New Piracy Loss Estimate 480
An anonymous reader writes "WSJ reports on a new MPAA estimate losses due to piracy. "The study, by LEK Consulting LLC, was completed last year, and people familiar with it say it reached a startling conclusion: U.S. movie studios are losing about $6.1 billion annually in global wholesale revenue to piracy, about 75% more than previous estimated losses of $3.5 billion in hard goods. On top of that, losses are coming not only from lost ticket sales, but from DVD sales that have been Hollywood's cash cow in recent years."
Re:Excellent! (Score:5, Interesting)
Bullshit. (Score:2, Interesting)
To put it simply, the MPAA sponsored this study, therefore it will be slanted as they desire. I'm sure there's some element of truth to these estimates, but the MPAA has as a goal the elimination of piracy, so the more inflated they can make the losses seem, the closer they get to their goal.
Put the shoe on the other foot. (Score:2, Interesting)
How about this deal: You allow after-viewing refunds on tickets so I can get my money back after you waste my two hours in a theater, and I'll start letting you have my money when you make something decent.
No surprise but the MPAA is lying (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:This, from the organization (Score:5, Interesting)
I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.
*yawn* (Score:3, Interesting)
If they hadnt all be bought, id say write your congressperson.. But they have, so why bother.
Really... (Score:1, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I thought they might be legitimate... (Score:5, Interesting)
I noticed that, too. This "study" constitutes fraud on the part of the MPAA and the company they hired. Consumers making copies of legitimate films that they bought is legally protected fair use. To count one PENNY of that as so-called "piracy" is fraud of the highest order.
This time, the survey specifically asked consumers how many of their pirated movies they would have purchased in stores or seen in theaters if they didn't have an unauthorized copy, giving studios a different picture of their true losses.That's about the least useful thing they could have done. Why? Because:
The study also shows that home video, not theatrical distribution, is the market that piracy hits hardest, accounting for two-thirds of the studio's lost revenue.
Duh. Most movies aren't available in a pirated form until long after they have left the theater, low-quality camera versions notwithstanding. I would have thought that this conclusion would have been obvious. You mean the studios were surprised?
So let's see the whole paragraph you quoted part of....
Last year, according to a person familiar with the matter, copies of movies downloaded or received from people who had downloaded them cost the studios $447 million in the U.S., whereas copies stemming from professional bootleggers cost the studios $335 million. An additional $529 million in losses came from consumers making copies of legitimate films they bought on DVD or VHS.
So what they're saying is that their figures are inflated by $529 million, or almost 60%. More than 40% of their claimed losses due to "piracy" are actually due to legal copying. Okay. So even if we naively believe that this is the only flaw in their methodology and that their estimates of how many downloaders would have otherwise bought the movie are correct (big stretch), we're really only talking about the equivalent of one blockbuster's gross per year, at least in the U.S. Cry me a river....
A real study (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Brilliant assumptions (Score:5, Interesting)
Not only that, but also assumes that the sales coming as a direct result of the publicity gained by "piracy" would still be there, if there was no "piracy".
Yesterday I went to a concert of Arctic Monkeys in Paris, I paid 25 euros for the ticket. I also bought an Arctic Monkeys t-shirt for 20 euros. Their CD, which I downloaded from the net, costs 15 euros. I leave the conclusion to the RIAA.
Re:Brilliant assumptions (Score:3, Interesting)
"The "brilliant assumption" is that people who pirate movies are going to tell the truth in a telephone survey."
Slashdotters make this brilliant assumption all the time. How many times have you seen this:
"People who use P2P buy more music. The studies prove it!"
In this latest survey, if the respondents are acting as expected (saying what they think the survey taker wants to hear, or saying something which reflects better on them), then the loss to piracy is actually worse than the study states... unless the analysts are attempting to correct for this.
Maybe if they made good stuff (Score:2, Interesting)
I was looking at the upcoming movies and they appear to be a fair mix between drivel and crap. I thought maybe X-Men would be decent but I read further and discovered they replaced the director and large parts of the staff so I lost much of my optimism (I guess I'll still see it though)
Re:Brilliant assumptions (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I haven't been to a movie... (Score:2, Interesting)
the problem I think is, it really won't become obvious. Piracy is like jesus to the christians. It is so certain in their minds, that there is no point in healthy debate. They just won't change their views of it.
It doesn't matter that I would never go to the theatre to watch movie "X" or even buy it at walmart. Because I watched movie "X" the studios count that as a potential loss. (a year ago, the didn't use the word potential to describe their losses).
If you want to get businessy about it, my watching of movie "X" wasn't a potential loss, but a potential gain.
yep, a potential gain that never came to fruition.
This P2P thing is starting to surprise me (Score:5, Interesting)
Those where lower-income-bracket people, lower-computer-literacy people, that is, the backbone of the country. And they see nothing even remotely wrong in copying music. I fear the content producers are against too much of a slope now.
Re:I thought they might be legitimate... (Score:5, Interesting)
They promised the writer, Winston Groom, a percentage of the profits, but a little cooking of the books and the top grossing film of that year becomes a commerical failure a la hollywood accounting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting [wikipedia.org]
Another example is eddie murphy's 'coming to america'. It grossed 350 mil worldwide but yet failed to produce a profit.
Art Buchwald received a settlement after his lawsuit Buchwald v. Paramount over Paramount's use of Hollywood accounting. The court found Paramount's actions "unconscionable," noting that it was impossible to believe that a movie (1988's Eddie Murphy comedy Coming to America) which grossed US$350 million failed to make a profit, especially since the actual production costs were less than a tenth of that. Paramount settled for an undisclosed sum, rather than have its accounting methods closely scrutinized.
Even Stan Lee had to sue marvel over spiderman profits.
What I'm curious about is if Art Buchwald didn't settle with Paramount, and these practices were exposed in court, would the studio not be guilty of tax evasion if the movie made way more than reported?
Losses due to the DMCA, copy protection, etc??? (Score:2, Interesting)
I had to delay my graduation from UTA with a MS in CSE due to the copy protection in Wolfram Publishing's Mathematica not allowing me to run their software over the weekend, when my thesis was due Sunday at 6pm. I lost tens of thousands of dollars due to this.
I am currently unable to run MS' Visual Studio
I have suffered tremendous economic damage from people (e.g., IBM in 1998) saying that I was a pirate. You see, I was at a job interview, and was asked if I paid for my operating system. I said I did not; I ran Slackware Linux 3.4 I was physically thrown out; my $300 suit was ripped (it cost me $375 to repair) and the civil rights complaint went nowhere, due to a dept. of labor that screamed that I was a pirate and a felon.
I am currently unable to give out free Linux discs to high school students due to the BSA threatening the college that I teach at with lawsuits if I advertise that Linux is a free alternative to Windows on the college's web site. They call that advertisement an ad for pirated software.
I was unable to play "Test Drive 2: The Duel" from the time I purchased it a decade ago due to errant copy protection.
I am still unable to play "World War 2" "The Global Dillema: Guns or Butter" "Hero's Quest I" "Homeworld" and "Civilizations" due to copy protection BS. (These are about the only games I ever enjoyed, and I have lost the ability to play them due to absurd copyright stuff, like needing the original 360k disk in the drive plus the original manual for "Guns or Butter."
In my C#.NET class, I can not find a single student with a legitimate copy of VS.NET who can actually get the software to install.
Andy Out!
Harry Potter (Score:3, Interesting)
I didn't notice anything about the sales being poor.
(They did save a nickle a disk in Macrovision licensing, though.)
Re:Stats from "person familiar with matter" (Score:3, Interesting)
More importantly, if somebody wasn't going to buy the item anyway and they download it, can that be counted as theft or a lost sale? The MPAA still has exactly as much money and stock as before and they have a means of getting a sale they wouldn't otherwise receive (for the numerous persons who buy things that they download and like).
So, please, do tell me in what way downloading is automatically equal to theft.
I wonder their math (Score:2, Interesting)
So can you say, because I sold it for $1 for an illegal copy and 50 bought it, you lost $10*50=$500? Or should it be $10*1=$10? There is a huge difference!
Re:What about The Aliens? (Score:2, Interesting)
Wrong. WRONG. WRONG!
By giving the illegal copy to the poor kids you have eliminated those kid's need to sell his organs to get cash to buy movies. That way not only will the media corporation have less profit, but also the execs won't have cheap organs to replace their own rotten guts.
See? Everyone loses. Well, everyone that has any importance.
This bollocks has to stop - my genome does not belong to corporation X, the wheel does not belong to corporation Y and plants grown in third world peasants back yards for 5000 years deffinitely do not belong to corporation Z.
Sez you. Those fine corporations, pillars of our economy! - they have enough rabid lawyers to prove in any court, that not only your genome belongs to them, but also your entire earnings, for the whole of your predicted lifetime.
So in practical terms - yes, they own the genomes, wheel, doubleclick, single click whatever...
As for the Chinese... well it will be utter irony, when the country accused of so many bad things will become last defender of some freedoms. It will be "interesting times" indeed.