The Ongoing Cost of Piracy
Thursday, February 5th, 2009 by Patrick Ross
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How many times do you watch the same movie?
For me the amount varies. If the movie is “The Blues Brothers” or “This is Spinal Tap,” the answer is somewhere in the dozens; with those movies it’s like I’m on a mission from God, my love of them goes to eleven. If it’s a good children’s movie, I own it on DVD, and I’ve probably watched it with my kids a half-dozen times; “Finding Nemo” never gets old. But with most most I would say just once, wherever I catch it, in the theaters, on a Netflix DVD or stream, on a cable channel or on broadcast TV.
That’s important to keep in mind when we talk about motion picture piracy. I suspect most movie watchers’ profiles are similar to mine. After all, motion pictures aren’t like songs, they are more like novels; once you’ve experienced it, the surprise is gone, and it has to be exceptional to want to enjoy it a second (or third or twentieth) time without the suspense.
And thus we come to today’s New York Times, which has a sobering front-page story on the devastating effects of piracy on the motion picture industry. The headline says it all: “Digital Pirates Winning Battle with Studios.” Now I am always resistant to using the phrase “battle” to refer to this struggle (many of my like-minded supporters of artists’ rights disagree with me there) and I also am resistant to the notion that if it is a battle, the other side is losing.
Alec Baldwin advertised Hulu.com to just under 100 million people during the Superbowl Sunday night, the second-largest TV audience ever behind the finale of “M*A*S*H.” It is a top-ten web site as far as traffic is concerned. Motion pictures are increasingly being made available in various download and streaming options, like the Netflix feature I use and mentioned above. And release windows are definitely narrowing.
But given the fact that most motion pictures are only going to be viewed once, it is fair to deduce that a significant percentage of unauthorized views have replaced revenue that would have come from other means; after all, why commit two hours to something you have no interest in seeing? You couldn’t pay me to watch one of those “Saw” movies.
Please. Whatever you may think of Big Media, multinational corporations or high-paid Hollywood talent, at least accept the fact that unauthorized viewing and trading of motion pictures has a real impact on potential motion picture receipts. And this affects countless hard-working Americans, such as members of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, i.e., the stagehands on a motion picture set. IATSE members work when work is available, and they rely on residuals paid to IATSE to cover their health care and pensions. But every dollar denied the motion picture industry due to an unauthorized viewing reduces that residual pool, and thus could force IATSE to increase the number of hours required to qualify for benefits, thus disenfranchising some carpenters and make-up artists.
I raised the issue of IATSE last fall when testifying before a USTR panel working on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, and received a very positive reply. Of course, I don’t know how someone could reply otherwise. Why add to our current economic malaise by reducing employment and health care coverage?
I must come back once again to education. We all need to understand how many people are behind a motion picture; if you are skeptical, count how many names appear at the end of a motion picture, even a modest independent film like “Slumdog Millionaire”; I’ll bet you’ll have to pause the DVD a few times, because there are so many names they’ll scroll by too fast to count.
I understand how the Internet enables viewing of just about anything, anytime. But when unauthorized creative works are available, often pre-release works, they are being made available by bad actors around the globe. (A glimpse of the posters spread globally can be found here.) With so many inexpensive or free licensed offerings rolling out with regularity, the best thing we can do is to encourage people to use those services, and that will encourage more services and more creative works available on those services. This isn’t 2000, when Napster was the only game in town for online creative works availability. This is 2009, and the future keeps looking better for licensed availability. We can help encourage that progress.
February 8th, 2009 at 9:40 pm
What about the independent people that *want* to use Bit Torrent to distribute their works. Are they pirates too?
February 9th, 2009 at 10:41 am
As always, I have never denounced a technology, I have denounced infringement.
Personally if I were a filmmaker I wouldn’t want to use BitTorrent as a distribution device because there wouldn’t be any way to earn income, even ancillary. Music is much less costly to produce than motion pictures, but note Radiohead encouraged people to come to their web site and the only cost of the music (unless one voluntarily paid) was leaving an email. That email list was a source of future income, from a marketing standpoint.
With BitTorrent, you have no idea who is downloading your work, and it’s likely being downloaded by people who have no problem with infringement and don’t even know you’ve authorized the download, so you can’t assume you might be able to win them over as a paying customer later.
Still, it’s not my place to question someone else’s business model. If they want to do this that’s their business. I just wish people wouldn’t tell creators who want to exercise their rights that they should instead give their works away and find other sources of revenue. Let’s let everyone exercise their rights how they choose.
February 9th, 2009 at 10:45 am
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