Piracy 'Warnings' Fail To Boost Box Office Revenues, Research Says (torrentfreak.com)

A new academic study shows that graduated response policies against file-sharers fail to boost box office revenues. From a TorrentFreak report: The empirical research, which looked at the effects in various countries including the United States, suggests that these anti-piracy measures are not as effective as the movie studios had hoped. [...] Thus far there has been very little research on the topic but a new study, published by Dr. Jordi McKenzie of Sydney's Macquarie University, suggests that these "strikes" policies don't boost box office revenues. For his paper, published in the most recent issue of the journal 'Information Economics and Policy,' McKenzie looked at opening week and total box office revenues for 6,083 unique films released between 2005 and 2013. Using a variety of statistical analyses, he then measured the impact of the graduated response systems and related policies in six countries. In addition, another ten countries were included as a control measure. The overall conclusion based on thousands of data points is that these anti-piracy policies have no significant impact on box-office income.

Comments

Meanwhile....

[H3lldr0p]

Hollywood is enjoying a streak of box office highs for the past several years.

In short, "piracy" isn't touching their bottom line. If anything, the ability to share these movies and the associated emotions has increased it.

Word of mouth as the best form of advertisement. Who wouldda thunk it?

Re:Meanwhile....

[sheramil]

this. i guess it was all of three days ago, so most people would have forgotten by now: "Despite Piracy Claims, North American Box Office Hits Record $11.4 Billion In 2016" https://entertainment.slashdot...

News Flash

[bfpierce]

Preventing people from getting your movies for free does not in fact make them better able to afford your movies, or make it seem more worth it to those who can.

Re:News Flash

[DickBreath]

Preventing people from getting your movies for free may simply drive them to other forms of entertainment. Like trolling on web sites that were once for nerds.

Re:News Flash

[Anonymous Coward]

This is so massively critical I don't think Sports and Movies people realize it. I think a study showed once that chronic pirates actually spend more at the movies. Why? Because they are addicted to watching movies (now). Kill the addiction by making it too expensive and inconvenient and then that person may turn to video games, TV, other hobbies, internet trolling, music, etc. Why do you think drug dealers, and even many legitimate businesses give away the first few doses? Simple: humans are creatures of habit. We like the known and we like to repeat the known.

I noticed when I dropped cable two things happened:
1) I stopped watching sports as much - I would only watch the "big games" at a bar or friends house
2) Lack of watching sports made me buy fewer tickets to the games

Results:
- #1 & #2 combined over a couple years resulted in me losing interest, skipping even big games and not buying tickets to any games

- Now I haven't spent even $1 on sports in over a year and don't feel any urge to do so (I went from full cable package + season tickets to ZERO)

- This would have been entirely avoided by the sports team if I didn't have to pay so much for cable sports

Makes sense.

[jellomizer]

If you are going to the movies. It is often because.
1. You are excited to see it and really do not want to wait for it.
2. You would want to see it in a large screen, quality speakers, perhaps 3d.
3. You want a reason to leave your home, and perhaps with other people.

If you are excited to see the movie. There isn't any real rush to pirate it. This no rush means it may be available at higher quality vs legit streaming channels, or DVD/Blueray rentals (say from RedBox) for a few bucks.

Re:Makes sense.

[DickBreath]

If you go to the theater to see a movie it is because you REALLY want to see it. So badly that you are willing to endure the movie magic experience of the theater.

Screaming kids, people getting up and squeezing out through the row of seats, and then back again later, and cell phones, and people talking, and telling their life story, along with narrating the film, people kicking the back of your seat, throwing popcorn . . .

It's all part of the movie magic! The theater experience. You wouldn't want to get less than you paid for.

And let's not forget being treated like a criminal before admission into the dignity of the theater experience. And 45 minutes of ads.

Wow shocked

[DarkOx]

The not so subtle suggestion you think a large portion of your patrons are no good criminals or ignorant boobs that need to be lectured at over and over again does not make them want to cooperate or cause them to embrace your way of thinking?

Wow I am totally shocked! Maybe if they were a little less in your face about it, did not threaten you jail they'd get more buy in. That and they need to stop pushing the obviously false equivalence with physical theft. Only the most radical intellectual property proponents consider that remotely equivalent. They'd find a lot more allies among the general public if they stopped clutching the pearls quite so hard. Many people myself included agree we need some copyright and intellectual property protections. Where we don't and won't agree is that it has to be FOREVER or that we need armed FBI shock troops kicking in doors and shooting peoples dogs because they copied a DVD once. Which I realize does not happen in minor cases like that but you'd sure imagine that it does after watching some of those piracy warnings and propaganda shorts they put in front of movies now.

I don't know about others but the response those things engender in me is, "These guys are nasty bullies, I don't like bullies so I don't care what happens to them, best of luck to pirates." Which is a simplistic, non intellectual response that when I sit down and think about the issues careful I realize isn't really right, but they are making an emotional appeal and so they trigger an emotional reaction; just not the one they want.

Mostly not even worth free

[SuperKendall]

The thing about Hollywood movies is, more and more I can't even be bothered to watch most of them when they are free, never mind the trouble of going to the theater or wasting bandwidth downloading them...

The theaters have done what they can with things like having theaters that have assigned seats and comfortable roomy chairs. But it doesn't matter how great the room is, if the movie stinks why would I go?

I don't know what it would take for movie studios to start producing interesting and original work again. Maybe they should ask Netflix how it's done...

Re:What warnings?

[SharpFang]

Specifically, they don't need to wait through that unskippable crap. Only legal customers are actually penalized.

It has some negative impact, at the leasy.

[Thanatiel]

These stupid warnings ended up pissing me off so much I simply stopped buying disks.
For a while I switched to a well know ads-free streaming platform, until they banned VPN.
Since I simply browse the web, read books or play games.

They should not underestimate how much customers despise being interrupted with stupid insulting warnings (or worse : anti-piracy videos)

What genius didn't realise the pirates will not be the ones seeing these annoying messages ?