- Related Stories
-
Leaked e-mails reveal MediaDefender's antipiracy woes
September 20, 2007 -
Hollywood's copyright enforcer
August 27, 2007 -
Hey Eminem, blame the system, not Apple
August 17, 2007 -
Pro-piracy politician proffers his worldview
August 13, 2007 -
Ad-supported SpiralFrog finally launches music site
August 7, 2007 -
It's about piracy, not privacy
July 24, 2007 - Related Blogs
-
IsoHunt shuts down trackers to U.S. users
September 26, 2007 -
MediaDefender is wake-up call for entertainment sector
September 20, 2007
Motion Picture Association of America claims sites feature links to hundreds of films, including some still showing in theaters.
The story "Hollywood studios go after two piracy sites" published September 28, 2007 at 4:51 AM is no longer available on CNET News.
Content from Reuters expires after 30 days.
Anything else is just "unlicensed access".
Why isn't the RICO act being used against the RIAA and the MPAA? Both are organizations that use extortion to extract money from their victims.
They should be over in Asia shutting down the factories that print copies and sell them instead of wasting their effort on the online p2p hydra. The only thing that will do is make fairly ignored examples of people and yet destroy lives with little to no impact on the actual copying quantities.
The studios are already making money hand over fist on DVD's and HD discs... this is about profit maximization, not keeping the wolf from the door, which makes it even less acceptable to do drive-by-lawsuits and use the justice system to crush private individuals under the RIAA/MPAA money sacks.
You dressed up in your best clothing. You showed respect for
your fellow moviegoers. If you brought your kids (something
that usually didn't happen), they were as quiet as a church
congregation during a funeral.
The theater was usually impeccably clean. The whole main room
was decorated, and not a dark black box that you simply sat in.
There was at most one preview of a coming attraction. Then you
got the news reels and the cartoons - these were just to allow
the projector guy to load the main event's first reels and cue
them.
Most movies back then had intermissions, to allow folks to go
out and have a smoke, to chat with friends, and to stretch your
legs (it also allowed the second set of film reels to get loaded
up).
A theater's employees fell all over themselves to be courteous
and kind, as did the owner.
--
Today, what do you have? Ten-twenty minutes of
advertisements (not to mention "placement ads" throughout the
flick). Noisy kids. Sticky floors. Sound rigging that's jacked up
way too damned high and obviously done by a tone-deaf
amateur. Insanely high concession prices. A Cattle-Car mentality
in both seating and in customer service.
...and I haven't even touched on the movies themselves. It's rare
to find a film that requires intelligence to get the jist of
anymore, y'know?
/P
It's cheaper to wait for the Movie to come out on DVD, and BUY it!
Really? Instead of just parroting the industry propaganda, let's see the actual math and studies that purport to support these numbers.
explaining Vista's sales figures ;)
It lets the MPAA throw out huge numbers to scare people with,
nothing more. If they actually had to prove it by showing year-
on-year profit numbers, you'd find an embarrassing fact: the
MPAA members are actually pulling some rather embarrassing
amounts of profits and growth each year.
/P
While the MPAA/RIAA have every right to sue, and potentially have pirates tossed into jail, that is not a smart thing to do. The record industries tactics are doing very little to control piracy, and quite a bit to **** off the people who buy movies and music.
The record and movie industries exist to make money. If they continue to anger their customers and cost themselves sales, they are doing a disservice to their stock holders and should be fired.
As far as estimating losses due to piracy, that's always been an interesting question. The theft in this case in non-material in nature, as the original movie or song never leaves the possession of the owner. So the theft is a loss of an opportunity to make money.
Which leads back to the original question of, how do you estimate the value of loss of opportunity? You have several categories of people here.
1. People who will never know of the existence of the material.
2. People who aren't interested and will never view or buy the material.
3. People who are interested and will never view or buy the material.
4. People who are interested and will view, but never buy the material.
5. People who are interested and will view and buy the material.
Categories 1-3 can be ignored as they don't participate in piracy other than by complete accident, clicking on a link without thinking about it.
Category 4 can be broken into people who can afford the material, and people who cannot afford the material. Piracy of material by people who can afford it isn't necessarily a loss. For those who pirate a song or movie and then go on to purchase the CD/DVD, the industry makes their money and the original download was an advertising expense. And it should be considered an advertising expense for those who download the material, view it once, and never watch or listen to it again. In these two cases, the piracies should not be considered losses.
Piracy of material by people who can't afford it is not, and never will be, a loss.
A piracy should only be considered a loss if the person pirating the material can afford to purchase it, intends to use it for their own income purposes, or intends to use it more than the one time necessary to determine it holds value for them.