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Record Box Office Indicates MPAA 'Piracy Problem' Hot Air
Kinescope writes "The motion picture industry has said that its profits are at risk due to piracy, but a record-setting 2007 box office has some wondering if the industry is crying 'wolf.' Last year, the US box office totaled $9.63 billion, a 5.4% increase over 2006. 'Piracy is so bad, according to the MPAA, that we need special legislation to target the dastardly college pirates who are destroying the business. It's so bad that Weekly Reader subscribers will learn about the $7 billion a year "lost" to Internet piracy. It's so bad that the MPAA wants ISPs to ignore years of common carrier law and the promises of "safe harbor" and start filtering their traffic, looking for copyright violations. The real world isn't quite this simple, of course. It turns out that the MPAA's college numbers were off by a factor of three, a revelation that came after years of hiding the study's methodology but continuing to lobby Congress with its numbers.'"
When the governator (Arnold!) made a visit to canada to discuss this 'problem', there was new legislation that was made law within two months. That shows you the power of the governator (or perhaps, the power of american influence). The problem was that 'Canada was responsible for over half the pirated movies in north america'. The legislation enacted was almost EXACTLY what was requested by Gov. Schwarzenegger... and STILL they cry 'Blame Canada!'
... is that it ISN'T actually a problem!
The only problem with it all
Just a nitpick, but the summary says $9.63 million, when it is in fact billion
Also, the box office figures don't correlate directly to lost profits, because the DVD industry is so big now, and I think that's where they're losing most of their money. Getting a copy that was taken by a video camera sucks compared to a movie; however, once a DVD comes out, you can download the same quality for free.
$9.63 million, a 5.4% increase over 2006
How about "billion" instead? (It'll probably get corrected.)
Well, either that, or piracy has indeed PWNED the movie industry. Bad. Hah.
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What alternatives do we have?
Our body of law gives rights to the creators and their protected ability of being the one to approve copies. Regardless of whether we agree or now with this, that is our situation.
Now, we take this to the "digital domain". Those older creators want, no.. need these protections as they see in the non-internet world. The only real way to "guarantee" this is by digital restrictions. The best way I think of this is that of a akin to a capability system and the copyright maintainer has an account on your machine.
However, our machines are ours. The geeks amongst us demand that we are able to control our software and hardware. What was unable to do in WinXP, Vista seems to offer the beginning of that capability system with the media companies at the kill switch. And to top it off, Vista has remotely disabling drivers for "holes" that might appear. For those that own a machine, this OS laughs in their face, as if saying "Bring It On!"
And there are many casualties. Those casualties are the Joe and Jane Publics that don't understand this issue close enough, or think that all needs to be done is burn to DVD... just like the iPod to music. When they find out that they are locked with binary garbage that cannot be used for any fair use purpose (backing up owned DVDs is fair usage).
And where are we now? When the users know they are eventually shafted, those that have the know-how will show others where to download the movies and the music they legitimately bought. Once they know they were taken advantage of, any feeling of "theft" (or whatever you call it) will be gone. The media companies had their chance to do their dealings with the public honestly, but have failed.
Just like língchí.. Death by a thousand cuts.
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Seriously.. record box office receipts with movies as bad as they are? What the fuck is the MPAA complaining about?
They make utter shit.. and people flock to pay for it! I can think of maybe one decent movie in the past few years.. Blood Diamond.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
I was under the impression that movies haven't made a profit since shortly before the introduction of talkies. How can the movie industry "lose" that which their accountants deny existed in the first place?
What do you expect from an industry that produces products that gross many times more than they cost to make, but still supposedly fail to turn a profit? "The Lord of the Rings" movies apparently grossed ~$6 billion, but didn't make a profit, all thanks to Hollywood accounting. Why should it be different for their other numbers, whether their "lost profits", stats on movie piracy, or any other number they decide to make up for the need at hand?
All the data in the article is proving is that a fairly consistent number of people enjoy going out to the movies. It doesn't have anything to do with piracy.
I live by the studios and work in the industry. Plenty of them drive giant gas-guzzlers like Hummers.
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Am I the only one who feels like the industry position is akin to a restaurant owner trying to figure out a way to charge some customers for using excess salt, and for grabbing two mints rather than just one?
Why doesn't the quality of their product get factored in as well?
I think, because they don't know how to make good products any longer. More correctly, I suppose, the people in charge have become so risk-averse that they don't dare take a chance on something that isn't sufficiently "mainstream". At least the junk they regularly churn out does, on average, turn a profit. Not as much as they would like, of course, and they want to eliminate copyright infringement to improve the bottom line without having to take chances on releasing anything better. Kind of like Microsoft and Product Activation/WGA: squeeze a few extra bucks out of those people that will pay if they have to, and don't have the technical skill to bypass your protection system.
Even if they achieve the Holy Grail of perfectly controlled content distribution (an unattainable goal in any event) I don't think it will have as much effect as they seem to think it will.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I think arguments of how much money is made a honeypot for the MPAA/RIAA to suck us into an argument on their terms. The MPAA/RIAA are going to win if you make it about money for some very good reasons:
1) It's not about how much money you made, but how much more money you could have made. Great I made $2000 last year on my stocks, but damn those pirates I could have made $3000!
2) Companies are all about shareholder equity. The more money you make, the more you increase your stock price and the more dividends you can pay out.
3) The average politician is sympathetic to this, both in terms of legally allowing business to flourish, and corruptly accepting money from donors involved with the MPAA/RIAA.
4) not enough average people make a stink about losing their rights thanks to copy protection, so politicians don't listen.
And #4 is what we need to continue to pound on and educate the masses over. Large companies want to slowly take away, nibble by nibble, your rights to copy things that you should be able to copy. You make the message simple enough, pound on it, and don't let up, and eventually rights will trump money. Consumers as a group are the most powerful group in the US, we are just completely disorganized and disinterested. Unless we get organized, the well organized MAFIAA will continue to dominate this discussion in the places where it counts.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
A 5% increase (when inflation is 3+%) isn't much to write home about. Up front let me say I only go to at most 1 or 2 movies a year since, well, most of them suck and then there is netflix. That said, it would be a lot more helpful to have not only same screen data (ie, same store sales) but also to adjust it for inflation. That is the only way to have even a remote idea of where things stand. Significantly harder to quantify is the changing nature of what people do in their free time. Growing up in the late 70s/early 80s there wasn't much to do besides a) get drunk b) get high c) to to a movie.
... make it a business to create fiction?
How many "good" movies see a big theatrical box office?
No Country For Old Men grossed $64 million in the U.S., Ratatouille $206 million.
Both are fine films, but play to a very different audience.
when the dollar is falling almost daily. Wheat growers are having record profits, too (despite the famine). That's because the dollar has lost about 15% of its value in the past year. And now comes the torrent of accusations of conspiracy theories because I think the fed inflation figure is laughable. Not that I am saying that the right to charge for a freely(as in beer)-reproducible commodity should be equated with the right to sell a piece of property that can only be sold once without having to create it again (as in bread). Copyrights that last over 10 years is what causes piracy -- not consumers that want to treat movies the way they treat books. But the dollar buys much fewer things that anyone wants to have nowadays, so there are all the dollars people "earn" or have accumulated (when spend at the same rate) must be buying fewer things... but at higher prices.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Movie tickets have actually kept pace with inflation pretty well. Compared to what I paid in 1990, movie tickets are only about a dollar overpriced now. Cinema equipment is also much better and facilities nicer (albeit sometimes sticky), so I'm okay with that. The ticket price has doubled from $6 to $12 here. The student discount didn't even exist back then, or it was promotional. Students went to the matinees if they wanted to save a buck.
What has gone down, however, is the relative price of a video rental. They used to be the same price as a movie ticket, and they've fallen quite a bit as ticket prices have increased. As it stands, a 5% increase in revenue without adjusting for inflation is lackluster at best and possibly right at par.
It hasn't been my experience that theaters raise prices all that often, at least around here. They tend to move in $0.50 or $1 every year or two, which isn't really all that unfair. But now that DVD rentals are here (and BD, if you've got the player) and the age of home theaters has arrived, the increase in quality and decrease in price has made it pretty compelling. Staying in and doing "movie night" can be a good experience these days. 20 years ago, not so much.
I still personally feel like being at home doesn't compare, even though I have an extremely nice (read: jealousy-inducing) setup. It's about the experience, not only of the film, but socially. It's a different kind of night with friends than having them over, which is a different kind of fun. Different strokes, though, of course.
What if it's too crappy for me to pay for, but good enough to keep in the background while having dinner or something?
The studios don't owe you their crappy contentThat's no problem, they don't have to pay a cent when I download their movies using bittorrent.
c++;
Good lord! Were there such things in 2007?
I am struggling to think of when I actually went to a cinema and saw a film and if so, what it was. I really cannot remember if I spent an inordinate amount of money getting in, then spent a small fortune getting a drink or sweets. Nope, still drawing a blank...
DVDs however are another matter. Barely a week went by without some sort of hiring going on. It's far more comfortable and relaxing to curl up on the sofa with fiancee and a beer and relax.
One point I will say is that during the Great Depression, movie audiences were also at a very large high. It was felt that the general population needed to escape from the reality of their lives for a short period of time and that movies provided that relief. With the way that the world is heading (rising oil prices etc), what is to say that people will also choose to spend a few hours a week safe in the womb of feel-good movies.
Maybe Disney will see a new market here and make films with even more schmaltzy endings...
Teamwork is essential. It gives the enemy someone else to shoot at
Here is how the MPAA / RIAA / ISP logic works:
Year-End Loss: Piracy is to blame. It's not our fault.
Year-End Profit: We had great artists/writers/engineers that made some great products.
Not Enough Bandwidth: Piracy is taking up all the bandwidth. It's not our fault.
Excess Bandwidth: We have a better system than the 'other'guys. We're better ISP.
Low Box Office Turnout: People are pirating movies instead of going to the theater. It's not our fault.
High Box Office Turnout: We made really great movies.
Low Record Sales: People are pirating all their music instead of buying it. It's not our fault.
High Record Sales: We have great artists who produced great songs.
Anybody see a pattern here? Whenever the MPAA/RIAA or ISP's have problems, they blame pirates for "taking away" sales and clogging networks. The MPAA and RIAA don't realize that if they continue to pump out crappy content (films/music), then people are going to want to make sure thay what they are going to spend $25 on is worth it (would you buy a song or movie without listening or viewing it first? A 30 second preview isn't enough.). The MPAA/RIAA doesn't understand that people are pirating because the industries are prducing horrible music albums and over-hyped movies that nobody feels is worth their hard-earned money. Every film t hat comes out of Hollywood is over-hyped and inflated, so there is no way to tell a great film from a bad one. Record labels use the trick of putting 2 or 3 good songs out of 10-12 tracks on an album, and then charging $25 for the whole thing. If you produce crappy content, people are going to do what they can to make it better, or at least save themselves from being duped by record labels and film studios. ISP's have a similar reaction: Comcast blames p2p file sharing ("pirating" in Comcast's eyes) as the reason that it's service is horrible, rather than acknowledge that it spends way to much on advertising for customers that it already doen't have the bandwidth or infrastructure to support.
Whenever these guys have problems, they shift blame to other people, namely, "pirates". BUT, when they have a windfall, they are pretty damn quick to shift the attention towards themselves.
Basically:
Successes: We're just simply a company of experts who know what we're doing!
Problems: It's your fault, not ours.
The problem isn't only limited to these groups, but can be seen in other companies that don't understand how to run a business:
MAINTAIN your infrastructure. If you lose it, you have nothing.
INFRASTRUCTURE is everything. If it suffers, your customers suffer, and ultimately, you will suffer the most. (Just look at AOL.....)
DO remember that your customers chose you. You didn't choose them.
DO keep your customers happy.
DO provide good service.
DO give the customer what they want. If you do, they will give you money in return.
DO remember people want a product, not more advertisements. (AOL again.....)
DON'T spend more than you make.
DON'T advertise things you can't deliver.
DON'T try to pull a fast one by your customers. You will always lose.
DON'T overvalue your product. (AOL again.....)
DON'T treat the customer like an ATM. It pisses them off.
Word-Of-Mouth is the best and most effective way to get a new customer.
A happy customer is far more likely to convince a friend to buy from you than your commercial is.
Money from a customer is good, but get greedy and it will disappear.
And lastly:
DO remember that your competitors would be more than happy to buy your company from your creditors if you ever went belly-up.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
d. Making someone pretty, 1 million
e. Fixing someone who got hit with a stick, 20k/yr
f. 3 year treatment for burnout, 120k/yr
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
Cinema is a social event...not surprising it doesn't suffer from piracy.
When you're watching DVDs at home it makes no difference if they're pirated or not, so piracy wins.
No sig today...
The problem is that the content products like movies, music even books try to pretend they are normal products until it comes time to actually discuss profit margins and production costs.
You would say that if a movie cost X to produce then if it made a box office result of X+Y that Y would be profit? It don't work like that, extremely successfull movies that break box-office records can nonetheless show a LOSS. Hollywood style accounting would get you arrested in any other field, but somehow we tolerate it because... well you got to wonder why it is tolerated.
It seems rather convenient that the movie industry is allowed to just inflate its costs on all of its products until they rather handily do not show a profit. Say I create an item, a painting, I put itup for auction, then as the price goes higher and higher I keep increasing the costs of the paint I used so that even if my simple pencil drawing started out with a cost of a penny, if it sells for a million, it cost me a million and a penny to produce.
Idiotic? Well it happens all the time in movies, just look at the Spiderman movies and Lord of the Rings trilogy. Products that OBVIOUSLY had more revenue then cost but that is NOT what the final account says.
I know this will shock americans, but it is high time the state steps in and regulates the content industry. Offcourse that won't happen, any politician who dares regulate hollywood will be torn to shreds by the media.
And we swallow it, what is the favorite show of Slashdot? Futurama? How many eps show rampant anti-piracy propoganda? A show were turning humans into a softdrink is perfectly fine, but copyright infringement is an evil that deserves an entire episode.
We are controlled by the media, as long as the media can set public opinion they can abuse this by making sure politicians who do what they want them to do get noticed, and the ones who go against get buried.
Oh and don't think for a second that the content industry cares one shit about censorship. Ratings, a fine for a nipple? All part of charade. In exchange for allowing Hollywood to make its own economic rules, the politicians are allowed to introduce simplistic and ineffective self regulation.
And no, this is NOT a conspiracy theorie, there are no shadowy meetings in which this is arranged, it is just how things work. Conspiracy theorists are dreamers, idealists who hope that there is a clear enemy who no matter how powerfull can ultimately be overcome one day.
Real life don't work that way, there is just an understanding. Politicians leave the content producers alone, and the content producers won't tear them a new hole in the public eye.
Ever wonder why we think Kerry was a stiff, Al Gore to intellectual? Who do you think put that image in our minds? Watch the media very carefully and see how every person who is the smallest threath to the way things are done is assasinated.
Just imagine how you would react to a Jay Leno monologue about a senator who wishes to put the IRS in charge of examing hollywoods finanicials. How many seconds do you think he would need to tear this guy down and the audience swallowing it hook line and sinker?
The politicians KNOW this, the media controls the public so they can never control them.
Some people believe a free press is needed to keep goverment in check, but who keeps the media in check? Examine the politics in England and how newspaper support for one party or the other can swing the election. The media is the watchdog, but who watches the watcher? The public? Yeah right, they only know what the media tells them.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I think applying a quote from Dr. King to this situation is a stretch of epic proportions in the scope of the injustice.
Perhaps the true injustice is that companies with access to billions of dollars have tailored our laws to suit their own interests. These laws run counter to the original concepts of copyright that were developed outside of corporate interference.
The original purpose behind copyright was to allow these creations to fall into the public domain while providing incentives to the creator, not be used as some black-currency for corporations.
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If they actually lost money when I downloaded a movie, I can honestly say that I would keep azureus going all day, every day, downloading every movie I could get my hands on. Twice. I hate those money grubbing, lying, cheating scumbags so much.
Don't hold back, tell us how you really feel.
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