Film Industry Economic Losses Mount From Continuing World Wide Piracy

First-run movie DVDs of films made by US studios are sold be vendors on the streets within a few miles of the central offices of the People’s Republic in Beijing. The Motion Picture Association of America says it lost $244 million because of piracy in China in 2005, the most recent year for which the association has comprehensive figures. The cost of piracy reported in the MPAA survey was $1.3 billion for the same year in America. The US legal system’s protection  for intellectual property rights does not work  for the film industry because most people have chosen moral relativism with regard to the theft of movies. These people, which includes many in the US,  use file-sharing and other methods to steal premium content and use it for free.

The piracy problem has continued to worsen over the last several years, despite pressure from industry associations and legal authorities. There were almost 11 million illegal downloads of “Star Trek” this year, making it the most stolen movie of 2009, according to TorrentFreak.

“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen”, “Hangover”, “District 9”, and “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” also made the top 10 list which had among them a total of 85 million illegal downloads this year. Multiplied times $9 a ticket price and the amount becomes a substantial portion of the total revenue that some studios bring in.

The motion picture industry has spent millions of dollars trying to curb piracy. Almost every major nation has digital piracy laws, but content piracy is like the drug trade and shop-lifting. Content owners are in a fight which they can never completely win. There are simply too many people who believe that whatever they see is theirs to keep or theirs to use and have chosen to ignore the economic hardship this causes the creative community.

Douglas A. McIntyre