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Warner Brothers Pulls Canadian Previews
A number of readers let us know that Reuters and others are reporting that Warner Brothers is canceling movie previews in Canadian theaters, starting with Oceans Thirteen. A Warner VP said, "Within the first week of a film's release, you can almost be certain that somewhere out there a Canadian copy will show up." Recently, the International Intellectual Property Association placed Canada on its Priority Watch List, along with the likes of Argentina, China, Russia, Turkey, and Venezuela. This community knows, thanks to Michael Geist, that the claim is mostly ficiton.
Too bad they don't do that here, too, so I wouldn't have to sit through so many previews just to see the movie I paid to see.
Slow Down, Cowboy! It's been 60 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment.
...it seems like everything's gone wrong since Canada came along!
... but where the hell is the correlation between a preview and a pirated full copy of a movie?
We figured out a long time ago that it's easier to elect seven judges than to elect 132 legislators.
Promotional Previews are specifically released in order to help promote the film through positive word of mouth and newspaper reviews..
Do they really think this is somehow going to help them make more revenue if there's no buzz on the street, amongst friends and no reviews in papers?
Talk about stupid. The movie industry seems as stupid as the RIAA labels..
MABASPLOOM!
Prediction: by August, there'll be a press release noting that revenues for Ocean's Thirteen and Harry Potter were low, and that it'sss all the faults of those tricksy pirateses stealing their preciousss, and that (surprise, surprise), the only solution is that the Canadian government "harmonize" its rules with the US by passing something equivalent to (or worse than) the DMCA.
Now what can we do as a nation to get them to pull their crappy movies from our theaters?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I think a preview is the movie, released a bit early.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Well.... If they're interested in preventing pre-release copies being available, I guess it kind-of makes sense. Don't show movies in theaters that aren't enforcing camcorder bans, etc. If they're trying to prevent piracy in general, it's not going to help much.
... On theglobeandmail.com below:
M .20070508.WBmingram20070508112009/WBStory/WBmingra m
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGA
The Globe And Mail is one of Canada's largest daily newspapers and has some amount of influence. Also, Mathew Ingram is somewhat influential in the "blogisphere" up north. I think he's hit the nail on the head. Too bad the studios won't be paying attention.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Within the first week of a film's release, you can almost be certain that somewhere out there a Canadian copy will show up.
Come, my fellow Americans, we can do this! We have a week to get our copy of Oceans Thirteen up! FTW!!
All those thieving consumers out there need to be punished. I can only hope that the MPAA members carry forward with step #2 on their route to newfound profits: Stop releasing films, period. That will show those thieving consumers.
........ /sarcasm
Stop 1 - Make movies
Stop 2 - Don't release them to the public
Stop 3
Stop 4 profit!
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Come on, we all know that despite a similar or larger number of firearms per person in Canada that violent crime and gun crime in particular is much lower there. It is obvious that having the opportunity to get cheap pirate movies keeps Canadians from killing each other. As such, I call on the US government to decriminalise piracy. Won't someone please think of the children!
So in an effort to curb CAMCORDER pirated videos, they are getting rid of previews which will generate word of mouth, reviews, and more sales?!? It's not like we're talking about copied DVDs, or direct rips with full Dolby 7.1 surround sound, we're talking about PoC hand held camera recordings with a single audio channel, wiggling around through out the movie, with people blocking a chunk of the screen and audience noise over the movie...
I hate to break it to them, but anyone who is watching a copy of a movie from that medium was not in a position to actually buy a ticket or DVD.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
That's all there is to this...the only people who will be hit by this are the movie critics, and the MPAA is hoping they will raise a fuss about this...I *hope* the critics have a clue about this, and don't take the bait....
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
Actually, China wouldn't care at all. The fact is, the United States is incapable of matching China's production costs, so it would be completely impossible for us to flood their market with cheap counterfeit goods (which are the only kind of counterfeit good that sells unless for some reason it's a limited supply item). As such, we could counterfeit Chinese goods coming into our country, but the chinese ones would probably be cheaper unless the Chinese government put large export tariffs on them, or we could try and ship counterfeit goods to China, but once again our goods would end up costing more than the origionals. The only reason that the US cares at all about IP is that it's our current major export, and as such we would really rather prefer if everyone payed us for it.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
to Harpo to "harmonize" Canadian copyright laws with the U.S. This is part of his "deep integration" hidden agenda he's going to implement the second he gets a majority government. You know, all of those "extra" laws Canada has on the books that "hinder" trade? He's already sold the tar sands to the oil barons lock, stock and barrel.
Don't forget, the "piracy" claims come from an industry whose reputation for "creative accounting" is cited as examples of such in accounting textbooks!
So if we start pirating commercials before movies they will stop showing them also?? That is absolutely fantastic news!
Can't say I was really looking forward to seeing Oceans Thirteen. Twelve just struck me as party amongst the upper echelons of Really Really Really Good Looking® society flouncing around in their "aren't we simply FABULOUS darling?" way while deigning to let us watch. One also gets tired of Mr. Clooney being the Sexiest Man In The History of This Planet or Any Other Since His Personal Image Consultant Taught Him to Stop Wiggling His Head Like That.
More to the point, if Warner thinks they can push Canada around with their fabricated numbers they are in for a surprise. The US isn't necessarily every Canadian's favourite country right now and bully tactics are likely to backfire. Plus, if Harper caves he will be judged as an American tody-boy and his Conservatives will find themselves back in the political outhouse for another 15 years, the same way they were after Mulroney sang Danny Boy to Regan like some desperately sycophantic wiener. Harper knows that so he won't be able to make our laws Just Like America, much as he'd love to.
You have to realize that Canada gave away a lot to get the softwood lumber deal, just to see American industry continue to sue us us, obstruct business, and pay off the government to ignore it's own obligations under NAFTA. Canadians are cheesed about this, among other things, so the idea of a puffed up American lawyer dictating how we should run our country is...unwelcome.
So to my American friends, don't worry, we'll take care of business on our end. It would really help, though, if you could slap these Napoleonic dweebs down a bit yourselves.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
The flaw in that logic is assuming all movies are equal in terms of revenue.
Hundreds of movies will see limited theatrical screenings and certainly never make it to pirate DVD because they're worthless to the pirates. Whilst a movie like The Station Agent is an undeniably great movie, short of winning awards, a movie about an anti social dwarf trainspotter isn't going to get the interest of many people buying pirate DVDs.
60 movies a year still equates out to the most popular new release every single week plus the secondary releases on more popular weeks.
Pulling numbers out of the usual spot: Assuming a curve that averages out to 10 movies that make $100m at the box office, 20 that make $50m, 30 that may $30m, 100 that make $10m and the remaining 1200 that make $2m in limited indie showings, you have a total box office revenue of $5.3b of that, the 60 highest earners make 2.9b. Thus under 5% of all movies account for almost 55% of all revenue.
So, Geist makes it seem as though piracy only affects 5% of the industry and thus claims of being affected by it are laughable. What he conveniently misses is that it affects the highest budget 5% that likely accounts for a huge percentage of actual revenue.
It's about on a par with Microsoft saying they're not monopolistic because they only provide one of the hundreds of OS variants out there. Technically it's true but very conveniently ignores the actual proportion of the market their one OS occupies.
This community knows, thanks to Michael Geist, that the claim is mostly ficiton
ficiton (noun): an imaginary particle, spontaneously generated by media company executives (morons), to rationalize irrational behavior. The process of emitting and absorbing ficitons is termed con-fusion
.Soylent Green is peoplicious!
First, it amazes me that someone could continue to give credence to the movie industry's, when provided with a clear and concise debunking of those arguments such as Michael Geist's. Second, you're completely wrong. The movie studios tried to do marking of the type that you describe. In order to do it in a way that would allow it to work even after the movie had been camcorded and compressed, it was a pattern of big colored blobs visible to moviegoers. It failed, completely and utterly. If the studios put the identifying marks in unimportant scenese, the pirates cut it out of the video they released. If they put it in important scenes, fans complained. As far as I'm aware, those colored blobs aren't used anymore, for those two reasons. A video watermark that survives camcording and compression, such as what you describe, is as fictional as the the rest of the industry's arguments.
I am in Canada, I saw an early promo screening of "Serenity" and the paranoia was laughable, they were confiscating anything electronic that might have a camera (cellphones etc..) and they came in several times to scan the audience. It was plain silly, I felt like I was in a police state.
I think they should actually follow through with the previous threat and delay all movies in Canada by two weeks, that will be long enough for everyone to get the real buzz on the movie and should result in substantially less people being suckered by hype. Then they can find someone else to blame.
But let's face it, this is not really about Canadians camcordering movies. This is all about greasing public opinion for an attempt to intro more draconian copyright laws in Canada so we can enjoy the benefits of industry lawyers threatening our 12 year old kids and grannies with lawsuits about something they might have infringed and then forking over the money because they are too scared to fight.
My hope is that our current minority government situation will make such draconian changes much more difficult to pass.
That might be a bit difficult to make happen. Most of the production of US goods takes place in places like
That's because the US depend on all of the developing nations to do their fabrication for them with cheap foreign labour. The only way the US can make that economically viable is to ensure that everyone else is looking out for their interests
This is why when countries like Thailand who are battling huge AIDS epidemics say the hell with it and mandate the production of cheap generic drugs, the US firms go ape -- they can't afford to actually heal people unless they're making truckloads of profit. The developing nations can't hope to spend $10K/month/year/whatever per person. Bottom line, it isn't cost effective to save the lives of poor people. Shitty, huh?
It's because everyone else is too poor. People in developing nations can't actually pay for the goods at the prices the US companies would like to charge. So they resort to wide scale piracy, knock offs, and what have you.
They're not out to get you because your rich, they just don't see why they should do without or pay ridiculous fees to US companies.
We in the West like the idea of globalization as long as it gets us cheap products and preserves our jobs. But, in the long run, you can't actually have both. Basically, it's what happens when decades of old-school colonial/imperialism mentality meets modern economic realities.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.