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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."
The true part: "There is a nation, it is called Canada."
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Why does anyone believe these unaccountable, selfserving "stats" released by the notoriously lying, litigious, abusive RIAA? We don't make gas mileage requirements taking oil companies' reports as gospel, except when "we" are really screwing "ourselves".
--
make install -not war
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.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
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
..confirming that less than 13% of their crap is worth watching.
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.
Look, I disagree with the RIAA as much as the next
Sony ha
The MPAA knows the claim is bogus... like the RIAA lobbying to try to alter Canada's copyright provisions to suit them, this is just trying to sow seeds to try to get the copyright laws changed to suit the MPAA. Seriously, anyone who does download movies knows the camcorder rips are the worst of the lot... it's the studio prints that are desireable... and where do those come from?... It's all just PR (or propaganda if you will) designed to try to further their aims... and to borrow a line from another topic... this ploy is not intelligently designed...
You want to know why ticket sales are down... Ask yourself this...What is the last movies that you just had to see?
They asserted 50% movie piracy by camcorders in Canada.
The total FOR THE WORLD piracy rate is 11% OF THEATRICAL RELEASES according to the MPAAs own numbers.
Also just because 11% of the worldwide movies are camcordered doesn't mean they lost 11% of their movie revenues. So it's not even wastage. How did Star War do? It was heavily camcordered in the 1980's.
Make movies so horrible no one would bother recording it.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That technique is just one of the methods and is arguably the worst way to pirate. A lot of films get bootlegged during post production and often show up before the film is released in theaters. Waterworld showed up in Russia as this chaotic mix of dailies and some cut scenes, not that the final release was much better. The most popular way to pirate has to be ripped DVDs. My friends in distribution call them $20 masters. You buy one copy and use it as a master recording. I shot a couple of low budget films and my distributor told me he saw bootlegs selling for a $1 in Malaysia right next to 100 mill Hollywood films also selling for $1. There is no market in South East Asia for domestic films, they're all pirated and sold openly. I think you'll find there are pirates of every film made. Pirating is largely free and if they are reselling the pirates DVDs are cheap to burn.
There are lies, damn lies, and MP/RIAA statistics.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
The movie industry made a big deal out of this simply to get some good headlines. Geist's expected hatchet job on its "facts" are beside the point. Virtually no one will hear it: only those already tuned in to the lies are reading Geist's columns.
The purpose of the hype was to provide "justification" for Bev Oda to push for the reforms that she and the content industry have been working on. If this goes as I expect, watch for some more sabre-rattling headlines to come, followed quickly by a copyright reform bill that will address the content industry's wish list.
As much as I don't want another election, I hope the Conservatives' upcoming budget is defeated, so that any of Oda's bills will die on the table when the government falls.
Look at the tomato! Isn't it sad? He can't dance! Poor tomato!
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!!!
"A little misunderstanding? Galileo and the Pope had a little misunderstanding."
Their lost revenue isnt some cheap cammed version of a movie here...it's because more people than ever before have big screen televions at home. DVD is also to blame...the quality is just better than ever before at home and people have more reason to either rent or buy a movie. The novelty of watching it on a big screen has worn off to some point. What they need to do is give people more incentive to go see it while it is still at the movie theatre. Perhaps a voucher where you get a discount if you buy the movie on DVD later...or perhaps try and make more movies people want to watch. There is a reason why there is a lot more direct to DVD movies than ever before. Movie theatres are going to become a novelty someday and will simply complement simultaneous release on DVD of movies. It's up to the industry to wake up and learn this sooner rather than later. Look at the music industry...they lost more revenues than they could have by trying to fight digital music downloads rather than embrace it. It is nice to see that the video game industry seems to have learned from all of this by letting people download video games on their consoles and letting amateur gave developer in on the revenue pie (360, PS3, and wii all allow you to download games). One thing's for sure though let's hope they never go entirely digital...it is nice to own a movie you can see on your shelf...the same applies to video games
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.
The movie industry, like the music industry, releases a large number of movies, but makes most of the money from a small number of hits. Since pirates will tend to target the most popular films, that 13% of films probably represents the majority of revenues and profits.
Of course, it's very difficult to determine just how much loss the existence of pirate versions of those films represents to the industry. It might be significant; it might be quite small. The MPAA hardly has a record of being honest in its assessments. How many in-theater pirated DVDs of Hollywood films do Slashdotters have? Are you folks aware of many other people with pirated DVDs? I bet it's not many, though I also suspect Slashdot's (often young, male, with disposable income, tech and pop culture savy) population is a prime target for both Hollywood and pirates. How many Thais (say) would have bought the $20 DVD if there were no pirated version? I bet that's not so many either.
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
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