p2pnet news view | Movies:- A Swedish court sentenced The Pirate Bay four to a year each in jail and financial damages of more than three million dollars for running a search engine.

In February, three Thai CD counterfeiters were given jail time of under a year and fined $14,200 each for churning out 306 illegal CDs a minute for the last three years, selling the results on the black-markets as originals.

The sentence looks like a joke compared to the Pirate Bay lads who essentially, let me repeat myself, ran a SEARCH engine.

Of course, this inequality is essentially the PR machine at work to justify the passing of legislation designed to curtail human basic rights. (ACTA)

IPFI, MIPI, AFACTS, RIAA, MPAA take delight in reporting damage awards handed by the courts in various file sharing cases.

The majority of these claims are based on the premise that the downloader/uploader made ‘n’ pieces of content available on the internet for free that would have sold for ‘o’ dollars retail or ‘p’ dollars wholesale, therefore depriving the content creators of {N x O} or {N x P}, ‘whatever your Honour thinks is fair’.

Unfortunately, that’s not quite how this works.

In real life, a movie on the big cinema screen is a different experience to watching the same on a laptop or mobile phone screen.

The special Dolby surround sound effects can’t be ‘felt’ when you’re peering intently at a 7″ or 2″ screen listening hard to the 8 ohm quasi stereo ’speakers’.

There are no fresh popcorn smells and of course, there’s no way two people could watch such a small screen together so the ‘arm-over’ maneuver doesn’t work outside the cinema.

The hedonic value of watching a presentation on a big screen at the movie theatre is vastly superior to reviewing the same movie on a micro computing device — especially if there’s a couple involved. It’s a bit like the difference between store-bought coffee, or a home made powdered, instant coffee.

I’m a coffee addict. I drink between 30 and 40 cups of coffee per day.

At select establishments around the world, a long black coffee costs $3.75 for the small cup.

If I were to use the content industries argument, my addiction is equal to a $150.00 per day habit.

I do quite often go out and have a long black coffee when chatting with friends or holding a business meeting. However, that would not be more than three or four times a week and my total tab for that wouldn’t exceed $20-$30 all in.

The rest of the time, I drink instant coffee.

The Germans have a good word for instant coffee, ‘ersatz  kave’, which means ‘pretend coffee’ or fake coffee.

I use Nescafe Expresso which sells retail for a 350 gm jar for $9.00 (sometimes $7.00 on sale). I buy a 2 kg bag of sugar for $1.65. The coffee and the sugar last me for approximately ten days,

I drink 245 cups of pretend coffee a week interspersed with five – seven real coffees. My total coffee budget is therefore approximately $31.00 per week; not the $1,050.00 that the content industry think I should pay them.

The instant cup of coffee two minutes after I wake up in the morning is worth far more than the long black I have to cross the road to get, but it’s hedonic value is enhanced by the fact that I can have that ersatz coffee without shaving, dressing or going out into the weather.

That first cup of coffee doesn’t in any way replace the desire or need to have the real thing later in the day, surrounded by my peers or colleagues in nice surroundings.

The two are separate, disparate and totally unrelated experiences and worth two totally different values.

A taste for free

It can be argued by coffee afficianados that ersatz coffee is a temporary fix only – a prelude to the real thing, a stop-gap, an emergency standby, the free taste. It can equally be argued that the world wouldn’t function as well without the ersatz coffees, which in reality actually make the real coffee taste so much better by comparison.

The same can be argued successfully for movies shared online. The ‘free taste’ actually enhances the hedonic value of the movie experience and leads to more movie admissions at higher prices.

Cinema attendance figures for the last two years indicate that more people are going to the cinema than at any time in the last sixty years.  Yep –  records are being broken, daily.

According to a recent report by Price Waterhouse, the ancillary markets and new technologies have revolutionized profit potential.

Over the last decade, ancillary markets have grown by over 30%. The home video market alone has grown over 200%. The combined worldwide filmed entertainment market will achieve sales of $118.9 billion in 2009, a 7.1% compound annual growth rate (CAGR). Source: Price Waterhouse Cooper.

Very few industries can claim a 7.1% compound annual growth.

But then again, very few industries that have millions of PR people working for them for free.

The hedonic value for consumers of attending a cinema screening is being proven daily at the Box office in leading file sharing countries like :

• Slovakia, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Russia were the top performing European countries for cinema attendance growth in 2008.
• Russia saw the largest amount of increased ticket sales, 124 million, up 16% from 107 million in 2008. Turkey, however posted a jump of almost 27%, with 38.5 million admissions.
• Across Central Europe, Slovakia stood out with an 18.2% gain, to 3.3 million admissions, but still down compared to a strong 2006, with 3.4 million admissions.
• Bulgarians were back up to 2.8 million admissions, a 12.1% increase, but below a five year high of 3.1 million admissions in 2004.
• Poland’s 3.4% rise brought a five-year high of  almost 34 million admissions

And:

• Box office goes boom

According to Box Office Mojo, an online site that crunches movie revenue data, February admissions were up more than 10 per cent over last year, and that came on the heels of the first-ever billion-dollar January. Compared to previous annual revenues, 2009 is tracking as Hollywood’s most lucrative year ever, with the current year-to-date box-office standing at about $1.8 billion US — as much as a 20-per-cent increase over same-period totals from the past three years.

In summary, the Content Industries claims that file sharing carried out on P2P technologies and networks is damaging their bottom line is sheer and utter  (warning – expletive forthcoming) bullshit.

It is akin to claiming that file sharing is stopping young couples from going to the cinema and the lack of ‘over the shoulder arm maneuvers’ is leading to negative population growth.

In closing – if the industry’s claims that file sharing is hurting their bottom line is based on fact, rather than self creative litigation justification, then why during a depression are more people going to the movies than file sharing for free ?

My answer is that consumers are a lot more discerning than Hollywood and can actually taste the difference between instant coffee and real coffee.

The attention that Goverments and the Courts should give the content industry about these claims is the same attantion that Starbucks gives to Coles when the price of Nescafe in Coles drops down to $7.00 during sales. Nothing.

[And note -- according to MPAA stats released just yesterday, while the rest of America is struggling just to stay afloat, Hollywood is reporting a $14 billion surplus - Jon.]

Three CD pirates jailed in Thailand
http://www.ifpi.com/content/section_news/20090225.html

Passion Helps Record Year At Global Box-office
http://www.zeeks.com/wirestory/?story=0fc3m7kv

Box office, admissions rise in 2006
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117960597.html?categoryid=13&cs=1

Box office goes boom
http://www.vancouversun.com/Cars/office+goes+boom/1364236/story.html

European cinema bounces back in 2006
http://www.obs.coe.int/about/oea/pr/mif2007.html

Weekend box office figures
http://www.ukfilmcouncil.org.uk/weekendboxoffice

Follow p2pnet on Twitter.

looking for a new job – MPAA statistics and rubber bananas, April 9, 2009

around 3% – MPAA says 44% of movie losses due to piracy on college networks, number could be closer to 3%, January 23, 2008

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009 at 11:16 am and is filed under Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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