sales, but from DVD sales that have been Hollywood's cash cow in recent years."
Why don't they show the RIAA and MPAA giving the Big Spin, themselves?
bzzzzzzzzz-tik-tik-tik-tik-tik-tik
"Come on 6.1 billion! Come on 6.1 billion!"
tikka-tikka-tikka-tik-tok-tok "Come on 6.1 billion! YAAAAAYYYYYYY!!!! We lost 6.1 billion!!! Wheeee!!! Huzzah!!"
"Now we cut to live footage of those most responsible for the losses incurred by the RIAA and MPAA conducting a clandestine summit in a treehouse on the outskirts of Wooster, Massachusetts!"
It sure beats the boring truth, doesn't it?A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
that said VCRs would kill the movie industry.
Seriously, this crap is getting ridiculous. I find myself cheering for bigger losses.
they made until now ? They were able to pay startling amounts to actors and actresses so far ? Much extravaganza was going on. There will be a little less parties and splendor around for them, but hey, they still are better off.
Read radical news here
That's logical, right?
Tag: arrr
In other news I had a friend do a study for me (I paid him a pizza, a bag of dorritos and a case of coke) and he conculded, that I paid too much for Internet, my Internet was not fast enough, I was overcharged for movies and music, and I paid too much taxes.
Pay $20+ for an ad infused FBI warning with regioning, or virtually nothing for no ads or FBI warnings or regioning.
Remove the warning, remove the ads, charge $10 max. I can live without movies if you force me to.
...if they were actually making movies worth watching!
People shape laws. Not the other way around.
Could this be the cause of perhaps.... no good movies in theaters recently.
...until I read this:
An additional $529 million in losses came from consumers making copies of legitimate films they bought on DVD or VHS.
Losses? You have to buy another one when you want to make a copy? Pay-per-disc?
They're counting every time any kind of copy is made as a loss of sale. They're not even trying to be realistic here.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
This study can't be trusted any farther than it can be thrown, to mangle an age-old aphorism.
To put it simply, the MPAA sponsored this study, therefore it will be slanted as they desire. I'm sure there's some element of truth to these estimates, but the MPAA has as a goal the elimination of piracy, so the more inflated they can make the losses seem, the closer they get to their goal.
Specialization is for insects. -Heinlein
I don't even understand why they bother using real numbers in these studies. Why not just move ahead to the logical conclusion, and have the study say that the MPAA loses a zillion bajillion dollars per year to piracy? It would be about as meaningful.
Incidentally, do you ever notice how you never see any studies calculating the exact amount of money the MPAA loses each year from making crappy, unoriginal, cookie-cutter movies; showing the movies in a medium where you have to spend gas money to get to the theater and then more than half the cost of a DVD to get in the theater door; and then once they have your money putting more effort into showing you more ads than they do the movie? That's a study I'd be curious to read.
I'm sure it's quite obvious to most people that they're just inflating numbers. They can't really even begin to estimate how much revenue is lost to piracy on a yearly basis. I'll wager a substantial sum of money that in a few years this number will grow by another 2 or 3 billion dollars, not because people are pirating any more or any less music, movies, books, or other forms of media, but because the corporations want to make it seem as though they're in danger of falling apart. The truth of the matter is that they've been ripping consumers off for so many years that they have more than enough money to withstand the effects of piracy. Their hesitation to change and adapt by switching to new business models and solutions only reaffirms my belief that these corporate dinosaurs are actually in need of extinction.
If you can't be creative and adapt to the modern world market and find new methods of selling your product, please get the hell out of the way of the companies and people that are trying to make a difference. The stagnation and lack of creative thinking is inflicting more harm on the consumers and economy than any amount of piracy could ever do. Sink, swim, or get the hell out of the water.
I don't know why I bother:
This is funny, it almost sounds from the article that they changed their methodology to increase their claimed "losses", and had to rein them back in when they discovered their losses exceeded global Gross (International) Product.
I'm surprised to see such an MPAA friendly article from WSJ. Or maybe I'm not.
How about I get a bunch of people together and sue the **AA for all the "lost entertainment value" I have experienced from thier respective industries high priced albums and shitty movies.
How about this deal: You allow after-viewing refunds on tickets so I can get my money back after you waste my two hours in a theater, and I'll start letting you have my money when you make something decent.
Again, this survey appears to be based on multiplying the number of illegal copies out there by the list price. GAH! How obvious is it that that's bullshit? They're forgetting that most people think their films are crap enough not to be worth spending a couple of dollars on, but will watch them for free.
To calculate this right, you need to work out how many people would have bought a real copy *if a free download of it was not available* which is quite different.
I once had a meeting with the head of the MPAA and his head lawyer to discuss a technology my cousin and i had created. He full blank told us that the numbers they give are made up and that there is a chance they acutally make money from p2p (as the technology of choice was at the time). I was shocked by that statement. He said that they will probably just add another billion the next year.
Are they REALLY losing anything when people such as me download a movie or game that I never would have bought in the first place? I would easily not pirate the game and not pay $50 for it, or I could borrow it from a friend, or anything. I buy stuff worth buying, end of story.
the Political Inquirer
Obviously they're trying to make the number sound huge, but they should cut up the costs of the CD. How much do they charge for manufacturing the product, case, booklet, etc? They can't count it as loss if it wasn't necessary to be produced in the first place. I'm sure there's a lot more that they wouldn't count as loss as the money wouldn't goto the studios anyways, so they should just take the profit that they make from each sale and add that up.
The future should involve free access to media, with it so readily available thanks to the internet, I think this is the direction we are heading, but those that are raking in the money because of movies and CD's are fighting it tooth and nail. Its the way of change, how is this any different than machines taking over jobs of people on assembly lines. Those people fought it too. I see it in kind of a Star Trek light, "computer...play me this song by this artist". The computer never asked Riker for his $1.95 per song. But no, our society is so driven by money, that will never happen. We need in a couple years to get these younger generation politicians in office that can help move things in these directions. Make it legal and dont call it piracy. Things are changing, and we can only fight it for so long.
By toothpaste for dinner
They are guessing, and they are being overoptimistic about market prospects with no piracy.
The problem is, there is no evidence that the drop in sales from their expectations was due to piracy.
Drop in sales can be due to the market; DVDs and ticket sales may no longer be attractive -- drop in sales figures may reflect people seeking alternative, cheaper entertainment options.
Yes, piracy exists, yes it has an impact, but no, that impact cannot be reliably measured with any precision -- there are too many factors influencing the sales numbers you get; primarily, the market - to presume sales always go up unless piracy drives them down is just plain arrogant and a head-up-in-the-clouds assumption.
The amount of piracy occuring is by its very nature a relatively unknown factor, especially when they refer to casual copying, or other things which DRM and other measures are purported to prevent ---- the best that can be made is an educated guess.
These from the people who consider lending an original copy of a CD to a friend to be piracy ---- they cannot reasonably measure the total of such things with anything close to an accurate reading, it's just not practical to get statistically relevant information from a population that is being told what many of them do is bad.
Of COURSE reporters and researchers paid by a company with a certain agenda are likely to drastically exagerate the extent and certainty about the loss being due to piracy or not due to piracy.
This really isn't news. It must be that time of the year when a new bill is being introduced. As a shocking rebuttle I could come out and say they're loosing 10 billion a year from puting out crap like pluto nash and some other films i've never seen and can't remember.
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
I lost about 600 BILLION Euro by not selling all that used toilet paper for an estimated 1.2 billion/sheet I set its price at.
It's so tremendously hypocritical talking all that bullshit about globalization, a free market and how everyone's gonna save oh-so-much by having goods produced in low-wage-countries of the third world and eastern europe, and at the very same time not wanting to adjust to the demands the consumer - which is not the most unimportant in that market-thing in the end, you know, corporate world? - makes.
If your business model is about to fail, well, get over it, and come up with a new one that's working without mob tactics.
:%s/Open Source/Free Software/g
YTARY!
Is there *ever* going to be a point when the xxAA reports good news again? For instance, "Ticket sales are down, but we've increased profits by not releasing so many terrible movies this year." Or, "We increased sales of DVDs this year by reducing the price by $3 across the board."
Not likely.
As long as they keep complaining, they have a way to justify restricting access to digital (and analog) content.
Not that it really matters, because they have the money to pay lobbyists to influnece Congress anyway. But the public may be able to stomach some sort of compromise with regards to fair use restrictions if the xxAAs keep bitching and complaining.
There are two kinds of people in the world: those with loaded guns, and those who dig.
I heard that there are three types of reports from the MPAA: lies, damn lies, and statistics.
theatre in 2 years, haven't bought any recent films on DVD in at least as long and dropped my NetFlix rental plan to the "cheapo" plan as well. They aren't losing money due to piracy, they haven't released anything I would waste my bandwidth on. They are losing money because they release trash; bad "popcorn" flicks, weak remakes that bear little resemblance to their predecessors, bubble gum movies with pop stars who act worse than they lip synch,etc.. You can blame piracy for a while longer, but eventually the problem will become obvious to even the most oblivious film studio executive.
I don't like being forced to watch copyright warnings, stupid "don't steal" commercials and having trouble with archiving movies, so I prefer watching 'stolen' copies, which don't have any added crap.
"I don't even understand why they bother using real numbers in these studies."
I can see it now...
The MPAA reports on a startling new study indicating that over 63 trillion gigawatts of elephants are being harvested anually as a result of DVD piracy. The study corrected for factors such as yellow, and the tootsie roll center of a Tootsie Pop, providing the first clear evidence of a connection between movie downlaods and the number 7.
Seems like the MPAA & the RIAA are having a competition..
they're standing on a rotating platform, trying to see who can spin the fastest.
http://www.xkcd.com/354/
Incidentally, do you ever notice how you never see any studies calculating the exact amount of money the MPAA loses each year from making crappy, unoriginal, cookie-cutter movies; showing the movies in a medium where you have to spend gas money to get to the theater and then more than half the cost of a DVD to get in the theater door; and then once they have your money putting more effort into showing you more ads than they do the movie? That's a study I'd be curious to read.
That is a fuggin' great idea. I'd love to see a study like that. Perhaps something comparing the rate of return on art flicks vs. standard Hollywood fare. If the major studios put out 4x the movies in 2007, with the same aggregate budget they spent in 2006, covering a wider variety of themes targeted at a wider variety of audiences, they might make as much or more revenue.
The problem is that they bank on losing money on 4 out of every 5 movies, knowing that the fifth will be a blockbuster that will recoup all the money they threw down the toilet producing flicks like Battlefield Earth.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
If the pirates keep this up, the MPAA will be losing so much potential sales that they'll end up in the potential red and be forced to shut down operations due to the massive potential loss!
If I don't read this here, where else can I possibly find trustworthy news from?
Please stop entering code 2,2,7,6,6,4
P.S. Keep Mum about chapter 376 or the lads'll have yer guts fer garters
Hollywood Studios make a HUGE movie, say like Gigli.
Hollywood TV Studios hype hype hype said big movie on shows like ET, Access Hollywood, or Live with regis and kelly.
Someone pirates a screener of Gigli and posts a torrent.
Gigli opens in theatres.
A few people really into movies either download the torrent or see it opening day.
Those people who are really into movies are also the people that others go to to find out if new movies are any good.
Noone goes to the theatre by the second day.
Clearly the losses were because of the people who downloaded the torrent, not because the movies are pap.
Too bad the 'media' will rebroadcast this, and the average joe will believe it. Causing more legislature members to jump for joy, knowing they can pass more stupid restrictive legislation to restrict our rights some more.
If they hadnt all be bought, id say write your congressperson.. But they have, so why bother.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
But I didn't, that means I have clearly stolen £675.48 from the movie industry. I could just as easily have not bought 2 movies every week, oh no, now it's over a thousand pounds worth of none sales that I'm responsible for.
Have I missed any mpaa logic?
Incidentally, I haven't downloaded any illegal mp3's or illegal movies either, but I have recently started downloading some indie made "please download and watch our production we made with no budget" things that might often lack polish but do provide at least some entertainment.
I believe the sales will go down even more if there's no piracy, but that's another topic.
That should tell you a lot right there.
...the survey specifically asked consumers how many of their pirated movies they would have purchased in stores or seen in theaters if they didn't have an unauthorized copy...
Late yesterday, in response to questions from The Wall Street Journal, the MPAA released some information from the survey, including members' U.S. and global piracy losses. emphasis mine
And that should shed more light on what's going on here.
"A study this magnitude takes some work to roll out," says an MPAA spokeswoman.
"Roll out"...is that the new euphemism for "doctoring" or "falsifying" now?
She says the numbers weren't far out of line with what the industry expected.
But of course!
It uses more consistent methods and incorporates consumer research for the first time...
And we all answer those honestly, don't we?
Ditto
Henry, I have some reports here from your Major O'Houlihan that I frankly find hard to believe.
Well, don't believe them then, General. Good-bye.
What?
that it is not even wrong. Its just in the wrong ballpark.
+5,Bull$hit
After they spend $100 million to make movies like Stealth or $130 million to make The Island, I'm a little surprised. Oh? Their study didn't take those kind of "costs" into account? Well no wonder it's only 6 billion.
Dear MPAA,
My consulting firm of Cashmore, Cheipe and Cheatham is prepared to provide you with a report showing that piracy costs run into the tens of trillions of US dollars. The price for this report is E200,000.
I would love to know how they can attribute it to piracy, instead of the fact that they both release a bunch of crap these days.
DISCLAIMER:
I don't believe what I write, and neither should you.
$954.862 trillion.
Sure, another guestimate of what they think their losses are based on what they would like to think they're really making.
The real reason I don't belive a word of it is they think they're only losing 244mill in China.
And they claim $529mill in losses in the US because consumers are using their fair use rights to make a backup copy so they don't have to go out and rebuy movies every time a disk gets scratched because the MPAA is too cheap to use scratch resistant disks.
How long until they blame Netflix and Blockbuster because people are renting movies at a prepaid monthly rate instead of buying them.
F7 doesn't work, ignore spelling and grammar
What we wanted to make so we could all buy new jets - what we actually made = Piracy Loss Estimate
It is not surprising to me that theatre attendence is down. Admission prices are sky high, like they were set by oil company executives.
In return for my money, I get to watch commercials before the movies and public service announcements about piracy (by the way, assholes, it's not "stealing", it's copyright infringement). Then, I get to watch trailers, which a really commercials too. Finally, the movies starts, which I might enjoy if I can hear it over the sounds of people's babies crying in an R rated movie or people talking on their cellphones (shut the fuck up, lady!!!).
So now I mainly buy DVDs. Most movies I can buy for the price of two tickets and a hot dog at AMC, and I have something to show for it, not to mention being able to watch it multiple times.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I don't go to movies because the ticket is $7 and then popcorn and a coke is about a billion more dollars. I don't BUY DVDs because the ones I buy usually get viewed only once (they are boring) so everthing I view now is rented from NetFlix (low risk). Finally I get PLENTY to watch with TiVo.
TT
10 x 10,000,000,000 x US$20 = US$2,000,000,000,000 = 2 Trillion US Dollars
This clearly dwarfs the cost of invading Iraq and giving Baby Boomers their Social Security benefits put together, therefore it is much more important. It is in fact, as shown by the objective calculations above, by far the most important issue on earth today. More than global warming, AIDS, tuberculosis, environmental pollution, shortages of potable water, collapse of fisheries, ozone layer depletion, overpopulation, lack of medical care, famine, poverty, slavery, wars in the Third World, tyrannical dictatorships, nuclear weapons proliferation, exploitation of the many by the few, rampant governmental corruption, compromised information and news media, organized crime, in short more important than anything.
Someone should tell the RIAA.
I cant see spending 20+ bux for a dvd, when most of it is on cable on-demand and in HD.
Sounds like the MPAA is out of touch with consumers. Pay for crap quality? I wont even steal that crap quality.
I haven't bought a single DVD since I started my subscription to Blockbuster Online. With Netflix and Blockbuster Online competing, prices are very reasonable, why would anyone buy a movie when they can have any DVD in existance sent directly to their door within 1 day? I'm sure piracy is to blame for some of the lost sales, but realistically 90% of the people who pirate aren't going to buy the movie.
Apparently, the North American Free Trade Agreement did not do jack for actors, actresses, writers, and directors.
I propose that we produce a movie about Indiana Jones will lead the successful colonization of Mexico.
I would like to see a study of how much money they make by double charging its customers for the same copyright....
You pay to watch it in the theater, then buy the dvd, then buy the PSP disc. I now own three copyrights. Oh wait, I mean I paid triple.
Everybody copies my program, nobody pays me!
I lost $2.7 billion last year. Oh on Thursday, I have a loss of $5.4 billion. On Saturdays and Sunday I have a discount.
I am the owner of 'Hello World'!
Grundgesetz * 23. Mai 1949 - 30. November 2007 - http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/
Uh, hey, this is Slashdot... nobody reads the articles here anyway.
I'd like to see this study done in the real world by a movie studio: Take two similarly popular movies that are projected to perform similarly in revenues over the next few months. Then release both in DVD with all the appropriate promo deals and merchandising. Finally, offer one for free download from their official website via bittorrent or even an easier http download. After a few months they can measure the revenues of each movie. Now, do you think they'd actually do that study? What do you think would be the result?
Is people who, having watched a movie (copied or otherwise), realize "OMG, these people make nothing but crap."
(cue obligatory Cheech and Chong sketch: "Does it look like an MPAA movie???")
It's like famous adman Jerry Della Femina always said - the fastest way to kill a bad product is good advertising.
Think of copying as "good advertising."
Arrr, matey! Turn me crank or walk me plank!
U.S. movie studios are losing about $6.1 billion annually in global wholesale revenue to piracy, about 75% more than previous estimated losses of $3.5 billion in hard goods.
Shit, those numbers really made me think people. I really feel bad about MPAA and it's about time we start to take this seriously, and no more inane jokes.
I suggest we organize some kind of charity or something where we can donate and help MPAA recover at least a small part of the losses they endure due to the plague that piracy is. It's all our fault, and we should collectively take the blame for it as users of those products.
Also we should insist before your local politicians to lobby for a complete ban of any recordable media, and making the act of creating a backup copy a federal crime punishable jailtime and hefty fines. If you want backups, just support the studios who invested millions in creating those movies to entertain us and educate us and buy several copies of the DVD or CD.
There are some even worse offences, like recording TV shows and radio stations and repeatedly watching them with other people, in other time, and even fast forwarding the ads. This has to stop if we want to preserve the media as it is.
I know people will come and talk about "fair rights" and "recordable media is used for backup of data and personal content" but we know that's just the regular excuses of the pirates, no any CD-R or DVD-R can be used fairly, since it will in one way or another be used for copying existing data, and we know copying is a serious crime.
Ah fuck 'em.
I don't pirate movies or music, but I lost any sympathy for the RIAA or the MPAA when they decided to buy laws forcing me to buy hardware with pointless DRM to prevent the piracy I'm not doing.
I'm not pirating, but I have to bear the cost of the MPAA's unworkable "solution", a so-called solution that puts industry spyware in my computers and TVs, and that makes my current hardware obsolete?
Fuck those fat cats.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
When they make a movie, they have dozens of marketing experts analyze the movie's plotline, product placements, advertising broken down by demographic and geographic market.
would it be too much effort to break into categories this piracy market instead of just lumping it all together as "bad"?
i'm not very good at marketing, but even I can see that pirates fall into some categories...
* the duplicator factories that get the artwork and labelling to match exactly so they can inject it into the distribution chain
* the guy that crouches in the theater hiding a mini-DV camcorder to get a copy before it goes to DVD
* weird bored guy who has a netflix account and a bunch of really big hard drives. rips the DVD's and then never really watches them again.
* tivo/dvr dude who records movies from HBO/cinemax and moves them to his PC for later viewing
* people who download movies from mysterious torrent sites
Anyway, what I'm saying is that some of the copying that goes on in these demographics is sort of paid for (HBO, netflix) and is after the dvd release anyway, so the MPAA should chill. Other copying (projectionist or guy with the camcorder) is pre-dvd release and HAPPENS IN THE DAMN THEATER so they should be able to get control of that situation if they didn't hire the minimum number of minimum wage ushers possible. Some of the people doing the copying are just being video pack-rats and just feel warm and fuzzy having access to 3000 movies...in my experience these people often buy plenty of DVDs on top of the downloads.
So no great news here, the MPAA and movie studios are stupid and don't understand their non-paying customers any better than they understand their paying customers.
From the article "An additional $529 million in losses came from consumers making copies of legitimate films they bought on DVD or VHS".
Isn't that fair use?
-ItsME
Agree with you but I've seen two films at the cinema this year, and thats way down. I won't be renting dvd's, or torrenting the films that didnt appeal.
The Incredible Hulk film was on free broadcast tv last weekend, I watched new Dr Who season 2 instead, so I do hope my contribution to 'stealing hollywood' was included in the figure.
I ignored a 'free' Hollywood film on tv that i could have stolen beforehand but it failed to interest me - i mean thats got to be stealing in these peoples eyes for i did not pay.
Neal Stephension (i think in the book) - before the command line considered that american culture was a way to win hearts and minds. The sign of a successful book/film like the Harry Potters/DaVinci codes is are they plaguarised.
When I (not american, or mexican) can ignore whole parts of american popular culture Hollywood and America has got a influnce problem.
I like to think that I go see a film on its merits rather than some giving some accountants a means to add to his stealing guestimate.
If I buy myself a fat pipe and a bunch of storage, can I just download millions of movies/music to drive the MP/RIAA out of business?
In other news, U.S. movie consumers are making about $6.1 billion annually in global wholesale revenue from piracy.
It is rather likely that the ADs exploiting a feature forced upon consumers for a very specific purpose violates the DMCA. There are likely a myriad of their other practices which are equally unlawful.
/.ers would rather write an essay length response to a poor summary of an article while downloading every pr0n file on the intarweb than spend a few minutes a day reading the crux of the news--the stuff that matters--or brushing up on their legal loopholes.
/.ers who dislike the MPAA who could also spare a little bit of time without adversely affecting their life. This sounds suspiciously like a DDOS attack though, and I wouldn't put it past them to have ommited any wording re:computers in their legal definition.
Why is nothing anything done about it?
One could safely assume that there is some process a member of the general public could adhere to which would cost more resources to respond to than to create.
There are an awefully large number of
Someone at the *IAA needs to go and do economics 101 and learn about Boom/bust cycles.
Does it go on forever?
So even with their inflated accounting, they come up with a loss of about 15% of the global revenue of the US movie industry? Give me a break.
By the way, other estimated of worldwide movie industry revenues go up to $450bln when one includes mechandise and other sales. Of course, that also counts Bollywood and other non-US producers.
Easy to blame pirates for all the crappy movies that are coming out. Also, has anyone noticed the way the promote them on TV? "BEST movie yet, with best actors, blah! blah!" Who decides when a movie is not only good, but the best one yet? seems to me the people who make them do.
26% - Legal fees.
21% - Cost spent on anti-piracy tools. (Theater Survelliance, DVD protection schemes)
14% - Copies of material you have the rights to.
13% - Lobbyist payoffs.
10% - Physical piracy. (Incl third world DVDs, pirated copies, etc, -assuming that everyone who pirated would have bought a ticket-)
8% - Press releases, journalist intimidation, and Oscar interruptions.
7% - Other Fair usage. (Screenshots, icons, etc)
1% - Getting the Attorney General to say that Piracy benefits Terrorism.
NO THEY DIDN'T, YOU LAZY TWIT!
Not only are you too cheap to pay for what you use, but you are too lazy to even bother to understand someone when they call you on your BS.
Piracy is the perfect excuse for poor performance in producing a good product.
The executives can churn out rubbish and when the investors come calling looking for answers for poor returns, all the executive has to do is blame pirates.
Its a jedi mind trick.
Here I was thinking the lost revenue was due to a godawful product. Tisk.
How many movies have you downloaded then gone and bought the DVD because you liked it? How many did you want to go blind or gouge your eyes out after watching? (Probably more of the latter recently)
Let's see if I can get this metaphor to work... I wonder if I can use fuzzy-math tactics (Call it 'Perceived Value'). Hollywood perceives DVD and ticket sales as valuable to them. I perceive my free-time at a value of a modest $10/hr.
I go to the theater, because that's what my girlfriend wants to do, pay $10ea for tickets for a "2-hour" movie. OK, as of now, I'm break-even after two hours, plus the value of my girlfiend. But the movie was only 88-minutes because aside from 3-hour epics, Hollywood won't make anything longer. $7.33 went toward the title movie, $0.21 for each of the 6 trailers I had to watch, $0.42 for 5 min of soda and "don't steal this" commercials, $0.42 for the 5 min courtesy reminders, and the remaining $0.57 for atmosphere of voiceovers, bad sound systems, and artifacts. The movie turns out to be awful with 8-min of dialog written by apes with typewriters while throwing feces at each other, and 80-min of special effects.
Now, can I say that the studio stole my time because my 'Perceived Value' of the film was not there? Can I send them a bill for $20? At the very least for the $2.67 of junk that I did NOT pay for? For those that say I voluntarily went to the movies, they are correct. Hollywood also voluntarily put out the lousy film. Even though my math is correct (within rounding), I call it fuzzy because value is subjective.
They are trying to bill us for lost revenue, I say we bill them for lost time.
"The quality of life is determined by its activites."--Aristotle
I guess this big loss of revenue is having a major effect on their profits.....
oh wait no, they are making more money year on year. They should have done what software companies did for years about piracy.... pretend it doesn't exist. Going after it this aggressivley is tantamount to publicising the fact that it is possible.
Would someone be so kind and explain those gentlemen the difference between their claimed loss and the sharp reality of no revenue? They cannot lose what they don't have.
The real reason is the $6.1b number they are quoting are before the adjustments are made for portion of the survey regarding whether the consumer would have bought it had it not been pirated. They mention the study analyzes that angle, but they don't actually say that the 6.1 number reflects the adjusted amount. I suspect the truth is the 6.1 number is pre-adjusted and that the report actually shows that probable losses are substantially smaller. I suspect all MPAA members are in agreement to selectively release the report and this is just a cover-story. After all, the idea that the studios would not want to release the numbers for fear of hurting their stock-prices set off my BS radar.
I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.
Do you think maybe the MPAA hired someone to go strangle women -- later known as the Boston Strangler -- just so they could have a scary phantom to use as a simile when battling the VCR in court?
Nah, they wouldn't stoop that low... would they?
"Last year, according to a person familiar with the matter, copies of movies downloaded or received from people who had downloaded them cost the studios $447 million in the U.S., whereas copies stemming from professional bootleggers cost the studios $335 million."
We don't know his name. We don't know his position. But at least he's familiar with the matter!
damaged by dogma
The only way the pro-sharing people can support thier arguments is by discrediting this report. All Western Governments will react to that 6.1 billion figure, (Extra sales taxes you know) by passing more stupid DRM/Restriction laws on all computer/internet users.
How do the file traders prove the report wrong? Stop uploading/downloading CD/DVD/Software titles for six months. Either sales go up which means the publishers were right, or sales stay the same meaning the pro-sharing people are correct.
If the sales of new CDS/DVDS stay stagnant for too long (with no downloads available), look for the studios to lower prices. Thats good for everyone.
Food for thought,
Enjoy.
It's just the normal noises in here.
Please don't fall into their game of using the word "piracy" for sharing data with other people in your society. We can debate all we like about whether that sharing is right, and we may even argue that it morally amounts to theft, but the *act* is sharing, and that's what it should be called. Regardless of the origins of the word piracy, it has a negative and unhelpful connotation.
Go here. Look at the top five releases. As of today, 3 May, apparently only one of them, by consensus of all the reporting critics, is worth seeing. Look at the top ten. Look at the top twenty. It's similarly bleak.
I realize this hardly counts as definitive evidence, but it's enough that I really don't believe the MPAA when they moan about piracy.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, write technology blogs.
Goods that satisfy both these qualities are known as public goods and fall under a whole different set of rules and economic models. Usually the Government is involved in providing these services since they can, through taxes, force everyone to pay for them. Most public goods that economists talk about these days are information. Basic scientific research, for example, is funded by the government.
Recorded Music has rapidly become a public good with the advent of the digital age. It is non-rivalrous, if we are listening to a CD in the same room, your listening of the CD doesn't make my listening less enjoyable, and it is very difficult to exclude non-payers since it is so easy to make perfect copies of them.
In my opinion, there isn't very much that the recorded music industry can do about this. Their industry has changed into a public good. Recordings now are more usefull for artists as marketing for their concerts than they are as actual revenue generators. Concerts they can still exclude non-payers from easily buy selling tickets and having ticket checkers at the gates. The same is true for the movie industry. The movies they produce are a public good. The "movie theater experience" is still very profitable, but they need to figure out a way to make money of these DVDs that are hard to exclude non-payers from enjoying. They need to totally change their model, you can't beat the masses.
Not much else to say, here.
You have tried to support your argument with faulty reasoning! Go directly to jail; do not pass Go, do not collect $200!
"Hard Goods" eh?
I don't know the figures myself... but wasn't it case that last time they cried foul like this they had actually taken record profits from ticket and DVD sales? Anyone know whether their overall intake is actually still going UP despite all their crying?
I still watch movies, but mostly I rent them, and I'm not alone, wanna know why?
I rent them because except on tuesday nights or during the day on weekdays it costs me $15 to go to a movie. A new release costs me about $8 to rent or about $30 to buy. Now you may say, what about the big screen, what about dolby 5.1. Well that's fine and dandy if you're going alone, but if I take my girlfriend that's $30(enough to buy the dvd and watch it forever). For a family of four(which I admitedly don't have) even with kids prices(about $9) you're looking at about $50, without food or drink. For your average family renting a dvd saves at minimum $42, and you can watch it in the comfort of your own home. Throw in the fact that most movies lately are crap, and you can see why people don't go.
Movie theatre revenues here are going down the drain as more and more people are deciding it's just too expensive.
6 billion? I cant imagine how those rich film producers even live with their million dollar paychecks...
Oh my, the gas prices must be killing them. How can they afford to live in this country with only 50 to 1 billion per film...
I just cant imagine how hard it is to survive in Beverly Hills these days... It really must be getting ugly there. I mean only 5 bentleys... and 6 houses around the world?
Gosh. It almost makes living on 30k to 60k seem impossible...
I'm sure glad we have illegal mexican slaves to pick up the work. You know when you exploit labor, this is what they do... they have no loyalty, and could careless about pirating your movies because they arent being paid enough to live a good life, or afford the gas needed to get to and from work, and your stupid movie theaters...
Big fucking deal... WAH WAH WAH.. I'm RICH and you poor people are hurting me.
Do a real study... Study how much of the wealth is controlled by top 1% of the country. Study how much the average man is getting fucked by the government that no longer represents their interests. Study how the down fall of civilizations happen...
Study why people dont give a shit about millionaires, and in many cases... billionaires.
WAH WAH WAH...
PAY MY GAS BILL, MY HEALTH CARE, MY PHONE, MY HEATING, MY INSURANCE.... You think i give a shit about your 6 billion...
What a load of bullshit. Another study, by me, was completed about 30 seconds ago, and people familiar with it say it reached a startling conclusion: NASA is losing about $300 million annually in global wholesale revenue because I'm not buying one of their shuttles.
From MPAA site http://www.mpaa.org/researchStatistics.asp
> Worldwide box office held steady at $23.24 billion in 2005.
> Although down 7.9% from 2004, the worldwide box office
> reflected a 46% growth over 2000. (Refer to page 5 of the
> 2005 Theatrical Market Statistics Report)
$6.1 / $23.24 - seems like they just went for 25%
1) Cut down on expensive special effects
2) Refuse to pay actors millions to appear in movie
This will lead to:
3) Lower cinema prices
4) Lower DVD costs
and will eventually lead to less piracy
It's not the special effects that make a movie good. It's the story and the acting. And low paid actors can be just as good as super stars.
I agree. No one wants to pay full price for they crap they come out with these days.
I was looking at the upcoming movies and they appear to be a fair mix between drivel and crap. I thought maybe X-Men would be decent but I read further and discovered they replaced the director and large parts of the staff so I lost much of my optimism (I guess I'll still see it though)
Coding Blog
Isnt a torrent site an accomplished..... Is the ISP not an accomplished.....
Why would I need to buy DVDs when I have Netflix.
On occasion, my girlfriend will buy a DVD that we (or rather she) really liked. But we're occasional movie goers. We'll go out to the movies once every 6 months. We mostly rent.
So...why would I buy DVDs?
Isnt a torrent site an accomplished.....
Is the ISP not an accomplished.....
I'd go see 3-4x as many movies if they cut ticket prices in half. But with movie prices so high, I take more care in picking which movies I'll see in the theater. I've only seen 10 movies in the theater in the past year, but there were easily 20 others that I wanted to see but ruled out due to bad ratings. Simply put: I wouldn't be as picky if it didn't cost so much.
Hollywood made about $85 from me this year, but they could have made somewhere in the $130 to $170 range if they'd just lower their damned prices. Heck, I'd probably even shell out $200-250 for a "see every movie that comes out this year" pass, even if it required you to see half of the movies "off peak".
Assuming at least 1/2 of the moviegoing population is like me, cutting ticket prices in half would at least break even. However, I have a sneaking suspicion that they'd at least double their revenue from ticket sales.
if you prefer the 'stolen' copy for the reasons you mentioned, why wouldn't you go out and buy the original anyway?
it's one thing to dislike those things, and getting a pirated copy on the side so you can enjoy it the way you want to - it's another entirely to enjoy it (in any way) without any reward for those who produced it
From the Industry that brought us A Sound of Thunder. $5 and 103mins of pain. Turns out the movie wasn't even FINISHED when they released it - they ran out of money so shipped with preview special effects. AND I had to sit through the stupid fricking "If this movie doesnt have this warning it's been pirated" message. www.LegalWarfare.com :: Trial by Firepower
Make vapid, plotless movies, then charge ridiculous prices for theatre tickets and DVDs, and THIS is what happens! Why is the situtation so difficult to understand?
I beleive in the last year I may have lost somewhere around the vicinity of $6 billion due to theft. I performed a study asking 100 people if they had stolen my valuable toenail clippings, which go for $100 million apiece. I have accounted for the vast undercoverage of people who are lying to protect themselves.
Because of you theives I'll never see that $6 billion.
Today marks the one year anniversary of the complete elimination of digital piracy. Projected results by the RIAA and MPAA would have made them both $60 billion richer in this year had their predictions been correct. But, as has been the trend for the past 10 years, with the increased pressure on pirating has resulted in a DECREASE of revenue. Top analysts agree that this is due to less propagation of digital movies and audio. In addition, they speculate that most people who pirated digital media in the past likely would not have bought the hard media had piracy been unavailable.
In related news, both the RIAA and MPAA are expected to file for chapter 11 later this month.
Parent has a good point, but not in the way they expect - I suspect.
Every time it's about the numbers - and of course they have to use numbers, because the members of congress they support like the numbers.
But on the flip side, they always get -attacked- over those numbers as well, such as here on Slashdot. Review the comments, and one thing should become glaringly obvious: nobody seems to think that there aren't any losses from piracy, just that the amount is inaccurate - and some say can't be measured anyway.
But most people seems to skip the former half of that point... there are losses. So what if it's not $7B? Say it's only $5M - that's still $5M I'm sure they would rather have had than not have. Whether you think they're entitled to that $7B, $5M, or even $5 (bargain bin DVD sales) is another matter - but per their business, they should; I bet the RIAA/MPAA would wish even only half the people here defended the business model of -selling- media as much as they were to defend the GPL*, it'd be a lot healthier an industry to begin with.
* "if you don't like the terms of the GPL, then don't incorporate the GPL software" - not "then do it anyway"
"if you don't like paying money for a movie, then don't watch the movie" - not "then pirate the movie and watch it anyway"
I live in a world of people with fast internet connections and software skills, and where copying interesting data is in the blood, be it software, music, films. But just a week ago I realized how deep this P2P thing is getting into the "real world". I was doing some install in a manufacturing plant, in the production back office. It was a small office with about ten people working. Then the secretary raised the topic of a new CD of a popular band that was to be released that day. Se asked about how long she had to wait till the CD was shared. Somebody answers that he had downloaded already. The conversation involves more people. The talked about the band, asked if the new CD was any good. All was very natural, no hushing, no self-conciousness. NOBODY even thought about buying the CD. The one that had downloaded it offered for copy, the local net of the company was used to make copies of the thing, while mixing talk of music with production problems. It was all very natural, very cool, like sending copies of a joke e-mail or something like that.
Those where lower-income-bracket people, lower-computer-literacy people, that is, the backbone of the country. And they see nothing even remotely wrong in copying music. I fear the content producers are against too much of a slope now.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
One can only hope that their schlock empire will financially implode and true art and artists are at last allowed to flourish, unstrangled by the weeds of greedy commercialism.
Hollywood sugar water marketed as fruit juice to the lowest common denominator masses. Fuck them!
Really. Totally. 100% on the nose. The VCR was never much of a threat except in a very few cases.
I mod everyone down who says "I'll get modded down for this." I hate to disappoint.
Does anyone think that this kind of speculations will stop? Most likely not, I believe that they will only get worse untill they finally catch up with the era. I will neither admit nor deny piracy, but I still think that the whole Hollywood (and record) business is WAY over flated. "'The market forces that exist today make it unrealistic to spend $200 million on a movie,' (George Lucas from a previous /. story).
I believe that a big part of the lost revenue is due too (correct me if you think I'm wrong) some actors over inflated paychecks. I personally love eally good actors. But to get 20,000,000 for a film is just ridiculus, plain and simple. There are a TONs of excelent actors just dying to get on the big screen, and they often give us the most insight into their character (Star Wars IV,V,VI anyone?!)
I am all for that the company who pays for the movie (or music if you will) shoould get their monies worth, and they have kept it at a fairly even plane. But please, there comes a time when people have had enough.
And I ask you, do you believe their claims? Or do you believe that a company's goal is to make profit? Although I live in Sweden this is what I have understood that the (once again, correct me if im wrong) RIAA and MPAA are all driven by private interests?
We recently had a HUGE IT-bubble that burst, and just maybe It's time for Hollywood as well?
As said before, there are TONs of excelent actors. Isn't it a a breath of fresh air when a new, and unforseen, actor perfom with an equal amount (or more) grace and proffesional skill equal the over paid "profesional ones"?
Congress wasn't hopping-to fast enough with that $3.5 billion number, so the MPAA figured they would just throw the new $6.1 billion number out there in hopes that their pawns Berman and Coble would hurry up and get to work.
I love how they claim that money that they have never had, nor have ever earned is magically stolen from them somehow.
By that standard, I've had billions stolen from me too, where the hell is all my money, you damn piratical freeloaders! Global warming and noodly appendages be damned, I want all my sweet sweet billions that I have never done a thing to earn..
This is as close to a textbook example of fraud as you are ever likely to see.
With all the arguments against file sharing and peer to peer networks, I feel it is my duty to alert the RIAA, the MPAA and all who would oppose such methods of distribution of a much greater threat to their industry. Indeed, this is a threat that all industries and businesses should consider.
This particular threat has been around for a much greater interval than file sharing. It is so insidious that is has become what I might call a staple in daily American life.
Not only does this threat encourage file sharing, but it also encourages theft, and indeed, crime, in general. This threat is the human hand.
Without the human hand, no one could use a mouse interface or a keyboard to even utilize file sharing clients.
Without the human hand, there would be no five-finger discount. No one could so precisely grip any desired item to pilfer it from retailers without the human hand.
Without the human hand, no one could grip any kind of harmful weapon with the intention of using it against other people.
Without the human hand, no one could administer harmful narcotics to themselves or use any kind of drug in general.
I believe the first step in combating this issue would be to ban the opposable thumb. Gripping precision would be reduced considerably, thereby making any crime more difficult.
Law enforcement take notice: you can adapt RIAA and MPAA strategies to this process as well! Using basic surveilance methods, find people who use their hands in a way that affects the lives of others, and upon discovery of such activity, slap... Er... Not "slap"... That has to do with hands... Hit! Yes, hit works. Hit them with a lawsuit claiming that they have the potential to do serious harm with their hands, as they have been monitored using them in a way that affects others.
This is a serious threat to civilization! Hands everywhere are capable of commiting any offense, therefore they must be eliminated!
Just because I enjoy content that I can acquire for free does not mean that I would buy it if the exact same content was not available for free.
However, if I am exposed to content that I can acquire for free - which I would not purchase were it not available for free - I may just be more likely to buy the legally distributed media for the same, and for the next from the same artist.
So, yeah, I agree not to be exposed to your content without paying for it. And nobody make any lame comments about radio, because radio sucks.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
Have you ever seen anyone calculate the losses due to copy protection run amuck?
.NET 2005 due to sill copy protection issues, when I have the full, licensed copy.
I had to delay my graduation from UTA with a MS in CSE due to the copy protection in Wolfram Publishing's Mathematica not allowing me to run their software over the weekend, when my thesis was due Sunday at 6pm. I lost tens of thousands of dollars due to this.
I am currently unable to run MS' Visual Studio
I have suffered tremendous economic damage from people (e.g., IBM in 1998) saying that I was a pirate. You see, I was at a job interview, and was asked if I paid for my operating system. I said I did not; I ran Slackware Linux 3.4 I was physically thrown out; my $300 suit was ripped (it cost me $375 to repair) and the civil rights complaint went nowhere, due to a dept. of labor that screamed that I was a pirate and a felon.
I am currently unable to give out free Linux discs to high school students due to the BSA threatening the college that I teach at with lawsuits if I advertise that Linux is a free alternative to Windows on the college's web site. They call that advertisement an ad for pirated software.
I was unable to play "Test Drive 2: The Duel" from the time I purchased it a decade ago due to errant copy protection.
I am still unable to play "World War 2" "The Global Dillema: Guns or Butter" "Hero's Quest I" "Homeworld" and "Civilizations" due to copy protection BS. (These are about the only games I ever enjoyed, and I have lost the ability to play them due to absurd copyright stuff, like needing the original 360k disk in the drive plus the original manual for "Guns or Butter."
In my C#.NET class, I can not find a single student with a legitimate copy of VS.NET who can actually get the software to install.
Andy Out!
I like to consider myself a man of principle, and my heart tells me what they are doing is wrong so I refuse to be a part of it.
At first, it kinda hurt, I hated listening to the radio due to all the commercials, and there were movies that came out that I really wanted to see and did not want to wait to come out on DVD or the movie channels but after a while, you get used to it. Purchasing an XM Radio really helped alot, so now I dont miss the CD's and with a Tivo and a phat home theater setup, I allways have something to watch so I dont mind waiting for the movies to come out on cable.
I know that my silent little protest doesnt do shit to hurt their industry, and I am not niave enough to think that a mass boycott will ever work but screw em, I aint paying those jerks a dime if I can possibly avoid it :)
I wonder if the manufacturers of player piano music claimed that their losses were due to pirates when technology changed and made their buisness model obsolete?
I long for the death of the recording industry.......
It's only paranoia if your wrong...
All it does is loop an advert for them. Skip Intro does a.... loop
qz
Oh noes. I bet Lucas can't even buy that small nation he's had his eye on because of this. I really have to fiegn playing the smallest violin in the world when crap like this gets put out...again. I know people that rent-to-own so to speak via blockbuster or whoever then remaster the DVD and burn it.
The companies still show their rental profits, same as always, who really rents some crap movie twice...within 5 years? For $.50 extra you can own the movie forever.
While this isn't true piracy in it's purest pirate bay torrent cam 0 day chinese subs glory, it really is a happy middle I think. They should gear themselves toward this reality.
Without an independent audit of their claims, is there any reason at all that anybody should be taking these numbers seriously?
Of course not.
They pull these numbers from their a**holes.
So now they hired some bigger a**holes and were able to pull out bigger numbers.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
"Piracy is not an indicator that suddenly 50% of the country is willing to break the law."
If one assumes that the "piracy isn't theft" argument is valid? Then piracy is an ineffective tool for economic adjustment (think about it for a minute).
"It's a very strong indicator that prices are WAY too high."
Well no. Not possessing the merchandice, and letting the company know why is a "strong indicator". Piracy is a very strong indicator that people want content free.
"The ONLY WAY that these idiots can save their money and their shareholders' money is to drastically slash prices to the point where people stop downloading videos through torrents."
And if that point is unsustainable? Are you willing to live with either the lowering of quality, or companies going out of business (like what happen to some game companies)?*
"Remember that even the person doing the downloading has to make an opportunity cost comparison. "is this video worth the Gigabyte of storage it'll take up?""
A lot of downloaders are packrats. Opportunity cost isn't on their radar.
"At some point, when the prices go down, sales will go up, and people will slow down and stop their piracy simply because it isn't convenient."
The question isn't one going up, and the other going down. The question is, will the numbers be that both producer and consumer are satisfied. The present system of willful reciprocal agreement (aka supply/demand) is best for answering this question.
"Any effort to preserve the high prices may result in recovering your losses in out-of-court settlements, if that, but even then, you're losing millions, if not billions, in the long term."
But piracy doesn't hurt anybody. How can it lose billions?
*It's easy to demand the Wal-marting of an entire industry, but that's only because most don't realize the consequences...until it's too late.
What's so complicated about this? Where did those billions go? Into the bank? NOOOOO! Into CDs? NOOOOO!
It moves to other markets, it's a semi-closed system. I just upped my cable modem, got an iBook, and will spend those extra billions on a nice dinner. There is NO way in the world I'm going to spend $12.75 on a movie (NYC Prices). Don't you guys get it? Lower the PRICE, what is SO COMPLICATED to understand?
RIAA: repeat this 3 times, and click your shoes!
Money goes where it's treated the nicest!
Money goes where it's treated the nicest!
Money goes where it's treated the nicest!
Ok, here's how I look at it. The RIAA/MPAA (personally,they are both the same bunch of idiots) calculate that if they released X number of movies/CD's in a year and sold every one of them, they should have made X number of dollars. Now at the end of the year, they only sold Y amount, therefore, they "lost" 6.1 billion. Of course, they don't take in consideration that NO ONE IS BUYING THEIR CRAP because for the last few years, they haven't produced/released anything anyone wants to buy!
The first (at least) Harry Potter movie DVD was released with the Macrovision flag tuned off.
I didn't notice anything about the sales being poor.
(They did save a nickle a disk in Macrovision licensing, though.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The average American spent $2000 more for gasoline this year than last year. I wonder if this might affect luxury items such as DVD purchases and movie tickets?
Here in NYC, a movie ticket is $10.50, a soda is $4.50, as is a bag of popcorn. That's about $20 per person to see a movie. With the price of gas going up, and wages going down, is it any wonder that movie studios aren't seeing the amazing profits they predict they should be getting? And when they aren't getting the money they want, they blame it on piracy.
Hello? The middle class is being killed out here. Make the shit cheaper, and we'll buy it. But right now, I don't see any way to make ends meet over the next few years except to cut out anything that isn't (mostly) free since the cost of living is now so high.
And frankly; it seems that all the MPAA did again was pull a bullshit number out of their ass to use as justification to persecute their own customers because they know that the only way to make money now (in this economy) is to sue people.
TTYL
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Mine's 1.2.3.4.5
Screw the candy bar - I want Spaceballs 2.
U.S. movie studios are losing about $6.1 billion annually in global wholesale revenue to piracy,
Or, put another way, US movie studios saved $2.5B annually in income taxes from the losses claimed due to the global wholesale revenue loss to piracy.
Maybe the best thing to do would be to start agreeing with them, and aggressively promoting their viewpoint... ...to their investors.
"These companies are LOSING money because of massive internet piracy. Look, I can easily download all of their products. Why would you want to invest in these people?"
It's not like they aren't already operating a scorched earth policy towards their customers, so it could hardly make them behave worse. And slashing their investment capital would cripple their lobbying efforts.
Clearly you did not. Why waste time spewing your ignorance? Worse yet, why waste my time by filling this board with it? Next time, please read the article carefully before commenting.
likely to be "bogus". Clearly, the exact methodology was not published, so you have no basis for this comment whatsover. Your bias is showing through.
/. party line, however. Most people clearly did not.
I will give you credit for actually reading the article before spewing the
I would like to "share" some things with you.
Give up on the chilish non-sequiters, please.
here with even a whiff of a credible argument against this report.
It is all "Whaaa, MPAA and RIAA are evil, I want my stuff for free, piracy isn't theft, the data MUST be biased, whaa whaaa whaaa!"
I quadruple-dog dare any slashdotter to give a reasoned argument as to why the 6.1 billion dollar figure is incorrect. Given that few slashdotters are going to be able to hold a candle to an experienced consulting firm with respect to economics and statistics, I am pretty confident my dare will stand.
Little do they know, they are losing $588.34 trillion dollars a day by not selling to the Xiggawathians on planet Rofuble.
I have a little more knowledge about what they might need to tap this huge market on planet Rofuble, but I need to do some further research on the technology. If they could just grant me $2 billion for research, I feel that we would be in a position to approach the King of Rofuble within the next few years. While that figure may startle you, rest assured it's a small price to pay for such a huge market!
Like it's any less realistic than whatever the MPAA's cooked up. At least his is understandable.
Wait, what about the extremely damaging "losses" they "suffer" when I let someone borrow a DVD? Oh my! There's another 2-3 billion that they would have made because OBVIOUSLY if I had not let my brother borrow my copy of one of the stupid, remake, cookie cutter, crappy movies that I made a mistake in buying, he would have bought a copy. Clearly, they have underestimated the losses here. Clearly.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Actually, what you've said and a few others in this thread makes no sense whatsoever. This study was commissioned by the Motion Picture Association of AMERICA, the MPAA for the whos at home. So, what you're saying is the MPAA would refuse to sell movies to the market that they exist in? HUH?!?!?! That makes no sense. Plus, they're not losing $1.3 billion by selling movies here, they're losing $1.3 billion dollars from NOT SELLING movies that have been pirated here. It's lost revenue due to the lack of sale, not losses due to sales.
Er, what exactly do you call an intellectual movie... and then someone here will pick an element of it not known for intellectualism and proceed to rip your selection to shreds on that basis.
A friend of mine ran after a bus. When I asked why, he told me to save money.
He was an idiot. He should have ran after a taxi.
These people do complete stupid calculations. Compare to buying a Rolexx for 3$ instead of a Rolex for 3000$.
If I buy the Rolexx, do you realy think that if that was not available, I would be able or willing to buy the 3000$ one?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
When oh when will the industry wake up and realise the fallacy of reports like these. Equating lost revenue, even on some supposedly research determined ratio, to piracy is simply not a valid metric.
The only valid observation from examining piracy, is that people as a result are watching more films. If people want to watch a film in a cinema, they will. If they want to own the DVD, they will. How is it that they come to the conclusion that 'we aren't doing enough to enforce protection of our material' ?
Surely, after 30 years of sophisticated reproduction technology, it must have occured to them that preventing people making duplicates of media is impossible. can't be done. Any mechanism they can devise, a million people can circumvent. The only rational thing they can do to appease their supposedly ailing wallets is adapt, and provide the consumer with the product they want at a price the consumer is willing to pay. As much as I detest the iTunes music store and the associated DRM technology, I have to agree with Steve Jobs. You wanna make money? Give people what they want.
Every download does not equate to a lost sale. Maybe every twenty.
I think most of you are not looking at the big picture. Without those claims, the content industry would not be able to dictate the specs. of the next standards (read HD-DVD). Now, with this image of loosing tons of money (billions!!!), the US government is pushing the standard bodies (IEEE, ITU, etc..) to include movie studios (the content creator) as active participant in the definition of the next standards. Get yourself a copy of the HD-DVD or BLU-RAY spec, for example... They have some seriously invasive DRM...
For those interested, go to your nearest favorite electronic store and play with a HD-DVD player. You would be surprised at how much of the movies you CAN'T skip over (including the standard FBI warning and the movie studio logo...)
(posted as AC for obvious reasons)...
Every Joe Sixpack in the United States has enough hard drive space and bandwidth to download and keep every major movie release in North America, and is as such causing a $6.1 billion drain. Is that what the MPAA is trying to say?
Hell, every time I open a torrent, it usually gobbles up all my available bandwidth. When I start torrents, my major concerns are the amount of space it will take up, and whether or not it's worth the time investment to actually get the damned thing in the first place (and all I usually download is anime, and not very much of it, either (because despite what everyone says, not every anime is good, regardless as to the fact that we don't get a lot of it here)).
I refuse to believe that everyone can download a gig-large feature-length movie every other week and keep it on their computer for future use. Sure, DVD burners are available, but burnable DVD media can and will eventually suffer from laser rot, in the case of some brands, sooner rather than later. It's a non-permanent solution, and requires a lot more time and effort than driving to the store and buying a real DVD.
Point is, it's not worth the drive to the store or the $30 for the DVD; everything sucks. I have seen maybe two movies in the past year that have caught my interest, one of them being the recent Silent Hill movie.
Hell, myself and three of my friends went to the mall on Valentine's day, said "Hey, let's see a movie" and found that nothing worth seeing was playing or even coming soon. We were perfectly willing to go to the theatres, stuff cash in their pockets, and yet there was nothing worth seeing so it never happened.
So, MPAA, WTF?
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
Your comments are dead on target! What they are trying to quantify is totally unquantifiable and could HARDLY be called "losses" even if it was. If they could estimate movie and music piracy numbers with any kind of accuracy and precision, then they could tell me what companies are going out of business long before they do. We'd all be rich from playing the stock market full of only winners, and we'd know who every criminal was in the world! PUH-LEEZ! It's clearly a case of, "We're not making as much money as we think we should, so we're gonna blame anybody but our own poor business practices and shoddy investments," finger pointing bullshit!
an estimate!
and they need backing for their cause, so the outside world NEEDS to be worse so they get the backing.
Seriously, does anyone not already know these numbers are bogus? I mean, they don't even take into account the number of people who would NOT have bought the software. They always assume a pirated copy is a lost sale, but, from what I've seen, most of us who can afford the software would buy it if it's worth buying. And if it's not or we can't afford it, then pirated or no, it's not a lost sale.
I'm beginning to think that the 6 billion was actually blown on ludicrous studies and surveys in order to prove that piracy is costing the industry... about 6 billion.
Voodoo Girl is the bomb!
The movie/audio cartel has fooled itself to believe that if only they could DRM'd everything,
then they could milk even more money out of the consumer.
But it's not true. Even if you round up the all the pirates that raid software and music cruise ships, and shackle everyone in DRM, profits will not go up.
Profits may actually go down, because the demand may go down, because the copying was providing free advertisement and creating interest in the product.
Just remember evertime you watch a DVD that counts as a $3 loss because they didn't get any PPV revenue from it.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
That band is freaking great. How was the concert?
We're just here for the dirty pictures.
Do you think the same people who decided to remake "The Poseiden Adventure" should dictate what technology the rest of us are allowed to have?
Ding, ding, ding... I'm going to gladly shell out 8 bucks to Richard Linklater's rotoscoped adaptation of Philip K. Dicks "A Scanner Darkly." It however will be the first film I will have been excited enough to pay for in many months.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
Car companies are finally reporting big earnings after years of lulled revenue. Perhaps consumers are simply spending their money elsewhere in an economy that contains more than a movie industry vs piracy dicotomy.
Money is a limited resource.
Industry A reported lost money this year.
Industry B reported far more than expected money this year.
Perhaps Black & Decker, Whirlpool, Ford, Dodge, Cadillac, General Electric, Ebay, etc should take notice of where spending money goes when it's not spent on the bloated RIAA or MPAA monopolies?
You can hate on the concept for being surreal, jumping to conclusions, or being presumptuous, but it's just in step with claims made by the MPAA. The 3 facts stand, and when dealing with a less-than-infinite resource ($), there are less-than-infinite conclusions to be drawn.
As much as I love shouting "ARRRRRRRR!" at my friends, dressing up in full regalia and talking about the FSM, waving a cutlass around, and boarding treasure-laden ships in order to relieve them of their doubloons and swooning womenfolk before scuttling them, when the discussion turns serious it just pisses me off to be called a 'pirate' for the sharing I do using BitTorrent.
The site where I do 95% of my uploading and downloading is dedicated to movies that are old, out-of-print, independent, or rare; movies that have cult appeal; arthouse movies that the average American has never seen or even heard of; subtitled Asian cinema that is only marginally popular with English speakers, and films that are so ridiculously bad they circle around the back of awfulness and become good by virtue of their entertaining badness. My favorite torrent site doesn't even allow big Hollywood blockbusters unless they are old enough to be classics.
The site has to support itself with donations and advertising. Google Adsense and many other ad brokers won't allow their ads to be shown there, because they consider it a 'pirate' site... even though what we do there actually stimulates the sales of DVDs for films that are either too obscure to sell well, or too old to be effectively milked by giant corporations who don't actually give a skinny rat's ass about art.
Secret Cinema has private forums, where a core group discusses films and does most of the uploading for the site. These are people who are much net-savvier than your average p2p user, people who are thoroughly familiar with the torrenting scene in general, and who know where and how to download for free virtually anything they want to watch or listen to... yet a recent poll of this very group revealed that approximately 82% of them still buy authorized versions of DVDs and CDs. Why? Various reasons... some are simply collectors, and like to have the tangibles, with official cover art and DVD extras and so on. Some like to support the studios and directors who in their estimation make good cinema. Virtually ALL of them end up giving money to MPAA/RIAA for movies and music that they would never have bought (and would possibly never have even heard of) if not for online filesharing.
Why does MPAA/RIAA call these people 'pirates'? Why do they make it so difficult for sites like Secret Cinema to make enough money to survive? It's clear that p2p filesharing stimulates legitimate purchases of box office tickets, DVDs, and CDs... yet they want to sue us all, lock us up, shut down our sites, put rootkits on our computers and DRM on the legitimate media we buy.
Compounding this utter stupidity on the part of MPAA/RIAA is the fact that they expect the public to buy goods from them sight unseen. I wouldn't buy a car without taking a look at it (and taking a test drive) first, would you? Why should I buy a DVD or a CD without knowing if I like the movie or music on it? Why should I pony up at the box office or the concert hall without having some kind of familiarity with the product I'm paying for? If it's GOOD and not utter SHITE, I won't mind paying for it even if I've already seen it on my computer monitor... but MPAA/RIAA wants to keep their products under wraps until we pay up, so that they can continue cranking out GARBAGE and selling it to an unsuspecting public! This is probably why Hollywood has degenerated into the massive crapfest that it is today; they know that they can make money from inferior product, as long as the trailer looks good. Screw that, I want to see what I'm buying before I pay for it, and that doesn't make me a criminal.
http://www.secret-cinema.com/
.. that the rest of the American society "earned" $6.1 billion last year
This part of tfa says it all:
"In recent months, the MPAA has been fine-tuning the totals..."
They aren't even TRYING to hide the fact that they are making shit up.
"I forgot my mantra."
because it is then called a free market. When you go to eat out, do you pay before or after the meal. If the meal was terrible, do you pay or comlpain?
How much of this is professionals with big bulk copiers, and how much is home users sharing?
Just think how much more the US politicians and legislature could earn tax free if those losses could be recovered and directed the way that God intended. Those losses amount to thousands of dollars for every politician in the US! And don't forget the losses incurred by the brown paper envelope manufacturers.
Well, I'm not an accountant, and when I lived in America, even when I was pulling 6 figures, my checking account was regularly overdrawn. I prefer the system here in Norway that says "If there's no money in the account, you can't spend it".
So, here's the deal, how does this work. From what I've read, it appears that there is a issue that pirate organizations are successfully selling or distributing the equivilent of $6.1 billion in DVDs to the public which the movie studios themselves can't seem to do.
So based on the statistic the was given in the article, a claim that says for every pirated DVD which is found, there are 7 more that aren't. So, immediately, we understand that at least $763 million in lost DVD sales are made to people that are willing to purchase DVDs, but are more competative prices. Now, since that figure only accounts for 1 out of 8 copies meaning the 1 copy they find, if we were to assume that at least double that are the DVDs which are physically reproduced instead of downloaded, then we've accounted for $1.526 billion in losses.
To define the loss, I'm assuming that the studios are using the retail prices of the DVDs to calculate the actual losses. So, before we go any further with this astronomical figure of $6.1 billion, I would like to point out that the Walmart value is much lower. For example, the list price for the film "Chronicles Of Narnia" is $29.99 and the Walmart price is $19.87 or approximately 34% less. So first let's adjust the $6.1 billion to represent the walmart pricing, therefore we have $4.026 billion or round to $4 billion for nice numbers, $26 million just isn't worth that much in the real world anymore anyway.
So if my figures are even close to correct, then it means that we're already talking about a major imbelishment by the studios.
By the same math, the loss calculation should instead of being $1.526 billion would be $1.007 billion instead, still leaving approximately $3 billion unaccounted for.
If every single person on the planet were to spend $2 on DVDs each year, then the $3 in losses would be accounted for. But if were to say that 10% of the people which is probably getting closer to reality, spent $20 on DVDs each year, then it would also be made up for. Or if we say that 5% of the people on the planet actually buy DVDs, elimitating 3rd world, countries where hollywood doesn't relase translations, countries where local video is prefered, grandparents that don't own DVD players, children that don't buy their own DVDs, etc... we might have a number that is more realistic. Therefore, we're talking about $40 more spending on DVDs per year per consumer.
That's 2 discs more per year per DVD consumer. So Hollywood is saying that they can't seem to find a method to get DVD consumers to buy 2 more discs per year each. But they're also saying that they believe the consumer is in fact either pirating or purchasing pirated copies for 2 more discs per year.
I'm going to take a leap and assume that for the sake of reality, that up to 1/2 of these pirated copies are actually pirated by people that simply can't afford the additional $40 per year on discs. The average minimum wage in America is approximately $5.50 per hour. The American work day is 40 hours in an american working week and 2080 hours (typically rounded to 2000) working hours in a year. Meaning that minimum wage employees make appoximately $11,000 a year. The number of minimum wage employees in the movie purchasing demographic which I regularly see published as ages 18-26 (primarily male) is staggering. With the exception of childrens films which are most commonly purchased by parents for children, much of the DVD purchases made in a year are by 18-26 primarily male.
So this leads us to the next point, in modern times when broadband is becoming more important, even paying bills is online for most people in this demographic, an internet connection, which shockingly enough costs about $29.95 a month or $359.4 a year from Road Runner, a Time Warner company (a
Personally, I have no idea what this number is nor how it is estimated, either in this study or in the "standard" situation. I really don't even have a good guess as to HOW you could estimate it. Also, since we don't have access to the math that the consultants used, it is premature to assume that the $6.1 billion figure is a linear function of this estimate.
These fools have been chasing larger revenues for a long time now. However what are these figures based on.. Estimates or some highly paid audit team that drags figures out of their arses. The truth behind this is that now people have the option to try before they buy they are not purchasing the crap that was forced on them before. After all how many times have you bought an album to find only one track that is of any use, and then stick it in a corner. Instead of all this media hype RIAA and MPAA should get off their self built podiums and listen to the people that buy their crap. Face it these companies, artists, etc etc are losing no more than ever before, after all if yu pirate the media would you have bought it in the first place? I have found I have bought more since I was able to "try before I buy" and cut out the junk. I am sure I am not the only one, and I certainly won't be the last one. Therefore all this media driven hype on this fanciful loss amounts is only driving their so called profits up and justifying some salary raises in the process (and probably some useless gits jobs!!)
That is why it is called "Wall Street Journal", not "Consumer Satisfaction Report" or "Pravda".
The goal of the article is clear, the profiteers of this type of "sociological research" are known.
If the "research" would come up with lesser figures, it would not even be published in WSJ. I do not believe a single pronoun in this article. This is not science. It cannot be.
It is a pity though that we do not have a balanced estimate.
I do believe that the industry losses are substantial because of the technological ease of illegal sharing and number of people that can copy a single leaked copy of the movie. It is logically obvious if you compare to previous technological state of copying copyrighted material. VCR was not the issue at its time, at least in the developed world. At least you have to pay for the tape.
I am not even sure one can do a balanced estimate now. It is basically trying to find out what would happen "if". This can never be scientific according to my book.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Maybe they wouldn't lose so much if they actually made movies worth seeing in theatres and worth buying. Count the number of remake movies this year. It is horendously high. MPAA shouldn't be able to complain if they aren't doing anything to solve this issue besides complaining more, developing less.
Is there *ever* going to be a point when the xxAA reports good news again?
Was there ever? They are an industry association. It's their job to whine, cry, lament and announce the end of the world.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Just imagine how big the losses would be if they made movies that were actually worth watching!
No sig today...
I _am_ relieved.
Learn to separate truth from illusion. Because in this world, it's the hardest thing to do.
2 Trillion US Dollars... [is] in short more important than anything.
Not quite, it's second to someone's phone bill.
Let's say that you MPAA affiliates get $10 for each moviegoer, which is an overly optimistic estimate to begin with. That makes 610 million tickets that were never sold because of piracy. What, that's like one visit per 10 people on this planet. That's completely absurd. Even with full priced DVD's (let's say they get 20 bucks per sold DVD) it's 300 million DVD's left unsold. Again: this is just stupid. I don't get how they can make such stupid arguments with a plain face..
This time, the survey specifically asked consumers how many of their pirated movies they would have purchased in stores or seen in theaters if they didn't have an unauthorized copy, giving studios a different picture of their true losses.
Did they ask consumers how many of their pirated movies they since bought after realising they were better than they had heard they were? Sometimes getting your hands on an illegal copy of a film can lead you to buy a legitimate copy later on.
Pig farmers are lamenting billon dollar losses in pork sales due to the spread of Judaism!
It's total bull, but it's as valid as any claim by the RIAA and MPAA.
Talk about counting the chickens before they hatch!
Shit, i can't be arsed *copying* most of the crap out there, let along watching it or heaven forbid, having to pay for it.
I have no trouble paying for media, however when the average new release is about as enjoyable as prison rape, I doubt their financial problems are soley due to freely available copies...
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Anyone actually RTFA? They are saying that China is #5 in piracy loss, behind SPAIN!! I call BS. I can't walk out in the streets of my city and buy pirated dvd movies. But yet whenever I ask any of my asian friends who have been to china, they are always talking about how they are on every single street corner over there. For 50 cents or whatever.
lost to fighting piracy is more like it.
Suppose each movie is sold for $10 per view, and only 1 out of 100 would pay for that. According to my memory of the economics lesson, if I sold it for $1 per view, there would possibly be 50 out of 100 would pay, depend on the content of the movie.
So can you say, because I sold it for $1 for an illegal copy and 50 bought it, you lost $10*50=$500? Or should it be $10*1=$10? There is a huge difference!
http://www.ieaa.org/~adrian/
Where is this 6.1 billion coming from? "If" I downloaded movies I "would" only use them for myself, maybe burn it for a friend....thats it...and I think thats what mostly happened. I think that number has been inflated to include loss of sales from popcorn and icecream in the cinemas :-)
To each his own.
How about we survey the number of people each week who come out of a cinema feeling totally ripped off because they were led to believe the movie was better than what it actually was? Let's work out what it would cost to refund their cinema-ticket money to them...
How about we calculate the amount of additional profits the film studios & record companies make as a result of the rampant price-fixing of CDs and DVDs across the whole industry?
How about the record companies dropping the prices of music CDs by not spending money on pointless pop videos that are only of interest to a minority of the (MTV generation) music audience?
Like I said, I don't pirate stuff - but when these megacorps like Sony, Paramount, Disney, etc. start giving *me* a good deal, then I'll have some sympathy for them.
Until then, here's a very loud Nelson-like "HA HA".
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Riaa / Mpaa / blaaa blaaa blaaa
Crap out : no one cares - only the stupid buy
Put quality material out and people will buy.
Once upon a time, a soon to be mommy and daddy loved each other very much (the lust was strong as well as the drinks)
Given ever increasing taxation and general cost of living, there's only so much money to go into the 'home entertainment' pot each month.
That pot is shared between DVDs, CDs, games and books.
There's only so much money, so I'll buy the best of each category and leave the 'good, but not great' until it is on sale, or just download it if I have the time to watch it.
So they wouldn't get any extra money in total if I didn't pirate it (how long until they count going around to a friend's house and watching a film with them as piracy?), and any loss isn't at full retail price, but at bargain sale price.
On the other hand I have bought CDs based upon downloading the music and liking the band. That music sale could have been a DVD sale, game sale or wine sale, the total money spent isn't increasing because I don't have that extra money to spend, but at least I could spend it better.
*catches plane to washington dc*
it's loitering time!
"The Boson Strangler" famous murderer of Dr. Higgs. :D
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
Music will survive the digital revolution because people will keep going to concerts. This is because live music is a "play once, listen once" medium. Sure, I'll take a recording (play once, listen many times) home, but I will continue to pay to hear good artists play live.
Movies and Television shows will not survive, because their ONLY output is 'play once, view many times' (POVMT) and is therefore driven to an economically valueless space by the digital age.
Ironically, this means that Theater, long the ignored cousin of the movie industry, might experience a huge surge in growth again (since they are 'perform once, view once') as movies get smaller, more indie, and less 'phenominal.'
In the long run I believe we'll wind up with a tiny movie industry fractured into mainly amatuer efforts, with a handful of distributed films that are generally low budget, creative efforts supported by public funding or paypal donations.
In the 40s and 50s of this decade, we'll look back on the 1900s not as the golden age of movies--but as the only age of movies.
heard it from a former employee that they distinguish themselves from norwiegen porn house of the same name by always enforcing the name be spelt in CAPs with proper punctuation ;)
I wonder when the study about the relationship piracy and sales are actually studied. We know Microsoft allowed rampant piracy for home use for a very long time in the start, same with others like Mac-software and any underdog you can find.
I think it's a very safe assumption that piracy is really free advertisement and a good karma-run (people will eventually realize nothing is totally free - and you can play on their bad conscience - which is why I stopped using unlicensed software).
Now, when they are on top of the world, they start a stranglehold squeeze, and wonder why their customers are fleeing all over the place..
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
"I don't know if I am off by a factor of four or a factor of five, so I will assume my answer is correct instead" is somewhere well beyond stupid. Pick 4.5 and go with it.
/. partisans is nil, so dishonesty was probably not a big problem. Good practices can minimize these effects anyway. Remember, these consultants are professionals who are extremely smart and who have made their careers out of measuring such things. They aren't going to find a lot of novel ideas floating around the slashdot forums.
The odds that the consulting firm interviewed a bunch of whiny
So, according the MPAA's "logic" anything I do that doesn't directly pay them for content is counted as a loss. So does that mean that when I went to see the University of Texas' excellent production of "Twelfth Night" two months ago that they're losing a ticket sale because I didn't see the abysmal ripoff "Who's The Man", which is also based very loosely on the same Shakespearean play?
Are we going to start suing theater companies because they might be saving from people seeing shitty movies
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
And if the music company had a link from the band/album info page to an easy-to-download version, DRM-free, at a reasonable cost?
Chances are the first person would've bought it - P2P networks are a major PITA after all. The music co would get a sale. One more than they'd get otherwise, even if the other 10 people do copy the damn thing.
I suspect they're going to have to scale back their expectations (perhaps they just can't keep on selling CDs for AU$30 like they still try to here) and adapt to changing consumer desires, while trying to preserve the core of their business and find additional revenue sources and business opportunities. Wow, like a real business has to.
It wouldn't really be a very good experiment, because it'd influence its self in a way that would not hold when extrapolated to a larger sample group. "Stop the presses! Movie studio releases big-name film for free download off its website!"
... but I'm not sure the industry as a whole would gain (in financial terms) if they _all_ did it with _all_ films, thus removing the differentiating factor.
Were I a film studio exec, I sure wouldn't release it for free - but I'd almost certainly make it a cheap download, then bask in the glorious publicity and profits. I'd probably keep on doing it too
Personally, I think free-for-download films are nonsense given their present production costs etc. The same is not true for quite a bit (but not all, see production cost) music, where money can be made from ticket sales at concerts, extras, etc etc. I think music co's are insane not to release some inventory for free - like a few tracks (not DRM'd, you want them shared, and full high-quality copies) from each album, then offer the rest available for affordable, convenient download. To a large extent that's a cultural issue in the companies, I suspect, combined with a lot of fear. That model has been working well for quite a lot of folks now, but it's still foreign and scary and different. We'll see what happens as the squeeze grows.
They claim losses based on what someone in Korea or China is doing (as well as the US). But the point is that their losses are when someone pays $1.50 for a DVD in an overseas market. They claim something like a $20 loss on that. As if that market could pay $20 the DVD. They also estimate those sales/losses. No one is reported how many bogus dvd sales they make.
;-)
I think there is a solution to this. If they are concerned about their 'losses', they can put a literal end to those and stop selling DVD's. That way they can just cut their losses and all these people who really would be paying for their films can just go see them in the theater. Sure, some people will make bootlegs...but the number will be much much smaller than 6 billion. And they will just stop "losing" money because anyone who would have copied their movie will just go see it in the theater. I think that solves all of the movie industries problems.
I might go to the movies a little more often if it weren't for all the bitch ass kids. Call me old, but I was taught to stfu at the movies.
Enron accounting was illegal, why not Hollywood?
Steal music, because you can.
Copy someone else's novel and publish as your own. You can get away with it because you are a Hahvahd student.
Join the other 50% you classmates who copy homework assignments and test answers.
Take supplements, steroids, HGH beacuse you'd be too wimpy to be an athlete without them.
But it's definitely one of those jokes that comes off Insightful if you "get it". Has there ever been an impartial, legitimate impact study? For every "lost sales" claim like this there's a "downloaders actually buy *more music" claim and then there's a "no, they buy less, but not much" one...
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
New plan. Just don't watch their movies at all. Then you've got nothing to worry about -- you're not contributing to their loss so you've got nothing to worry about, and you're not paying for these lies to be propogated, so you're morally in the clear.
Sure, you'll have to find another source of entertainment, but the internet is a massive place.
It's been a long time.
...and how much are consumers losing in ticket sales to shitty movies that don't live up to their advertising?
Cancelled cable TV three months ago. Sick of the crap on TV and cancelling of the little I still enjoyed viewing. You know what? Don't miss it at all. If the RIAA and MPAA push hard enough people may simply discover that nobody really needs their products and actually prefer spending time building something, starting a business whatever. You don't need the RIAA MPAA or anything else to make your personal time worthwhile.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
... is that they make the bizzare assumption that, if the item wasn't available for download, all the people downloading would go out & buy it. WTF!? I'd say 75% of people that download movies would rather just wait for it to come on TV. Or maybe I'm just a cheap bastard :p
Never, ever, ever cut a deal based on net profits, because everyone who knows anything is cutting a deal on gross income. This is known as a "back end deal" and is what everyone who knows anything about the Hollywood system gets. Because they all get back end deals, and because these are all expenses that are subtracted from the gross to get the net, and because these deals are percentage based, and because when you add together all the back end deals and other expenses it comes to at least 100%, movies will never make a progit and anyone who cuts a front end deal will get shafted. It's not illegal, just sleazy.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
If I wasn't interested enough by a movie to want to see it in the theater, and I haven't already viewed the movie in some *free* way, then I'm probably not going to shell out my money for it. Period.
Now, on the other hand, if I see a movie in the theater/at a friend's house, and I love it, then I will buy the DVD. Also, if I watch a downloaded copy, and I love it, then also will I buy the DVD. Actually, out of all the DVDs I've bought in the last couple years, most of them were bought only after first seeing a downloaded copy. The others were bought after first watching them either at friend's house or after they aired on TV.
Silent Hill and Underworld: Evolution are the only two that I've seen recently that I didn't think sucked, which pleasantly surprised me.
"about 75% more than previous estimated losses of $3.5 billion in hard goods"
Glad to see that suing everything in sight is working out so well for them.
Back when I was in my first year of university our internet got the crap filtered out of it (port 80 only) because one studio or other made some sweeping threat about suing the university because "someone" was sharing . This sort of annoyed those of us that *weren't* sharing movies and were trying to use the internet for something other than web access (IRC, FTP, etc.) Glad to see that making vague legal threats against people in other countries (I'm in Canada) hasn't paid off for them in the long run.
I hope they'll see it that way too, but I doubt it.
Screw the MPAA and RIAA I hope the loss it all. This is how I see it
The price they charge is worth the risk since the risk is low as well especially with the technology making it harder for them to track people. They need to lower prices to a level in which the risk is not worth it. If for example a cd cost the record industry less then ten cents and the royalities to the artist 10% of the profit in many cases... you could see a cd at 5-6 dollars and still make a very large profit. People are not willing to spend 20+ dollars even 15 for something that is not worth it. So we will keep pirating the material. I purchase my movies now since going to the movie is almost as much as buying a new movie at the store. I have started downloading new movies that are out in the movie theater and purchase the movie later if it is worth it. when it costs almost 20+ for my gf and me to go...
Thats 1.3 million "Evil Dead" Bruce Campbell for President!
Remember that those high, past, profits are what enabled Tom Cruise to become what he is today!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Many people in China and Russia could not afford a legal version of the movie. If there were no piracy there, it wouldn't even be an option for them.
Throw them in with all the "lost sales" of people who would never have paid full price for the movie.
(yeah, $6bn in lawsui... errr... extortion)
I just went to the flea market at the Kentucky Exposition Center in Louisville last weekend, and I witnessed many vendors openly selling pirated movies.
And the MPAA is worried about movie downloads???
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
> Traveling between Europe and America, I was appalled my Mac notebook was only allowed to switch regions 5-6 times before being locked into 1. Whoever thought of the regioning scheme is a class 1 idiot (especially for seperating europe, USA, Japan, etc as if the price difference was major). And the companies that still keep implementing it on their DVDs instead of region 0 are even dumber.
:)
Before I played even one DVD on my drive, I grabbed a firmware update online and removed the region crap from my DVD player. Of course, now I only have 4 manufacturer updates (and 5 user updates), but I don't expect to need any more of those any time soon. If you've only used up the user updates, you may still be able to manage the firmware hacks, though. It could save you a bit of pain
It seems as though the MPAA is basing these number on the falicy that EVERY bootleg DVD represents ONE Retail DVD that would have been sold and thus the loss of income.
One $5.00 Bootleg DVD = Lost Revenue of One $19.99 Retail DVD
The MPAA would be much better of using a method where the lost revenue equals a percentage of the selling price of a bootleg DVD.
One $5.00 Bootleg DVD = Lost Revenue of 10% of Price of Bootleg DVD
The MPAA has zero manufacturing and distribution costs associated with the sale of a bootleg DVD and again only a small fraction of people that purchase a bootleg DVD would have purchased the retail version had the bootleg version not been available.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law - Aleister Crowley