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Researchers Find Megaupload Shutdown Hurt Box Office Revenues
An anonymous reader writes "We've heard this one before, over and over again: pirates are the biggest spenders. It therefore shouldn't surprise too many people to learn that shutting down Megaupload earlier this year had a negative effect on box office revenues. The latest finding comes from a paper titled: 'Piracy and Movie Revenues: Evidence from Megaupload.'"
What movies did they use in their control group? I'm sorry but a 3 page paper with little details on the research is not enough to convince me that they can
make any kind of valid conclusion.
The actual conclusion of the researchers was:
We find that the shutdown had a negative, yet insignificant effect on box office revenues.
(emphasis mine)
So basically there was basically no effect either way on overall box office revenues. Blockbusters gained from the shutdown of megaupload (probably due to more people forced to go see it in the theatres as they couldn't download it any more), many smaller and less well known movies lost (probably due to less people being able to preview the movie, resulting in less word-of-mouth promotion of a movie).
Interesting results anyway.
Apparently the smaller films were negatively affected by the shutdown of the site (made less money). The larger films (500 or more screens) were positively affected by the shut down (made more money).
Box office revenues of movies shown on the average number of screens and below were affected negatively, but the total effect is not statistically significant. For blockbusters (shown on more than 500 screens) the sign is positive (and significant, depending on the specification).
[John]
Shit better not happen!
Just because there is alleged correlation between the two events doesn't mean the lower box office revenues were caused by the shutdown. Perhaps it is due to lackluster movies this year, perhaps it was due to the ever dwindling economy so those who would have normally gone to a movie couldn't justify spending an ever increasing amount on tickets (and concessions if the choose to get those), or perhaps it was just more people going to see "matinee" showings which are often a lot less expensive which drives down revenues but perhaps increases ticket sales. Heck one local theater to me has matinee showings that are $3 and most other showings are less than $5 before 6PM.
Perhaps instead of counting revenues they should count actual ticket sales. Like when they say a movie has broken a box office revenue record, is it because more people are actually seeing the movie or is it because ticket prices are at record highs?
So did they host mainly pirated movies etc or did it not?
Who cares? The only thing that matters is how to protect the internet from those who interfere. It far to easy to knock people offline, and that's what needs to be stopped.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
There's only a small, finite number of movies in theaters at any one time - the article mentioned 1344. If each one were hosted once, that'd be 1344 files. Meanwhile, MegaUpload was hosting files numbering many orders of magnitude beyond that. Therefore, it's possible that both are correct - most files were not piracy related, but there were some that did, and they may have had an effect on the market.
If Megaupload did hurt box office sales, then they obviously hosted lots of pirated material. This is against how the pirates are saying that Megaupload was mostly used for non-piracy related files. So did they host mainly pirated movies etc or did it not?
I've never used megaupload and I don't know how much of what it hosted (my impression is that most users wouldn't know what other users were using it for but maybe I'm wrong there) buy clearly it is perfectly possible both for it to be mostly used for non-piracy related files and for it to host lots of posted material. There is no contradiction between the two.
I suspect that the internet as a whole is mostly used for non-piracy purposes but clearly shutting it down would reduce piracy significantly...
NO ONE is denying that OP content lives on these and other servers. NO ONE.
Claims asserted include that Megaupload is used for MORE than just that and that innocent users and businesses were harmed by the overzealous acts of the US government... not just overzealous, but illegal acts.
By the reasoning you are implying, public parks should all be shut down because drug deals are known to occur in them.
Now for a psycho-medical opinion of you: You suffer from omission and denial of the obvious along with selective evidence and conclusions based on belief. The result of this is your apparent manufacture of statements made by this imaginary "singular entity" that are 'pirates' which are not even pirates by correct definitions.
If anyone thinks a bad camcorder copy of a screener will keep someone from going to see a film, then they are a complete and total idiot. 90% of the "pirated" movies on the internet are really low quality screeners or early edits that have crap audio and video quality. And these same videos are the ones the MPAA are claiming HURT their income. Where in fact it helps their income. When you are looking at dropping $40-$80 to go see a movie in the theater, Yes $40 is a realistic number, I recently paid that to take my wife to see SkyFall, you will have people that will not see a film unless they are sure it is not crap.
But the executives out there are so under educated they cant see marketing that is working for them. Now we have metrics that show that "pirated" films do in fact increase sales....
After my experience of taking my wife to a movie opening, I'm not going back again. The movie was OK, but smelling the disgusting feet of a unbathed idiot in the row behind, me or the rude idiots that must text on their phones through the movie as well as the sticky seating and floor means I'll watch them at home when they ome out on BluRay. My theater at home has better sound anyways....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
So no real effect either way then. Then why was it shut down again? Because people who are cheap (or have no money) will not go see it anyway? Yet they could affect others slightly?
Eventually digital music will cut its own throat. Once you get a 'good enough portable copy'. There is 0 reason to buy it again, ever. Unless someone can convince you that their digital copy is better. Also the 'album' format is basically dead. Instead of 10 songs you may or may not want, people just buy the 1 or 2 songs they want from it. So instead of basically 15 dollars margin per album they are getting 1-2 bucks. Digital single sales are imploding the market. Even without piracy margin is less than 10% of what it was. They have been lucky in that year over year total number of sales are up (hitting more people who would not bother to buy music at all at 15 bucks a copy).
Also a lot of that 70% could also be that the market has basically tanked. So discretionary spending is *way* down across the board on everything. Music/Movies is not somehow immune to this.
Keep your eye on 'subscription' services. That is where all the big studios will move to. You will hear things like "access 15 million songs for a low per month cost of 10 bucks". They need to figure out ways to resell you the same album you have bought 3 times already...
US law clearly states that they are not responsible for their customers actions any more than slashdot is responsible for the content of your posts here.
If the DOJ ever did take this illegal seizure to a trial they would lose badly not only on that fact but also on the many procedural errors that were made.
If Megaupload did hurt box office sales, then they obviously hosted lots of pirated material.
You get an F in Logic 101 today. It is quite possible for a site to host no pirated content and yet hurt box office sales. For example, movie critic web sites could give low ratings. A site could have only trailers (presumably that would be legal), which could backfire, convincing people to skip the movie. Perhaps the most damaging blow is an entertainment related discussion site ignoring the existence of a particular movie.
You demand a yes or no answer to an unfair question we all know can already be answered with a yes. This is the springboard to an obvious and contrived implication, which is "Megaupload broke the law/is evil".
Have you ever told a lie? Ever? If you've told just one lie in your entire life, then you are a liar! The number of adults who aren't liars under that standard might well be zero. The world is a sink of depravity.
And your black and white view is, as others said, beside the point. The real enabler is technology in the form of the Internet and extremely capacious and fast storage media. Bashing Megaupload is just shooting the messenger.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
In Las Vegas, Circle Park was shut down because some people were feeding the homeless.
(The park had become a place for homeless people to congregate, and there were other problems caused by some of the homeless in the neighborhoods surrounding the park.)
The courts said it was illegal to prevent feeding the homeless so they shut the park down completely.
When you are dancing with wolves, never limp
The proof is far more solid than any proofs given of the damage caused by piracy.
Yet you've never once whined about that, have you.
Shoddy research is shoddy research. No matter if you agree with the premise or not.
Alternative explanations:
It could be that new music is mostly crap - I rarely buy new releases, but I have a relatively big collection of older records and I still buy "new to me" records. I also do not buy "remastered" versions with the dynamic range squashed to almost zero.
It could also be that people are only buying one copy of a song, instead of buying the CD/record for their home and a cassette for their walkman/car they now buy the file and play it everywhere. Also, files can be backed up easier than records or tapes, so the need to buy them again in case of damage is reduced.
There is also the fact that iTunes and similar services sell single songs, not albums, which means that I can buy only the good songs for ~$1/each instead of buying the album (with one good and 10 mediocre songs) for $11 (to keep the song price the same) or more. Even a CD "single" usually contains remixes of the original song which I pay for when I buy that CD, but now I can just buy the original song.
There's also Youtube. With their content filters I would expect that if the video has survived for a year and got a low of view that the copyright owner approved of it (since otherwise it would be taken down). Yet, I can find a lot of music there for free.
The actual conclusion of the researchers was:
We find that the shutdown had a negative, yet insignificant effect on box office revenues.
You have misquoted the article, leaving out an important qualifier. The true quote actually reads:
"we find that the shutdown had a negative, yet in some cases insignificant effect on box office revenues.”
I need hardly add that this is not a trivial distinction. Assuming you used copy and paste for the quote, you must have then deliberately removed the text reading "in some cases" before you posted. Why exactly would anyone do this, except to change the meaning of the quote, however slightly?
I think the content industries have a perfect streak going: they always oppose technologies that turn out to be, not only not harmful, but actively good for their bottom line.
Radio was going to ruin record sales. A few decades after they lost that one, they were shelling out payola to get on the air.
The cassette tape recorder was going to destroy records. After losing that one, they made a mint selling everybody the same record twice, the new version being portable.
VCRs were going to be to the movie industry what the Boston Strangler was to women; after the Betamax decision, they made money selling cassettes.
The lesson is, that when content industries oppose a new technology, they have to be beaten ... for their OWN good....
There's only a small, finite number of movies in theaters at any one time - the article mentioned 1344. If each one were hosted once, that'd be 1344 files.
You're close. To those not aware movies and other large files frequently encountered from the scene are stored in archives (usually archives within archives) which range in size from 2,5,10,25,50,75,100+ megs for parity and convenience. If you'd like some sources for this peruse a tracker website sometime, do so with adblock at the very least. That being said, a single movie may have anywhere from 7 for the CDR sized DIVX encodes to close to 100 pieces for the 1080p variety, with the larger pieced out files typically encountered on the Megauploads of the world. On top of that there are different release groups, let's estimate that at about 5 for commonly accessible popular releases. There are many more than that especially if you include one off releases by non affiliated individuals like "MrMovieMagic Brave 720p", and then multiple releases of the same movie for different regions (English, Deutsch, Finnish, Russian, Spanish) etc. Remember this is loosely about 'cred'. Shifting the focus from encoded movies to DVD ISOs, music, software (think multigigabyte Autodesk or Adobe products, games etc.), ebooks, and you can imagine there is a lot of duplication involved. I'm not sure if you've done any work with version control, but I imagine the duplication of content on Megaupload in essence to be very similar to that of revision iterations. Oh look, another release due to encoding errors, random mislabeled files (you think that's %Language% you're getting, muhahaha), password protected junk (visit my site yo!), and down the rabbit hole it goes.
Therefore, it's possible that both are correct - most files were not piracy related, but there were some that did, and they may have had an effect on the market.
Or the crazy idea that free advertising works. Not that I think that is exactly what this is (many of these people have no intention of buying, ever.)
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
Movies still in the theater aren't sold for a long time. Logically, if someone DLs a movie and likes it enought to see it in the theater, he's going to buy it when it comes out on blu-ray.
The "article" was an abstract from the study, I saw no flaws. "We find that the shutdown had a negative, yet insignificant effect on box office revenues." What was flawed?
Free Martian Whores!
Where to begin, even.
First, who are "the pirates"?
Second, where are they, as a class, saying that Megaupload was mostly used for non-piracy related files?
Third and most importantly, you're spouting nonsense from a logical perspective. YouTube hosts LOTS of cat videos, maybe enough even to influence the number of cat purchases by animal lovers. That doesn't mean that YouTube mainly hosts cat videos. Who knows? Maybe it's 75% meow-infested, or maybe cat videos are less than 1% what's being hosted. THERE'S NO WAY TO TELL, just going on the fact (for argument's sake) that the number of YouTube hosted cat videos is enough to influence the pet industry. Similarly, there's no way to tell, just based upon Megaupload's influence on the box office, if movies were a major component of Megaupload's offerings.
Fourth, hosted and downloaded are two different things. It's entirely possible that by number of files hosted, pirated music and movies are a small component, but going by the number of downloads, they are the lion's share. After all, you might only need to share a particular powerpoint presentation a few times, but a bootleg media file could get downloaded tens of thousands of times. Or it could be that most uploads are not unauthorized, most downloads are not unauthorized, but the ones that are make up the vast majority of Megaupload's bandwidth. So, in that case, is Megaupload mostly used for piracy or not? Depends on your point of view.
Bottom line, the assertions you are claiming are contradictory really aren't.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
If Megaupload did hurt box office sales, then they obviously hosted lots of pirated material.
You seem to have trouble with reading comprehension, as do the moderators (your sock puppets? I can't believe you're not -1 overrated since you obviously don't read well).
The study said exactly the OPPOSITE. Megaupload didn't hurt box office receipts, it helped them. Shutting the site down hurt receipts.
Maybe you and the mods need a remedial reading class? Well, maybe the mods thought your lack of reading comprehension was interesting... but you have no excuse.
Free Martian Whores!
It's not shooting the messenger, it's stealing his bicycle and shoes and cutting off his legs with a spoon, then standing back and laughing as he bleeds out.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
So did they host mainly pirated movies etc or did it not?
Who cares? The only thing that matters is how to protect the internet from those who interfere. It far to easy to knock people offline, and that's what needs to be stopped.
I agree. Spammers and bot-herders should be free to host their command-and-control centers without the inconvenience of setting up redundant infrastructure.
Battlemaster--Game with friends in medival realms
Box office != to Movies sold.
I assume you're referring to DVD/BluRay sales. It's worth noting that the industry also claimed, at one point, that VCRs should be illegal because they enabled piracy. A couple of years down the line, legitimate VHS sales were a major part of their revenue.
It's ad hominem, I know, but the industry doesn't have a great track record of accurately forecasting the effects of new technology on their business. They follow the same MO each time...try to block all progress to maintain the status quo and then, once there's no other option, adapt. Studies like this are needed to help bring that adaptation sooner rather than later.
I'm curious if the city-wide crime statistics dropped when the park was closed. If so, I'm happy that the nanny state stepped in and protected citizens who would not protect themselves. If not, then the city deprived people of their park so that criminals would have to walk three blocks to commit their crimes.
No operating system can be secure enough to stop a person from installing something. That's how it spreads.
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