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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."
Without an independent audit of their claims, is there any reason at all that anybody should be taking these numbers seriously?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
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.
To expand on this, a famous example of this is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forrest_gump/
They promised the writer, Winston Groom, a percentage of the profits, but a little cooking of the books and the top grossing film of that year becomes a commerical failure a la hollywood accounting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
Another example is eddie murphy's 'coming to america'. It grossed 350 mil worldwide but yet failed to produce a profit.
Art Buchwald received a settlement after his lawsuit Buchwald v. Paramount over Paramount's use of Hollywood accounting. The court found Paramount's actions "unconscionable," noting that it was impossible to believe that a movie (1988's Eddie Murphy comedy Coming to America) which grossed US$350 million failed to make a profit, especially since the actual production costs were less than a tenth of that. Paramount settled for an undisclosed sum, rather than have its accounting methods closely scrutinized.
Even Stan Lee had to sue marvel over spiderman profits.
What I'm curious about is if Art Buchwald didn't settle with Paramount, and these practices were exposed in court, would the studio not be guilty of tax evasion if the movie made way more than reported?