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Piracy Fails To Prevent Another Box Office Record (torrentfreak.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The movie industry has reported global box office records reached $38.4 billion in 2015, up 5% on 2014's total, according to the MPAA's Theatrical Market Statistics report. The U.S. and Canada turned in $11.1 billion with international box office revenues hitting $27.2 billion. "I'm proud to say that the state of our industry has never been stronger," the former U.S. senator, MPAA chairman and CEO Chris Dodd said. "To paraphrase Mark Twain, the death of the movies has been greatly exaggerated," Dodd said. It begs the question whether or not piracy is truly killing the movie business -- the MPAA insists it is. According to Dodd, the box office would be more healthy to the tune of $1.5 billion if piracy could be brought under control. Some possible theories to achieve such a goal would be based off making content more readily available to the consumer. Napster co-found Sean Parker has a Screening Room project which hopes to bring first-run movies into the home via a set-top box. Though it has a trick up its sleeve: Customers prepared to pay the required $50 to watch at home would get two tickets to watch the movie in the cinema, which could either boost or at least maintain box office attendance. The Art House Convergence (AHC) said it "strongly opposes" the plan, warning it would only fuel torrent sites and piracy. National Assosciation of Theatre Owners chief John Fithian said, "More sophisticated window modeling may be needed for the growing success of a modern movie industry."
Where's the theft? If I steal your car, you no longer have the car. If I copy your album, don't you still have the album? I hate how people paint copyright infringement as theft. I'm not making a moral judgement here, but call an apple an apple.
I can certainly see multi-millionaires paying $50 so they can watch a newly released film in their private 40 seat theater in their beach house in hawaii.
I on the other hand balk at the fact that a 10 year old tv show is still $25/season (for SD).
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Considering Deadpool has alone has made over $750 million dollars globally, on a budget of less than $60 million
Not when you factor "Hollywood accounting" into it. This is an industry that goes to great, creative lengths to screw people out of money they're contractually entitled to, and they want us to feel sorry for them. When the MPAA execs start being honest with the people that actually make the movies that line their pockets, I'll start taking them a little more seriously. Until then, I have the world's smallest violin playing just for them.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Copyright should be a good thing. It's called copy right, as in "the right to make a copy". But in a few decades, Hollywood, the MPPA, the RIAA and Disney butchered copyright laws to a point where the spirit of it isn't even there anymore. They've twisted it into "it's only to protect us, screw everyone else and screw the public domain".
The argument here seems to be that piracy is okay because the movie studios are making plenty of money anyway. It's like saying that if I steal a couple million dollars from a billionaire, they're making plenty of money anyway so it's not really theft. Theft is theft is theft. And it's wrong.
Agreed. Here are the bigger questions involved with the current setup:
1.) Copyright infringement is wrong, and should be punished. However, the present system is such that a conviction of copyright infringement can be a life-ruining event. As TFA shows, the MPAA is not making a compelling case that ruining the life of an infringer is reasonable. If the MPAA wants to make the case that downloading a movie from The Pirate Bay is akin to stealing the Blu-Ray from Best Buy, then make the punishment for downloading the same as stealing the Blu-Ray. Instead, the fines and criminal charges are seen as akin the professional counterfeiting and piracy rings in court.
2.) There has always been the concept of the public domain - where art goes after a certain amount of time, and can be used by anyone. Copyright first started with a reasonable length of time for authors to make money off their work as an incentive to continue creating. However, it's been extended to the point of absurdity - no video game released, or pop song I grew up with, will enter the public domain until my grandchildren are dead. Now, there are different ideas as to how long copyright *should* last (my personal belief is ten years, with the option to renew at the cost of 10% of the owner's gross income annually), but "two lifetimes" is generally agreed upon to be patently unreasonable.
3.) There's very little 'reasonable ground' to be had. Stealing $100 from a billionaire is wrong, but 'finding a $100 bill on the ground that is later determined to have belonged to a billionaire' is a different matter entirely. In the US, making backup copies of one's own DVDs and Blu-Rays for noncommercial use that are never otherwise shared is, legally speaking, subject to the same penalties as operating a for-profit piracy ring. The whole "digital copy" situation with movies is such that whether the digital copy applies to the customer or not is dependent upon which services are being used. It's impossible to legally view a movie on an Android device if it comes in a DVD/Blu-Ray/iTunes combo pack, and nobody wants to standardize.
The MPAA's issue here is how royally fixed the game is in their favor, and a seeming unwillingness to come up with reasonable terms for things.
Your arguments are complete BS. The film industry has always had films that lose money; long before the age of piracy. This is nothing new. What is new is that they can no longer produce a bad film and make their money back before the public gets wise to the fact that it is a bad film (the Ewe Boll business model). If your film is garbage, you're going to lose money on it, period. And your DVD argument is complete apples and oranges. Your example is theft, removing property from someone's possession without compensation. Copyright infringement is not theft by any legal system in the world because the original is still in the original owner's possession, no matter what the media industry tries to tell us. Even with that in mind, your DVD argument is still bogus because that is what every retailer who sells DVDs does. As long as they make money overall, they continue to sell DVDs and call it a success. Do they try to minimize the theft? Sure. But, they don't say DVDs sales are a bust because they had a small percentage of their copies stolen.
What the media industry is doing is looking at all the piracy numbers and saying to themselves "if we can turn all these numbers into sales, look at all the money we can make!" This is complete fallacy and their own internal studies have proved it. The most prolific pirates are also their highest-paying customers. What does this mean? That means they purchase a legitimate copy as well and they use piracy either as previews or for convenience. What they industry wants is for everyone to purchase multiple copies of the same content. No one in the world is going to go for this, regardless of what laws or actions taken by the industry or the governments that support them. Do all pirates own legitimate copies as well? No. But, the ones that don't are almost impossible to turn into legitimate sales, again, according to the industry's own studies. They either don't have the money or have some ideological issue with paying (even if it's selfish miserliness).
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
Theft is illegal. Theft is usually wrong. But not always.
Stealing weapons from an enemy base is theft, but it isn't wrong. If you are putting your life at risk to save lives by stealing weapons from the enemy, that is morally lofty.
Also, theft is not copyright infringement. And copyright infringement is illegal, but has much moral ambiguity around it (some claim that the imposition of artificial scarcity is morally wrong, which would morally justify copyright infringement).
So, in sum:
1) Theft =/= copyright infringement
2) illegal =/= morally wrong
3) real life is complicated.
And householders would be 1.5bn better off if they didn't have to fit locks, and alarms, and other security.
And airports would be 1.5bn better off if there wasn't terrorism.
And countries would be BILLIONS better off if people just got off their arses and got a job, and paid taxes honestly.
But none of that is going to happen. You have legislation in place to combat all those. For copyright, It's already disproportionally harsh, and enforced where necessary (i.e. mass duplicators, and those people who are brought to court reasonably for deliberately downloading movies they haven't paid for).
Stop whining, get off your arses and focus on making movies.
Hint: Not been to a cinema in years. Don't buy DVD's any more, unless it's second-hand and thereby not profitable for you at all. Will pay a reasonable price for legal download rights for stuff I consider worthwhile in a half-playable format.
The reason you're not making all that you could? That shit you put into the cinema and flood everything else out with. That crap you enforce on your media and streams. The bollocks that you make me sit through on legally owned media.
I do not pirate. I pay for things. I paid for my shareware in the 90's (yes, I own mIRC, WinZIP, Doom and lots of other things that nobody ever paid for). I paid for proper licensing for commercial software of those things I used "for personal use" that were more than worth the money (VMWare was worth its hefty price and that's the MOST I've ever paid for software). I donate to software projects that I have no need to. I buy copies of good games for friends and give them out at Christmas, birthdays, special occasions and even run competitions on my game servers that I run FOR FREE for various communities. I have no qualms about handing over money for the legal right to play content that I *could* acquire elsewhere and supporting things I enjoyed myself.
But all that shit you do? It makes me choose between supporting that side of the shit, or pirating, if I want to watch it. So I choose not to watch it instead.
Honestly, best thing of buying a handful of movies with "free" credit from Amazon / Google Play? No unskippable trailers. Play from a multitude of devices, when I want, where I want, how I want. I don't even care that the downloads are DRM'd, to be honest, I have 1000 Steam games and that doesn't bother me either.
But it's the shit that GETS IN THE WAY that really bugs me. Software updates to BluRay players in order to watch a movie? Fuck that. I press play, I want to watch it. Wait MONTHS for a movie I do want to see to come out somewhere other than the cinema? I'd rather just forget about it and pick it up when it comes out as a "freebie" movie on some download service if you're going to deliberately stymie my initial enthusiasm for it. DVD's that don't play in laptops? Fuck off. And TEN MINUTES of fucking trailers that I can't skip when I just want to put on a Disney movie to occupy a child? That's just fucking evil. So I stopped buying them.
Stop whining about how unfair the world is, because copyright infringement is part-and-parcel of your industry the same way that "No the parcel never arrived" is part-and-parcel of running a mail order business. Sometimes it could be honest, sometimes it could be fraudulent. But you can't piss away your profits chasing it except in obvious - or large - cases and most people just can't be bothered to go to the effort of pirating things anyway. That's why Netflix et al are so popular. And why iTunes makes a killing even though ANY song you want is available on the first page of Google if you put in "mp3" into it. But navigating the mire of illegal downloads is beyond most people. They'd rather just have one place to go, pay, and download their content in a format they'd like.
iTunes lost the MP3 battle. How long until you lose the "H264" battle where you just end up providing DRM-free copies of anything people have bought a license to?
Honestly,
if one believes that copyright is a good thing at all, then one has a ethical obligation to respect it, even if they do not agree with the means by which it is being implemented
Absolutely not.
Nobody has an ethical obligation to support every aspect of a law just because they support one part of it. The fact that the constitution included a process for adding amendments should make it clear that unquestioning obedience to the law was never the intent of our legal system.
We're quite capable of acknowledging that copyright has benefited society while still recognizing that parts of copyright law have been expanded far beyond the original intent in ways that now cause harm.
*this*
The MPAA are business idiots.
If the MPAA ran a supermarket, they would say :
Hey, 2% of stuff is STOLEN.... let's put everything in locked glass shelves, then suddenly find out that the 50% reduction in sales (because it is now too inconvenient) dwarfs the now 1% that is being stolen.
Most people don't want to steal, but they do want convenience and a reasonable price.
46137
Oh please. False Dichotomy much?
. /Oblg. DVD vs Piracy
People pirate for a variety of reasons. Such as:
1. One can't legally buy a copy. Piracy is the *only* option to watch it. /sarcasm Those pesky Mathematicians! They are the cause of the downfall of society!
2. Artificial Scarcity. If a DVD/BluRay is not available in my region, piracy is simply more convenient
3. They can't afford it.
4. If a borrow a movie from a library, watch it, and then return it this has the exact same effect as if I had borrowed a movie from the library, made a copy, returned the original, and watch my copy later, except the former is legal, yet the latter is "magically" illegal
5. Piracy is the delusion that "copying numbers is illegal". How stupid is Civilization when it has declared Illegal Numbers !?!?
To everyone who plays the bullshit piracy-is-illegal card here are some questions for you:
Q. If your friend buys a DVD and loans it to you, is it piracy if you watch it? You never paid for the content.
Q. How many friends can I loan my DVD / BluRay to before it becomes piracy?
Q. Why is it OK if I personally loan it to friends, but I can't share my copy with strangers?
Q. How "long" do I have to know a person before I can legally share my copy?
Q. Are libraries engaging in piracy?
Do I personally pirate? No, as I like having my own personal library so I don't mind buying BluRays / DVDs. If I can't buy it, I'll just wait until it is available. But my reasons for why I _don't_ pirate may not work for someone who _does_.
> copyright is a good thing at all, then one has a ethical obligation to respect it,
1. When Copyright was only ~20 years, sure, I have no problem following that but when the law has become corrupt that something that _would_ become "public domain" will NEVER reach that status, then there is higher obligation:
Civil Disobedience is the only way to change to corrupt laws.
2. Rosa Parks would like to have some of what you are smoking. Laws are NOT absolutes. That is why they _change over time_.
Personally, abolish copyright, because it is no longer server its original purpose:
So no, we're not ethically bound to follow bullshit artificial laws.
The law said slavery was right and good. The law said that women being forbidden to vote was right and good. The law said that dark skinned people were to ride on the back of the bus, and use separate bathrooms, and drink from separate fountains. The law says that "interstate commerce" means "intrastate commerce." The law was, and remains, completely clear on these and similarly wrongheaded matters. And in so doing, it is completely, utterly, wrong. As is precisely the case here.
The law is the world's least worthy foundation to base an argument upon as it is commonly formulated by incompetents, sycophants, and the morally and ethically bereft, not in any particular order and in various combinations. So based, unsurprisingly, your argument fails utterly. My position is based upon facts and reason and recognition of the worth of production. Unless you strive for the same, your arguments will remain at the playground level. Selfish, baseless, failures.
Damning logic and semantics, as you say, puts you in precisely the same place as the people who made those laws. Clear, yes; clearly wrong. Wielding a power you have no ethical foundation for, while intentionally blinding yourself to obvious human truths, in most unworthy self-service.
NOW the discussion is over. Cheers. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Except for the bit where the people who pirate are mostly movie lovers and very often go to see it in the cinema as well, hell sometimes before pirating. Watch it on the big screen once with friends/a date - and download a copy to rewatch multiple times.
That is something they never factor in - the reality is that piracy has, if anything, most likely INCREASED movie profits.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *