This a quote from Jim Emerson's blog (the editor on rogerebert.com), and I found it hilarious:
Yesterday, September 19, was international Talk Like a Pirate Day, and perhaps in honor of the occasion the New York Times reported that the six major Hollywood studios had, at last, banded together to fight the piracy they've been saying for years is about to sink their respective ships. "Hollywood Unites in the Battle to Wipe Out Movie Pirates," the headline swaggered.
Last year, the MPAA estimated that digital piracy (most all of it on the continent and islands of Asia) had cost the entertainment conglomerates about $3 billion in lost DVD revenue. So, how much are the studios willing to spend to fight this red-ink menace?
Let's see, it says here: $30 million for the first two years of a nonprofit consortium (tax deductible?) called Motion Picture Laboratories (or MovieLabs), which will be devoted to speeding "the development of new ways [mostly technological] to foil movie pirates.
OK, so they say they're losing $3 billion a year in lost DVD revenue alone, so they're willing to get together and pony up the production cost of less than one average feature, over two years, split six ways. Wow, they must see piracy as a big threat to their business. Remember, they've been claiming that piracy could put an end to the creation of new entertainment because neither the investors nor the artists would find it profitable anymore.
To guard against that Doomsday Scenario, each studio will put up a whopping $2.5 million next year to fund the MovieLabs project, or a fraction of one percent of what they say they're losing on DVDs annually. Put another way: The studios are so worried about piracy destroying their very livelihood that they are willing to spend one twelfth of what Tom Cruise got to star in "Vanilla Sky." Now, that's a real commitment to the protection of their intellectual property!
