Timewaster's Guide Archive
Departments => Movies and TV => Topic started by: Fellfrosch on September 21, 2005, 03:55:18 PM
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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!
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Anyone who looks into the issue knows that the RIAA and MPAA's claims can't even be called "exaggeration". "Hyperbole" might not even cut it.
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And they're combating this through research? Haven't they figured out that no matter what anti-piracy encoding they try, someone figures out a hack through or a way around it within a few days?
If they're going to put money somewhere, why don't they use it to find some movie scriptwriters who (with a few exceptions) don't suck so much.
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I love it, they are doing the same thing as the RIAA did. Lets tell the world that we think we are losing money from Movie Piracy, we do not have to prove this just make everyone think that we really are losing money and they will never be the wiser.
How can prove that sales are going or have gone down due to the amount of movie piracy when you can not tell:
1) how many people do it
2) if they still buy the movies
3) how many movies does one person download
4) would the people who downloaded the movie have bought it if they could not have downloaded it
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because it had to be said....
ARRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!
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On this topic:
Hollywood argues - or at least strongly implies - that technology companies could stop copyright infringement if they wanted to, but have chosen not to do so. I have often wondered whether Hollywood really believes this, or whether the claim is just a ploy to gain political advantage.
(excerpted from: http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=898 )
Also read: http://techdirt.com/articles/20050919/0124222_F.shtml