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."

Comments

eh?

[TinBromide]

So the piracy claims about canada are mostly fiction, how is this different than the opinion* most piracy claims made in north america?

*I say opinion because there are no facts about piracy beyond the fact that it does happen, and it may or may not be good for the industry depending on who you ask.

"Stealing"

[Mariner28]

I have a hard time with the MPAA's and the RIAA's use of the term stealing. If I steal something from you, I deprive you of its use. When someone "pirates" something of yours, they deprive you of some potential revenue - quite a different scenario than "stealing".

And when someone tries to equate 11% of 1400 theater releases being filmed by camcorder-wielding pirates to an 11% shrink rate, well that's called FUD . Now, if the box-office receipts of 179 theaters were stolen by thieves - that I'd call an 11% shrink rate!!!

Real Piracy

[HeyBob!]

I got this from a friend in the biz:
Location: somewhere in the former Eastern Bloc (I can't remember the actual city)
Film lands at airport and is sent out to a series of theaters via courier. Except that the courier van is actual a portable dubbing studio on wheels (worth 100's of k's). The pirates took a couple of hours to do all the deliveries and by that time had a pristine digital copy of the movie.

The way they were caught was the studio inserted unique frames in to every copy of the print made (1000's of prints around the world). They were able to nail it down to an area and then sent investigators to watch for the projectionist to make the copies. When that panned out, they finally figured out that it was being done by the courier company.

Re:proof!

[davecb]

When camcorders first came out, a school friend's father set up a tripod in the projection room and taped a lovely copy of a then-popular movie. You could barely hear a low whir in the background from the projector...

Can't get more "inside" than that.

--dave

the notion of a nation

[Howserx]

The notion of a nation motion is not to make a nation legislation, and while emotions about the motion are running high what people need to know is according to all the promotion, the motion states that all these nations can only be nations within a united nation... of Canada http://www.cbc.ca/22minutes/video.html December 5th: Nation Explaination