MPAA: the Impact of Megaupload's Shutdown Was 'Massive'

An anonymous reader writes "The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has declared that the Megaupload shutdown earlier this year has been a great success. In a filing to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, the group representing major movie studios says the file hosting and sharing industry has been massively disrupted. Yet the MPAA says there is still work to be done, identifying sites that make available to downloaders 'unauthorized copies of high-quality, recently-released content and in some cases, coordinate the actual upload and download of that content.' Here's the list of sites, including where they are hosted: Extratorrent (Ukraine), IsoHunt (Canada), Kickass Torrents (Canada), Rutracker (Russia), The Pirate Bay (Sweden), Torrentz (Canada), and Kankan (China)."

Comments

Puke

[Swampash]

"The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has declared that the Megaupload shutdown earlier this year has been a great success"

Never mind the fact that the shutdown itself was conducted illegally, and that thousands of legitimate users and businesses were harmed.

Fuck you MPAA. You're the boy with his finger plugging a hole in a dike, and the water's pouring over the top.

Re:Puke

[Anonymous Coward]

Never mind the fact that the shutdown itself was conducted illegally, and that thousands of legitimate users and businesses were harmed.

What are you talking about? It proved that they control the world's law enforcement AND can act with absolute impunity to the Little People(tm)! That's what makes it a complete resounding success to them!

Yes, yes it was.

[TemperedAlchemist]

It was destructive to legitimate file sharing too.

And illegal, very illegal.

What they didn't say

[Hans Adler]

The MPAA's original paper: http://de.scribd.com/doc/115644694/NOT-Motion-Picture-Association-of-America-Final

They brag about how much money they are making and speak in passing about the "massive" impact of closing down Megaupload. The one thing that seems to be conspicuously missing is any estimate of how much more money they made due to the reduction in "piracy".

Re:What they didn't say

[BradleyUffner]

Exactly.

If they are "losing" money due to "piracy" then why does Piracy NEVER show up on the balance books for EACH movie?

I'm actually surprised that it doesn't. It would make the whole "Hollywood Accounting" thing easier to pull off, letting them pay the actors and writers even less because the film made less money.

Not according to the box office results

[Anonymous Coward]

Or this more in depth analysis which concludes:

"We find that the shutdown had a negative, yet insignificant effect on box office revenues.This counterintuitive result may suggest support for the theoretical perspective of (social) network effects where file-sharing acts as a mechanism to spread information about a good from consumers with zero or low willingness to pay to users with high willingness to pay."

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2176246

Re:Yeah right...

[pixelpusher220]

Also in the same way that Return of the Jedi didn't actually make a profit according to the LucasFilms...

Re:Yeah right...

[Dyinobal]

Hollywood accounting would make Al Capone roll in his grave.

Re:Doesn't help

[Tagged_84]

...pirated content, and that does take money away from content creators.

Please provide sources showing loss of revenue from piracy. PS. I'm an actual content creator, indie game developer, so if I was bias...

Re:Doesn't help

[bakes]

You forget that the "MPAA, RIAA, and all those other guys" are NOT the content creators.