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Canadian Movie Piracy Claims Mostly Fiction?
Justin Primus writes "Michael Geist's weekly column dismantles recent claims that Canada is the world's leading movie piracy haven. The article uses the industry's own data to demonstrate that the assertions about movie bootlegging and its economic impact are greatly exaggerated and that the MPAA's arguments about Canadian copyright law are misleading. I particularly liked how Geist dug up the fact that the MPAA itself says that there have only been 179 movies recorded with a camcorder over the past three years out of the 1,400 that the Hollywood studios released."
Take any statistics an entity comes up with to help itself with a grain of salt, and then ask for the raw data and methods, so that you can reproduce the results. If they can't give you the data for privacy reasons, at least look at the samples and methods.
Basically, don't trust in-house statistics, unless you can reproduce the results yourself.
The government can't save you.
Where does the number 179 come from? Is that the number of arrests made? If so, then that's 179 out of however many million Canadians went to see those 1400 movies. Or maybe that's 179 releases made from camcorders in Canadian theatres, in which case all 179 might have come from one person or a small group of people. Maybe 179 incidents only accounts for ten movies with multiple recording attemps done for those movies.
Rather than speculating, you can just read the cited document(I know wild speculation is more fun):
"MPAA analysis of counterfeit copies of recently released movies on DVD seized throughout the world reveals that more than 90 percent can be sourced back to theatrical camcording. As of August 2006, MPAA had documented 179 member company titles that had been stolen in this manner since 2004, providing the source copies for pirate DVDs discovered in the markets of 46 other countries on every inhabited continent."
The author makes his point perfectly, although the summary does not make it quite clear.
99% of the movies that are released get pirated. Out of all those pirated movies, only 11% are from bad cam recording. The rest are mostly DVD rips a bit later, DVD rips of advance projection or review copies or again for oscar nominations.
The author point is not that few movies are pirated (as stated, most movies are already available in pirated form), but that the camcording in the movie theater is a marginal form (mostly because of the dreadful results it gives). Most pirated movies are internal leaks.
Actually, that would be the Inuit. The Innu nation is in Labrador (where the Inuit live too, but farther north and on the coast).
If books were still popular, I might have mistakenly typed the BPAA (imaginary Book Publishers Association of America).
That would probably be the ABA, the American Booksellers Association. They intimidate even the publishers. (In how many other industries can the retailer get a refund on units ordered just by ripping off the cover (boxtop, whatever) and sending that back?) Not that all publishers are saints (some are, but the bigger houses tend to be like corporations everywhere).
And books are still popular. Readership statistics really haven't changed much in the last hundred or so years. Distribution models -- as with other industries -- are a mess, though.
-- Alastair
To bring it back into focus.
Our country's full name is Canada not the Dominion of Canada. The British North America Act (1867) declares "the Provinces of Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick shall form and be One Dominion under the Name of Canada; and on and after that Day those Three Provinces shall form and be One Dominion under that Name accordingly." (emphasis added)
In this context the word "dominion" means "nation".
The term "Dominion of Canada" was never officially recognized and has not been in regular use in government documents since the 50's or 60's so as not to intimidate our neighbour to the south.
Some of what I say is fact, some is conjecture, the rest I'm just blowing out my ass...you guess.