I recently stumbled on this tweet from Duncan Jones, the director on the little film that may, ‘Moon’:
“Dear BitTorrenters… so pleased Moon is liked by u; 40,000 active seeds cant be wrong! One thing. Will you please pick the DVD also?”
Film piracy has stopped being a hot topic; many experts have around for enough time to cool down a bit. That has not, however, prevented it from continuing to cause many problems with the film industry. Dodgy DVDs and increasingly, illegal downloads, cost the film industry massive degrees of revenue annually. A report in 2005 for that Motion Picture Association (the many big studios) estimated which the studios lost $6.1 billion annually and how the industry in general (theatres, satellite tv etc included) lost $18.2 billion. At the time it absolutely was estimated that regarding that $18.2 billion, $7.1 was because of internet piracy. There are few people, I feel, who does disagree using the suggestion that that figure has risen. This lack of revenue will obviously cause serious financial difficulties for the studios and is particularly certainly adding to their current downfall.
The movie companies are not without clout however in fact it is responding to this threat with both with hard legal measures and through raising awareness on the consequences of piracy. Recently the founders from the hugely popular illegal download website Pirate Bay were found doing copyright infringement and therefore are looking forward to each year in goal. In Australia the film industry has accused one in the country’s largest internet service providers of encouraging pirates, its largest users, to upgrade their packages and turning a blind eye with their download content.
On the opposite, friendlier, side on the equation, the Trust for Internet Piracy Awareness in the UK has evolved its campaign on the aggressive and accusatory ‘Piracy is Theft’ adverts into a kindlier many thanks note for supporting the British film industry by not embracing illegal downloading.
Piracy, particularly, internet piracy could be assumed to get growing. Even if it’s not necessarily, this can be a significantly just right problem at this time for something to need to become done about this. Piracy must stop, or at best be controlled to stop it from completely undermining the film industry (something some people could be all for but which the studios (i.e. those together with the money and capability to effect change) most emphatically tend not to). The question is, why has internet film piracy become very popular?
Obviously the prospect of receiving a product free of charge is plenty enough enticement for a few. Others find it as the beginning in the end of capitalist materialism and also a shining new future to the arts. These reasons don’t account, I think, to the huge quantities of otherwise ‘respectable’ folks who engage in this practice. The anonymity of sitting behind your working computer and large variety of other people executing it are certainly factors that encourage piracy. More significantly I think may be the increase in technology which has allowed it to get so simple. Obviously hugely increased internet speeds facilitate film piracy but so too does the freely available and straightforward to use peer2peer software including BitTorrent.