p2pnet news | MPAA News:- A ’study’ released by Hollywood’s MPAA claimed 44% of so-called domestic losses allegedly suffered by the major movie studios were down to file sharing American students.

It was later —- much later —- shown to be grossly inaccurate.

But not before the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) had splashed the spurious data around the world as part of its anti-P2P blitz.

Now, the Pirate Party of the United States has released Piracy at the Pictures: Do the Figures Add Up? in which it examines film industry figures and the relationship they have to the claims put forward by studios.

The aims to investigate claims that movie attendances have suffered as a result of cinema piracy, aka ‘camming’.

“With past claims by the likes of the MPAA that 90% of pirate DVDs originate from camcorder versions shot in Canada and New York, we wondered if the figures matched these claims,” says Pirate Party admin and study author Andrew Norton.

“To keep things simple and fair, we took the top ten films for the past eleven years,” he says, going on, “These films are the ones most likely to be recorded at the cinema, and distributed online, or on the street.”

The preliminary report concentrates on MPAA figures for box office returns, and puts them in context with a time line.

Read on >>>

A study into box office figures and how peer to peer technology has affected them over time.By Andrew Norton
Preliminary

Initial Findings

Initial findings from the study have found little, or no link between peer-to-peer (p2p) networks, and cinema box office sales, Certainly not for the top films of the year, which common sense would also suggest to be the ones most likely to be distributed and ‘pirated’. Using publicly available data for the box office figures, we constructed this graph (figure 1) showing the yearly combined box office grosses for the top 5, and top 10 films of each year.

It is worth noting the discrepancy of the years 1997 and 1998. This was caused by the top film of 1997, Titanic, extending it’s run well into 1998, and with only $88Million in box office receipts by December 28th 1997, ($600Million wasn’t reached until late August 1998) it could technically be considered a 1998 movie. However, since it was released in 1997, and in the cinema for more than the day needed to made a ‘camcorder copy’ it has been classed with the 1997 films.

Another point of interest from this graph is the dip in 2005 and 2006. in 2005, the lead grossing film was Star Wars episode 3. This is a film which not only was ‘cammed’ but has a work print released the day before it hit the cinemas, by someone internal to the film company. Despite this, the film was the top grosser of the year.

It brings into serious doubt the claims that this film was harmed by so-called ‘cinema piracy’ - a claim made clear by the FBI and homeland security operation (operation D-Elite) that targeted one internet site offering the workprint for download. The other pertinent fact - that Episode 3 had more success at the box office, than episode 2, which has no workprint leak, can only undermine this claim further.

Finally, with the continued rise in popularity of filesharing networks, the increasing power of computers, the decreasing complexity of such programs, the greater public knowledge of filesharing, and the increasing connectivity of computers with televisions, as well as the increased availability of hardware able to play video files from the internet, it’s contrary to film industry claims, that despite all of this, ticket sales increased in 2007.

The top 5 and top 10 films for 007 gross more than any year studied except 2004. a year when filesharing was already common.

When put into the context of p2p networks, the lifespans of the 3 most popular and well publicised networks have been marked on the above graph (figure 1), to produce figure 2.

The data for the claims put forward by the MPAA and it’s member companies, just does [sic] not hold water.

The only conclusions that can be drawn are that the MPAA is orchestrating an elaborate disinformation campaign. The reasons behind such a campaign may be revealed by the time the study is concluded.

Any study is only as good as the data it uses. To this end, we are using publicly published figures for box office returns which can be widely obtained. The data used to produce the graphs above is as follows:

Protocol timelines

Napster – June 1999 to July 2001
Kazaa – March 2001 to July 2006
Bittorrent – July 2001 to present

Stay tuned.

. .Stumble It!

grossly inaccurate -MPAA (Australia) versus Organised Crime, July 2, 2008

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 at 9:14 am and is filed under MPAA News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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