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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."
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.
That's logical, right?
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.
...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!
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 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.
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.
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 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/
That reminds me of when I had a meeting with Santa Claus and his head elf. He full blank told me that you are full of shit. However, I wasn't really shocked by that statement. He said that you will be getting coal next year.
is there any reason at all that anybody should be taking these numbers seriously?
If they come stapled to a $6.1 billion check made out to cash and slipped under the back door of the Captiol Building?
KFG
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.
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/
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?
short answer: no
long answer: nope
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?
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.
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
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!
Remember the old Scrooge McDuck comic books, where the Beagle Boys would dig a hole to his safe, and then slowly steal all his gold coins, until he noticed and sent Huey, Dewey and Louie to kick their asses?
This is like that, but with less ducks.
Not buying a corporation's product is the same as stealing. If they're spending money to make it, you should be spending money to consume it. That's just common sense.
More importantly, if somebody wasn't going to buy the item anyway and they download it, can that be counted as theft or a lost sale? The MPAA still has exactly as much money and stock as before and they have a means of getting a sale they wouldn't otherwise receive (for the numerous persons who buy things that they download and like).
So, please, do tell me in what way downloading is automatically equal to theft.
Remember, open source is free as in speech, not free as in bear.